The Money Is Political Too, Research Time, 18/11/2016

Utopias is going to be a book of philosophy that engages with history – with the currents of political and social change that have shaped the era in which I’m writing it. No matter how abstract and trippy the purely conceptual sections of the manuscript will get, that historical grounding will be in the background of everything I write.

It’ll be a philosophy of social development and history, but it’ll also be a theoretical examination of our ongoing moment in history.

And a hell of a trip.

So when I reached the end of Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy, I was pleased to read one of his final analyses. It was about the historical development of neoliberalism.

My title references the old feminist slogan, "The personal is political."
The democratic vector of politics is about making more and more aspects
of human life politically relevant, something that it's valuable to speak
about as proper to the public values of society. The social movement
whose first moment of wide visibility was the 1999 WTO protests did
the same for matters of the global economy and social welfare.

He didn't get into the finer historical points – in such a short, dense book, you keep your argument conceptual and stay away from the detailed chronology of real-world events. Also, explaining events directly can always be a little messy – events always overdetermine any one explanation of them you can make.

Basically, Rancière’s account of the new liberal way of politics is that it’s fundamentally about depoliticizing economics. If the economic is only the study of a science, then economic developments become a matter of management. Making sure things go as they should means ensuring that you’re guided by economic science.

Now you can employ science for political purposes, but our society’s general ideal of science* is that its laws and concepts are beyond politics. The laws of physics are the same, no matter your political persuasion.**

* At least in the middle 20th century when there was still general respect for scientific institutions and scientists.

** Again, whether or not you believe in science, jumping from a cliff will always make you fall at the same rate. Gravity doesn’t care about party membership (and neither do climate developments).

If you treat economics the same way, then you delegitimize attempts to make economic matters a political question. Poverty alleviation, economic inequality, and trade policy become issues that aren’t really proper to politics.

Now, this is hardly true today, but it’s the trajectory of the neoliberal order. It was the conservative reaction to the New Deal in America and the Marshall Plan turned welfare state in Europe.

Jacques Rancière anticipating the symbolic colours of the concession
speech that ushered in the Trump Administration.

Putting economics at a remove from the subject of politics passed economic matters to institutions run by professionals. These would be technocratic organizations like the World Trade Organization and European Central Bank, or treaties negotiated among bureaucrats and political figureheads like NAFTA and the TPP.

Here we can guess the historical trajectory I’m about to slide into. Because economic matters like trade, labour mobility, and inequality are fundamentally political. The protests at the Seattle WTO summit of 1999 were the first harbingers of this shift.

I think because September 11 and the invasion of Iraq happened so soon after the Seattle protests, it was easy for us in the moment to forget their significance. But the same economic processes of corporatization, short-term profit gouging, and exploitation of the poor resulted in the global financial crisis of 2008.

Arguably, the 2008 crisis laid the foundation of the popular discontent that simmered and boiled until Donald Trump rode into the Presidency on it.

And all this could have been avoided if we had begun the 21st century with a frank, society-wide conversation about how we needed to bring the economy back to politics. Because once it returned there on its own, it crushed a lot of us in the wreckage.

Who’s In Charge II?: In Unity There Is Weakness, Research Time, 16/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . Unity is an important political theme. I mean this in general. Rulers do generally tend to justify their rule, the state government, and other institutions as unifying the people.

As if that was a good thing.

Unity is often an ideal of politics and social organization – it brings peace, simplicity, and strength to a complicated, messy community. Let me move from general discussions to a simple case. Unity is the ideal of Donald Trump’s major theme in his platform speech at the Republican National Convention.

“I am your voice.”
"I alone can fix it.” 

And others in his administration echo fascist ideas.

There's also a fairly large literature on the links between fascism and
narcissism. After Trump, there'll be a lot more evidence for those links.

Strength through unity is an old fascist notion and slogan. It seems, in the abstract, like the kind of thing we want to embrace. We want our society to be unified, because we often consider the opposite of unity to be discord and conflict. So unity is a path to peace.

But when we apply that principle, we end up with fascism, because the unity of an entire society needs total enforcement. And total enforcement only comes through a secret police apparatus, a ubiquitous police enforcing behavioural and ideological conformity.

Enforcing social unity is a form of suppression and oppression because people’s natural tendency is to diversify. When there’s a social order of conformity, rebels appear all the time. They’re the divergent paths, the new vectors of departure from apparent social consensus.

Remember what I’ve been saying in the last few posts on radical democracy. Human freedom is the creation of liberation vectors – new kinds of living and directions of development. A free society permits as many of these vectors to flourish as can co-exist without conflict. And quite a few of those vectors can easily co-exist.

As Jacques Rancière wraps up Hatred of Democracy, he riffs on what a free society and democratic institutions should do. Democracy, as the regime that institutionalizes freedom as much as any institution can, should actually encourage society’s division instead of unification.

Our institutions should encourage people to come up with new ways to live, to pursue their freedom and desires in as many ways as possible. They should create space and opportunities for people to become different from their fellows and different from what they once were. Institutions should settle conflicts among people so they can all continue to pursue those freedoms and desires.

Going into an era of difficult politics, we need to take action to look
after each other. But we also need our theorists and thinkers to
understand why we should preserve freedom against authoritarianism
and what our society should look like when we've come through the
struggle for a new century of freedom.

Oligarchical institutions, like the ones most countries have, run a little differently. They’re about government by management – they identify and maintain a balance of wealth and class in a society. They settle conflicts among people so mollify them and keep the status quo humming along.

Now, there isn’t an either-or between oligarchical and democratic institutions. You can have a government that encourages people to pursue their desires, while also propping up some unfortunate class divisions.

I actually think Canada is lucky, relatively speaking. Our state institutions do have some pretty clear oligarchical tendencies (heavy campaign finance costs, dependence on established political parties, revolving doors of politicians and lobbyists, some nasty surveillance powers).

But those are tempered by institutions that encourage liberation (Charter rights, government transparency, social norms – at least in major cities – that encourage diversity).

Quite a few states have more oppressive institutions. Strong ethnic-nationalist social values in many European countries. Far more powerful police in the United States, along with a much more elitist political party culture.

So if you’re going to ask who’s in charge of an institution, you shouldn’t look at the office holders. You should look at what freedoms an institution’s activity encourages or suppresses. You should look at its material affects on people’s freedom.

Who’s In Charge? I: A Tempting Pessimism, Research Time, 14/11/2016

Prepare for the worst, be aware that the worst could happen. Pre-deportation concentration camps whose tenures last for years. A deportation force recruited from the worst of Trump’s racist followers, the boys who gleefully beat Muslim women and screamed “White power!” in the halls of their schools.

Ethnic cleansing in the United States of America. A crackdown on dissent at the most intense level in the Western world. A wave of unplanned and uncontrollable violence against non-whites in everyday life.

It might not come down to that. Trump and his team are ridiculously underprepared for the Presidency, and the leaders of the Republican Party are taking a bigger leadership role than his public image suggested. He’s also walked back some of his crazier rhetoric like “Lock her up!”

So it might not be that bad. Yet there are profound ways that it could get extremely bad. Worse than it’s ever been since the Restoration and the institution of Jim Crow.

An insightful article from the Wall Street Journal shows just how
underprepared Donald Trump appears for the Presidency. That just
shows you how far American politics has fallen. The best case
scenario for the new President is that he's an incompetent, corrupt
fool from a family of kleptocrat's whose image encourages
nationwide hate crimes.

And there are deeper forms of pessimism than this. Pessimism about the unfolding disaster of the Donald Trump Administration is based on historical contingencies. Particular events that have happened to America’s democratic institutions.

You can read Jacques Rancière – as I haven’t been doing – as a profound pessimist about democracy and human freedom. All his analyses of how democratic institutions – transparent elected governments, political parties, bureaucracies, and so on – all point to their constructing an elite class.

It’s a more fluid elite than has typically existed in most human societies. But it still makes democracy amount to an oligarchy with a collective delusion (or really good marketing). There’s the class of people who hold powerful positions in business and government, and there’s the governed.

If the ideal of democracy is, as Rancière says, “the power of anyone and everyone,” then its institutions eat away at it.

So you’d be left with the pessimism that human freedom could ever be achieved. If the very institutions we need to run a decently large society – even if we design them to be free and democratic – turn out to be oligarchies anyway? What’s the point?

But that conclusion would misunderstand the nature of what an ideal really is. It’s the vision of perfection that we strive toward, doing the tough work of making our stubborn material world approach closer and closer to that ideal. So we can design and tweak our institutions so that they approach “the power of anyone and everyone.”

Rancière drops a few ideas as to how. Strict limits on electoral mandates for office-holders can provide a steady churn of the oligarchy’s membership, as well as prevent corruption. And the only people with control over writing and discussing what the laws of the country will be, should be elected office-holders.

There’d be a total ban on government employees or lobbyists crossing the doors of state power to become legislators. Campaigns would be cheap or subsidized to open elected offices to as many independent candidates as possible. And the financially powerful would be barred from interfering in elections.

Now, you’ll notice that this doesn’t describe the government of pretty much any country. My country Canada is, as far as state government goes, a relatively accountable oligarchy of the financially powerful, whose power is limited by popular sovereignty written in the state constitution, as well as conventions of the rule of law.

It's not the best we can do, and definitely not the best we can imagine. The question for political philosophers, activists, or anybody who gives much of a crap about the institutions that shape their society is this – If we can’t do as good as we imagine, why bother? . . . To Be Continued

Too Much Democracy, Research Time, 11/11/2016

It’s been difficult for me to keep my thoughts in one place yesterday. There’s been quite a lot of terrible news coming out of the United States today, as the Trump transition team begins its descent into autocracy. His administration will be dominated by white nationalists, prolific architects of voter suppression, and religious fanatics.

But the most emotionally destabilizing news I’ve been reading today are accounts of the hate crimes.

The face of American autocracy. Violence is already sweeping the
country on its own power and we're still months away from the
inauguration. He doesn't even have the keys to the security state yet.

Muslim women beaten and robbed in the streets. Black and Hispanic schoolchildren are taunted, insulted, and beaten in openly racist violence. A man screams and threatens a woman in a coffeeshop for having a Skype conversation in sign language.

We were only on the second day after Trump’s election and the worst is already happening. Everyone in America’s orbit has a lot of work to do to overcome the oppression and violence that’s coming. And it is coming.

I’m going to try to do my part from Canada. One part of that will be opposing the growth of white nationalism in my own country, which many elements of Canada’s conservative party are embracing. The most visible proponent is Kellie Leitch, frontrunner for leadership of the federal Conservatives.

I’m also floating some activist ideas with my colleagues in the local New Democratic Party – fundraising for women’s rights groups who’ll come under attack from the Trump government, coming up with some videography and social media projects about Toronto’s multicultural communities.

And call me naïve, but theory is important too. Even something at the small (but growing, little by little) scale of this blog can keep democratic ideas in the culture. Getting unashamedly strange, ambitious, idealistic. The book will be called Utopias, after all. And I plan on touring it.

The last couple of weeks of posts have been riffs on different ideas in Jacques Rancière’s short, dense book Hatred of Democracy. One core idea that he turns over and over in that book is the conception of freedom as essentially limitless.

Theorist of radical democracy Jacques Rancière. If there's ever a time
when we need radical democracy, it's now.

He considers two ways to think about this limitlessness. One is the way that a lot of establishment liberals in Rancière’s country France have spoken about democracy’s limitlessness since the turn of our century.

The limitless desires of the ignorant masses to consume. The gauche gluttony of capitalist consumption plus the unrestrained lechery and extremism of total cultural freedom. It’s a foundational concept for the hatred of democracy in the West today, the idea that all people want from freedom is more stuff.

Remember how Mitt Romney, in those innocent days of 2012, used to talk about free stuff? That people let the government take control over their welfare because they were lazy and wanted Barack Obama to give them free stuff?

The vocabulary is definitely different when you leave erudite, pretentious France for in-your-face America. But the idea is the same.

It's all a red herring, though. The real limitlessness of democracy is the limitlessness of freedom itself. You create new ways of living, new identities, affiliations. Freedom is the proliferation of difference. What I called the asymptotic approach along multiplying vectors of liberation.

To reduce this expansion of the multiplicity of human life to a desire for more and better consumer goods is to make the most profound dimension of human desire into an image of lazy gluttony. Contempt for the desire that is freedom itself.

That contempt is also a way to drum up support for social homogeneity. Bringing people back in line with old-fashioned socially conservative values carves away the differences that constitute freedom itself.

In America today, it’s the popular call for the domination of white, male, straight identity, and the silence of all other ways of existence. The imagination of an ideal of perfect uniformity and conformity.

It’s going to be a rough four years.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites IV: The Exclusion of Imprisonment, Research Time, 10/11/2016

Continued from last post . . . When I say the fundamental anti-democratic force in society is the police, I'm not necessarily referring to actual police institutions. Though most of them these days aren't exactly all that impressive in their commitment to the rights of the people.

When I say the word 'police' in this context, it helps to think of this as a verb. When police forces solve crimes, help prosecute violent offenders, and actually protect the people of their communities, they’re public servants. They aren’t policing in this sense.

Policing as the enforcement of rules is a brutal means of social control. It's the social control of direct violent intimidation and fear. The spectacle of the tank driving down the street, the line of riot police armoured so heavily as they walk through what was once a thriving market district looking more like robot soldiers than people.

I don't remember ever thinking that guy with the cameo in Home Alone II
is going to be President of the United States one day. Even though I
wasn't even in puberty yet. Definitely not.

One very dark bright light in the victory of Donald Trump for the American Presidency is that I doubt he'd build a secret police institution. His moves to crush dissent will be as blatant and visibly in-your-face as Trump’s entire personality and campaign.

Quite a few of my good friends in Toronto are Syrian immigrants, people who've grown up in a state that controlled its population with secret police. So at least the Trump Administration will likely not embrace this essential institution of totalitarianism.

So in a philosophical sense, policing is control by the explicit and open threat of violence. That violence can take many forms, like actual physical beatings, the insidious buzzing of a surveillance state, or the institutionalized destruction of lives through imprisonment and the social exclusion of former convicts.

Policing is the biggest and most bruising stick of all the ways to exclude people from a legitimate place in a society, for the reason that a person doesn’t follow as they should a set of detailed substantive rules of propriety. As a process and a social force, policing in this sense is the essential anti-democratic activity.

If the nature of democracy as a process – the ontology of democracy – is as the struggle for freedom, then in what does that freedom consist? It’s more substantive than the libertarian sense of freedom, which is the mere absence of state coercion (though that’s incredibly important).

And it isn’t the communitarian sense of freedom either. I’ve been reading some very good critical writing on this concept in a collection of essays by Chantal Mouffe that I picked up from my shelves a while ago.

Communitarian conceptions of democratic inclusion requires such a thick, detailed, and essentially static shared morality in a community that they paradoxically end up embracing policing in the name of freedom. Communitarian conceptions of freedom reduce to a strict and detailed set of social rules that are defined as the proper way to be free. And conformity to these rules means you’ve got to start some heavy policing.

No, real democracy is neither of these. It’s the struggle for greater freedom – developing new vectors for liberation and the movement along those directions.

Seen here is a related – but sadly much more literal – example of the
heavy policing we're likely to see over the next four years. Some of
the Trump apologist trolls I've seen in the last while have mocked
progressives' fears of his impulsive, violent tendencies when in
charge of the American state. When I say Trump will likely go to
war, I don't mean war against a foreign country. I mean war on the
people of America.

This is only possible in a society, a network of complex relations between people that, when everything is working as it should, empowers us to develop and progress along liberation vectors. It sounds like the movement toward freedom should tear a community apart if liberation means everyone is creating new ways of life all the time.

In Jacques Rancière’s analysis of this problem, he describes he democratic process as the struggles for including all these proliferating differences in a society’s morality.

People are caught between two possibilities if the choice comes down to liberal or communitarian visions of a free society. Yet each of those two possibilities seem to be parallel visions of the other.

Liberalism leaves us disconnected individuals, little more than a bare life bouncing off other such isolates. Our best hopes for life would be to escape being crushed by our institutions or eaten by our neighbours.

Communitarian conceptions of citizenship and freedom position themselves as the antidote to liberal poverty of the subject’s morality. They are correct that rights can only exist with the real support of a whole community. But bearing rights that a community respects doesn’t require comprehensive moral conformity.

In other words, I don’t have to be the same kind of person as you to respect you, and welcome you to my community. Common identity isn’t the reason to respect someone – it’s simply being a person.

That’s the foundation of democracy.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites III: A Full Human Life, Research Time, 09/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . So a quick recap that will actually be quick. Representative democracy lies to us in its ideology in a lot of ways. The most profound is the notion that the act of election constitutes some magical transformation of the will of individuals into the will of the nation speaking through the parliament’s assembly.

But representative democratic institutions fall short of democracy’s ideal in a more ordinary – and no less important – way. The huge amounts of organization and money required to contest an election to a representative assembly restricts those positions to people who run and network with political parties.

Nothing says "Salt of the Earth American people" like these folks.

There are usually norms that party officials shouldn’t jump too easily from their bureaucratic jobs to running for election. But those are mostly vague feelings of squishiness. A decent public relations job usually overcomes those.

And really, the problem is that political parties are big organizations of well-connected people. It’s difficult for folks who haven’t become prominent in their communities to gain power in these organizations. And that cuts off a lot of ordinary people from the actual corridors of state power.

Democratic institutions in industrial civilizations have to be run by elite groups and elite organizations. Even if you lay aside a lot of the usual conceptions of elitism associated with wealth, they constitute an elite stratum of their own – the networks of people connected with political parties and parliamentary institutions.

It's enough to make democracy seem futile. But democracy is an ethical ideal. It’s the sort of thing that motivates your action, not a concrete goal that you can actually achieve, instantiate, make real.

The completely free society is an asymptotic approach. Would the democratic revolutionaries of the founding of the United States – to pick a noteworthy example this week – have anticipated the huge number of freedoms people advocate for today?

Consider the freedoms that only become necessary in an industrialized civilization like ours? Freedom of financial security. Freedom of information flows through decentralized internet media. Or the social and subjective freedoms that are needed today for non-cis, non-straight, non-binary sexual and gender identities?

You bet your ass Ben Franklin would have loved partying in the
craziest gay bars in America. That's what freedom is all about.

Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have understood any of the many new vectors of freedom that have arisen in the last few decades. But once he got up to speed, he probably would have been loving every minute of it.

The different demands for freedom and the different vectors upon which people can liberate themselves have grown and grown. And this growing freedom is what democracy is. Just as the ideal of the comprehensively free society is the ethical being of democracy, the ontological being of democracy is the real-world growth of liberation vectors and the social and individual struggles to develop and move along these vectors.

The ontology of democracy is literally the social struggle to free ourselves.

So in that sense, while parliamentary institutions have a tendency to build new elite groups, they aren’t truly the enemy of freedom because they can still encourage the growth and development of liberation vectors throughout society.

Only someone who conceives of politics only as civic engagement and the contest for state power would consider institutions themselves inherently anti-democratic or anti-freedom. I’ve met some very smart people who still have this blinkered view of politics, and I think in a lot of ways that’s a failure of education.

So what kind of society and institutions can encourage these liberation vectors to proliferate? It helps to consider what the opposite of such social structures and institutions would be.

They would be institutions that constrain people, sometimes literally. Social structures that encourage strict moralities. We’re used to thinking of such strict moralities as religious, and most of them are.

Police arresting protestors in Baton Rouge earlier this year. Because
you know what to do with the police.

Just consider how stifling it is to grow up in a harshly strict religious community. There are only a few ways to live, you face ostracism or worse punishments for breaking the rules, and those rules can sometimes regard intimate practices like hairstyle, sexual practice, or clothing choices.

But such strict enforcement of moral rules can come from secular cultures just as much as religious ones. We’re accustomed to thinking of headscarves and body covering as signposts of religious oppression – largely because of pervasive racist ideas in our society about Muslims and Jews.

But the police officer forcing a woman to strip on the beach is just as much an oppression as a police officer forcing a woman to cover her face on a city street.

Those images expose the essence of what opposes democracy, when we conceive of it as a social morality that encourage the growth of liberation vectors.

The police. . . . . To Be Continued

“My Taxes Pay Your Salary!” Research Time, 31/10/2016

I'm Canadian. Growing up here has given me some pretty peculiar cultural touchstones. One of those is an occasionally brilliant, mostly mediocre, sometimes seriously annoying popular sitcom – shot in Rouleau, Saskatchewan, don’t you know! – called Corner Gas.

One of the running gags in the show was when Oscar, a crusty old retiree with too much time and resentment on his hands, would complain to Davis, one of the two police officers in the town, about anything to do with any government service.

“Oscar, I’m a police officer. I don’t have any control over library policy.”

Oscar would improvise some sputtering justification for her rage, and then shout, “My taxes pay your salary!”

When Justin Trudeau recently said that the electoral reform he
campaigned on was no longer necessary, he was making a common
mistake of many institutional leaders – taking the face of his
leadership for the legitimacy of his orders. Laying all institutions
and the theories justifying their legitimacy aside, that's the most
fundamentally anti-democratic mistake you can make.

On the show, Oscar was usually a kind of town fool. When the show would tell us to laugh in a situation with Oscar, it was usually at the old man’s expense. But in his heart, Oscar was a radical democrat.

I've been ranting over the last couple of weeks about the concepts of radical democracy – much of it to do with reading Jacques Rancière, but also the ideas more broadly. The concept has a lot of dimensions to it, as all good philosophical concepts do, different ways to understand it and apply it.

A very important dimension of radical democracy has to do with what kinds of attitudes we should take toward our institutions. As I’ve been saying in the “Hating Democracy” series, just because you have democratic institutions like regular elections, representative government, and a free press, it doesn’t mean your society is actually democratic or free.

There has to be an attitude among the population that isn’t satisfied with their government and their elected leaders just because they’re basically following the rules as the institutions set them down. 

But isn’t that asking too much? Considering how rarely even democratic institutions end up legitimated and stably built around the world, wouldn’t it be enough just to live in a democratically-governed state? Should we just sit back and accept that our government isn’t going to lock us in prison and our prime minister will occasionally take his shirt off in public for viral social media posts?

Now, what the hell kind of democracy is that? This is the point Rancière has made in Hatred for Democracy. The foundation of a democratic society isn’t the institutions – it’s the constant demand that our leaders know their place in society.

That place is as our servants. My taxes do pay their salaries. Our parliamentary officials are 338 people (and 105 senators, and several many thousands of government employees) who have 36 million bosses.

That’s a weird way to think about governance. The word governance doesn’t even fit the concept, because it implies that the bureaucrats who run government institutions control the activities of the millions of governed people.

Thank you Oscar, for reminding us what freedom really is.

Now, that’s how our governments actually run. And we need our governments to run this way to provide the services we demand from our public servants – States need public health and population information to know where to build infrastructure and provide health and welfare services.

They have this power as part of a compromise – the people demand that their governments provide services to make everyone’s lives better. The government needs to impose on people to raise the money and manage the services, and the people accept that. 

But people have to constantly be on our governments’ and our leaders’ asses to make sure they live up to their end of the bargain.

When this century started, I don’t think I would have been down with this. I would have thought that democratic institutions were all we needed to be a free society. When I first heard about Rancière’s ideas, I thought they didn’t make sense. You can’t institutionalize rage.

The naïveté and blindness of youth.

The spirit of revolt isn’t meant to be institutionalized. Governments are institutions. Freedom is the spirit that keeps the government – and its members and leaders – from thinking it’s in charge.

Hating Democracy VI: Only If You Deserve Freedom, Research Time, 28/10/2016

Continued from previous post . . . There are three serious threats today to democratic institutions and the social freedoms we’ve built and continue to build in the West. Two of them have a serious level of political and social power.

One would be the nationalist cultural conservatives – whether they define themselves in terms of religion (American Biblical literalist Evangelicals), race (the alt-right), or both (Dugin-style Russian nationalism). 

The other would be oligarchs – the political movement for small government, lower taxes, an end to all welfare state institutions, and the removal of almost all labour and environmental protection laws. 

It's not as though either of their victories would make no different in
people's lives. States are powerful institutions, and the American
state controls literally millions of armed personnel across all levels
of law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies, and the
standing army. Trump would wield that power in the name of
white nationalism, and Clinton is a second wave feminist who at least
also believes there should be a welfare state.

But democracy has been criticized and attacked pretty well ever since democracy in any form has existed. Working in the Western tradition* – and reading Jacques Rancière in particular – most folks learn Plato’s arguments against democracy pretty early in a humanities education.

* I only know little bits of the democratic idea in the Asian traditions of politics and philosophy. But Mozi’s philosophy of universal love seems like it’s been a roiling undercurrent of Chinese political thought from the Warring States period onward.

Basically, it’s that democracy – rule of everyone by everyone – is the rule of the mob, the ignorant masses who destroy themselves with chaos and tyranny. Maybe their community collapses after takeover by a charismatic despot who seduces the people into supporting him. Maybe the community fragments into internal conflicts. 

This idea is at the heart of all ill will toward democracy and universal freedom – that only the wise deserve to be free. Because only the truly wise will know how best to use their freedom. 

In the institutions of democracy, that means restricting the right to vote. Not by some explicitly crude metric like race or religion. But by a person’s level of knowledge about their democratic institutions, the policies of the candidates, and the history of the country.

This was an idea that the conservative scholar David Harsanyi published this May. It amounts to a literacy test, which is one argument against its use. You’re damn right it would have detrimental effects against marginalized communities, disenfranchising huge swaths of people who need more than anyone to be heard by the powerful in society.

But the idea is seductive, because as an abstract principle, it makes perfect sense. If you don’t know anything about the real effects of the power you wield in voting, you shouldn’t use that power until you have the knowledge to use it wisely.

The modern Russian state is the perfect counter-example to the theory
that all a democracy needs is democratic institutions. Putin's
government has to be accountable to its people and report on its
activities. There are multiple political parties who contest fair
elections. Putin even has constitutional term limits that he has to
dance around to remain in control of the country. Russia is no
democracy.

So there’s a more profound argument to make here in favour of the democratic drive for everyone to have the maximum possible say over their own futures. At first glance, what I’m about to say may sound completely absurd – that knowledge of democratic institutions doesn’t matter for your civic engagement in a democracy.

Think about everything I’ve written about as I’ve hammered out my conception of immanent freedom in society. Democratic institutions – like elections, government transparency, and voting – are actually the least important elements of a democratic society.

They’re necessary, but far from sufficient. Institutions alone can produce an entrenched oligarchy – rotating in and out of legislative power through elections, all parliamentary parties corrupt, campaigns so expensive and financed by absurdly rich individuals and huge corporate subsidy. 

Why does that sound so familiar to me?

You can be a democracy and be an oligarchy. Knowledge of institutions doesn’t make a difference if you still let those institutions slide into a transparent oligarchy. 

What makes a democracy a society of freedom is the activism of people. People demanding a better deal, not only from their government, but from each other.

So in a way, Harsanyi and Plato are right that you need knowledge and wisdom to build a truly free society. But it’s a different kind of knowledge than the institutional and historical. It’s the knowledge of the networks, relationships, lives, and imbalances of justice all over your society.

One kind of knowledge that makes you more free? Knowing people from lots of different ethnic groups, cultural communities, social classes, genders, and sexualities in your city and your country. It’s the basic knowledge of the literal fabric of your society. 

You learn what kinds of people exist in your society – what makes you different, and the struggles for common dignity that bring you together. And that's the fundamental fabric that holds real freedom together.

Hating Democracy IV: End Your Traditions, Research Time, 24/10/2016

I haven’t gotten my hands on the first episode of Class by Sunday night, so the first post in that series will come on Tuesday. That’ll be my discussion of the first episode “For Tonight We Might Die.” The post on the second episode, “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo,” will likely go up Friday – But Patreon backers will get to see it a day earlier.

Posts on Class will probably appear each Tuesday after that. This will probably be how the Doctor Who posts end up going as well.

• • •

Continued from last post . . . You can say democracy is a lot of things. It’s not exactly a simple concept. But here’s what democracy is on today’s post. 

Democracy leaves ever aspect of a community’s social order up for grabs in every moment. It’s the fundamental opposition to social conservatism at all times. 

The unity of a culture is built from the ground up, from such ordinary
things as brief television commercials about noteworthy moments in
your country's history. Like when Drake took those baskets back to save
the Raptors from the Halifax Explosion at the conference to choose the
design of the new Canadian flag. At least that's how I remember it.

This is another part of Jacques Rancière’s account of the democratic attitude, democratic life. If I can name it a little more poetically, it’s the fundamental human yearning for freedom.

I sometimes feel as though a lot of popular political discourse in the West has lost this more profound conception of freedom. Too many of us think freedom is a matter of “money talks.” The kind of freedom that means we shouldn’t care how much a company pollutes if people still love their products because the market will guide our reason. 

The kind of freedom that means I can say whatever I want, even if it’s horrible and racist, because my fundamental freedom is freedom to be a jackass. That freedom is nothing more than the absence of coercion. Or sometimes even the absence of resistance.

In many ways, that kind of very individualist libertarianism doesn’t go far enough. It sticks with the perspective of an individual’s freedom as an isolated unit. But it doesn’t consider how deeply integrated each of us as individuals are with so many others. 

This doesn’t make individuality disappear into some amorphous blob of a society. For one thing, actual societies are way more complicated than that. Nations and communities aren’t homogeneous unities, no matter how many ancient* sociological theories treated them that way. 

* And undeniably fucked up . . . 

Societies don't really have any essence – no identity like an individual. They’re collections of many different individuals. These individuals all affect each other in complex networks. Think of how many different people you interact with half-frequently in a week. Or a month.

Co-workers, neighbours, friends, family members, casual acquaintances, occasional clients, people you see often enough at the grocery store that you remember their faces, that street musician with the steel drums and the cool hat. Now think about all the networks each of those people have. And all the networks that flow out from each person in those networks.

These networks aren't evenly distributed all over the world. They don’t have boundaries, per se, but there are hubs, as well as general tendencies to link in some ways and not in others. 

Though I'd like to meet some people from Kyrgyzstan. It seems like a
really cool place.

I don’t know personally anyone in Kyrgyzstan, for example. Because it’s far away, I’ve never been there, I don’t know any Kyrgyz myself in the city where I live, and I don’t even speak Kyrgyz, Russian, or Uzbek, the country’s most common languages. Physical, social, and institutional obstacles prevent me from direct connections to the networks of people in Kyrgyzstan.

But you could find a path through the networks of my networks (and all their networks) that would eventually lead to Kyrgyzstan. Because I live in immigrant-heavy Toronto, it probably wouldn’t take as long either. 

This is the reality of society. We’re not cells in some kind of big, giant person called Canada. We’re networks of individuals. But all these people affect each other – some a little, some a lot, and some in very subtle ways. Ideas, beliefs, and ways of acting all drift through these networks. 

So the individual people in those networks might share some tendencies, across the population when you survey it. Many of them may share tastes in food, or a peculiar rudeness in the behaviour of a city’s bad drivers. That’s where cultures come from: the integration of networks of individuals.

We’re not made by some omnipowerful essence called our nation. We’re individuals who all affect each other – and have some mild power over each other, in tension with each other. Most of the time, the people who are networked together benefit each other. 

We all do our jobs, keep our city’s infrastructure and businesses running, are generally nice to each other in the streets. But each of us, living our lives in pleasant, productive, peaceful ways, exercises their little bit of power to build and rebuild society every day.

Societies are not giant people who behave according to sarcastic
national stereotypes. But it would be funny if they were.

And that’s why you have no obligations to uphold your traditions if they stop working for you. If the world has changed so that something that you’ve always done before starts causing destructive effects, you can stop it. 

There’s no moral obligation to do something when it starts to hurt you instead of help you as it had for years or decades. Humans work best when we all strive to live so that we make each other’s lives better, or at least keep each other on the right track. The world is largely beyond our individual control, but we can adapt to a changing world.

Democracy is a politics that recognizes that fundamental human power over each other and over the world. It says to everyone who’s networked together and holds that little bit of power over everyone they’re fairly densely connected with: You have that power over each other, and an obligation to use it wisely for all our sakes. 

Democracy says: Each of us has a duty to help each other figure out the best way to survive and prosper. If that means overthrowing an old social habit or institution? If it looks like that’s the best route, heave ho.

Social conservatism in the face of destruction isn’t just foolhardy. It’s rude.

Hating Democracy III: The Rabble Babbles, Research Time, 21/10/2016

Continued from last post . . . In case you think this weird democratic hate on for democracy stops with the end of the Bush years, an intellectual very influential on today’s anti-democratic politics said essentially the same thing.

Yesterday, I described this disgust at real democracy as the belief that people’s freedom is living under and loyalty to democratic state institutions. That democracy isn’t actually the government of the people by the people, but institutions like regular elections of officials and leaders, a free press, and nominal transparency in government.

Rancière sums up the hypocritical anti-democracy like so:

“A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life.”

In other words, freedom is little more than unchecked personal desire at the expense of the common good or a higher form of social life. Here’s a thought leader in our own time – even our own moment – saying exactly the same thing: Nick Land.

Another aspect of Land's political philosophy is that our transhumanist
impulses will eventually take humanity's elite in a radical divergence
from humanity itself to survive our ecological crisis. As a slightly
serious joke, he describes the monstrosity to some as "face tentacles."

Land’s The Dark Enlightenment is a founding philosophical text of the alt-right movement, and he’s the closest the alt-right has today to a top philosopher. The barrel isn’t exactly very deep, but he’s still a genuinely intelligent man and sharp writer. 

I personally wish he hadn’t given himself over to a movement of resurgent white nationalism and just stuck to horror philosophy and the attempt to think the abyss. But sometimes, I also think that too much abyssal thinking leads to some very terrifying, violent places.

Anyway, Land’s argument against democracy (at least one aspect of it) goes like this. 

People basically act from self-interest – this could be literal individual interest, or in the interests of your family, clan, circle of close friends, or organization. Maximum, no more than a few hundred people, maybe just a little more than the max number a person can genuinely know as people.

Rulers of democracies are no different. But in a democracy, no individual or faction is ever in power much longer than a decade. So a given set of rulers, affiliates, factions, and sponsors develop a tendency to loot the state and profit as much from their control over the common wealth as they can.

People who know they’ll only be in power for a short while will only ever think in the short term, and never lay down long term plans for their society to accomplish important tasks. Like surviving an onrushing planetary ecological crisis. Only a ruler-for-life will do that, because their self-interest will run over the longest possible term. 

Here’s my take on this argument against democracy. After about a decade, when organizational rot has set in at the seat of power, the people have to kick the rulers out to reset the corruption clock. 

It’s essentially very similar to Land’s argument, but I refuse the additional step of believing that being a CEO-for-life (or until you feel like retiring) makes you a virtuous ruler who always thinks and plans for the long-term health and vibrancy of his national culture.

The most recent long-serving Prime Minister of my country Canada
was tossed out of power after nine years, when plenty of corruption
scandals had already taken root in his office. But even if he'd won
the 2015 election, he would have retired voluntarily one or two
years afterward anyway. Because we're a democracy and you don't
stick around in the top office for life.

From one perspective, I’m actually more pessimistic about human nature than Land, whose argument essentially describes a national chief executive as a benevolent despot. 

As far as I’m concerned, any moderate-term wielding of state power corrupts the office-holder. So rulers and their cliques have to be forcibly retired before the taste for filthy lucre sets in. Despotism is inevitably malevolent – kleptocracy at best, and at worst Stalin. 

Democratic institutions are the framework to keep those forced retirements smooth and peaceful. That insurance against state corruption is the central justification for democratic institutions. But real democracy is a lot more than just the institutions.

But let’s get back to Land and anti-democracy for the rest of the post. Land’s argument returns one of the oldest criticisms of democratic governance in the world – it starts in Plato’s Republic, where he calls democracy the babbling of self-important jerks. I’m paraphrasing, of course. But that’s the idea.

Plato’s critique of democracy has been a touchstone in Western political thinking ever since it was published. Yet Rancière makes a very incisive stab at Plato’s doubts about democracy. It’s so obvious when I read it that I smacked my own head – not quite literally, but it was one of those moments. I wondered why no one had thought of it before.

Why are we taking a self-professed opponent of democracy at his word about the character of people who actually embrace democratic culture and governance? Yes, he had seen a democratic assembly condemn Socrates to death for radical sedition. Which is extremely bogus.

But Plato describes democracy at its worst, as if its worst was its essence. That’s not an argument against democracy per se – it’s an argument against letting your most paranoid, socially conservative, closed-minded passions rule your democracy.

Sounds fine. But I’d seem to be in a bit of a pickle. Given what I’ve said today about how inevitable corruption is, how do I expect to stop people’s most paranoid, conservative, closed-minded passions and prejudices from taking over society? . . . To Be Continued

Hating Democracy II: Freedom As Chaos, Research Time, 20/10/2016

Continued from last post . . . So that's the general setup of the problem. If you take democracy to be democratic institutions alone, you’re going to end up being an opponent of what democracy really is. 

But what would that opposition be like? How would you understand people’s freedom if you were a democrat who thought that freedom was contrary to democracy?

Jacques Rancière is writing Hatred of Democracy in the year 2006, publishing it in 2007. There are few figures in world politics that embody these twisted hypocrisies in the understanding of freedom and democracy than George W Bush. 

The imagery of George W Bush definitely contributed to the disturbing
surreality of the terror experienced by a generally progressive person
living through the global politics of the 2000s.

Understanding the Bush years is part of what I want to do in Utopias. There is a subjective element to this as well. Utopias might get a little experimental as a philosophical text, being very explicit about the book’s nature as a response to the cultural and political problems of our own time. 

I think the best philosophy engages with its world in a very conceptual, abstract way – it can be an expression in concepts and ideas of its time and society. 

Here’s a not-so-coincidental example. Just as the cultural and historical context of the English Civil War helps us better understand Hobbes’ Leviathan, the context of the 21st century should inform ambitious philosophical work of our time and society.

So how does the Bush Administration and the politics of the time inform Rancière? They're the prime example of the terrible danger that comes when you think democracy is solely a matter of institutions. That democratic institutions are not just necessary, but also sufficient conditions of real democratic freedoms.

As Rancière describes, this premise makes you sincerely think you can create a democracy – literally a thriving democratic culture – at the point of a gun. With a military occupation. Because that is literally what they were doing to Iraq.

The Bush Administration were following the ideas they all developed as members of the Project for a New American Century think tank – building an American military empire, but an empire that would travel around the world installing democracies. Democratic, free societies whose governments upheld people’s basic liberties, who would naturally be American partners because of their shared love of freedom.

Alberto Gonzales was ruthless in his ideological devotion to the Bush
Administration, purging the Justice Department of attorneys who
questioned or critiqued the government's anti-terrorism laws. He was
also the most cartoonish failure of those years, dopily telling a
Congressional committee that he couldn't remember any of the
details of major activities in his own office.

Because they all thought that all you needed to do was knock down totalitarian institutions, install democratic ones, and people’s natural freedom would emerge. This is why they thought you could make a democracy with a military invasion. 

Here are some examples Rancière doesn’t bring up, but that I will. It’s why they thought no one would ever vote for Hamas in the Palestinian Territories in 2007 – because an election is a democratic institution and democracies don’t vote for non-democrats.

It’s why they cracked down on civil liberties in America itself, authorizing the mass data collection of the NSA, routinizing torture and secret rendition of terrorism suspects, federally prosecuting political enemies of the administration. They still considered them democrats because they were in democratic institutions, answerable to the press and periodically elected.

So how does Donald Rumsfeld describe free people? People literally having just been liberated from Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime? He’s sad for the public disorder after the invasion – people looting state institutions. 

But he’s sure that democratic institutions will channel that energy into the proper freedom. That's why the American military went to Iraq. 

Freedom is the goal of America’s invasion of Iraq, but raw freedom is a sad by-product of liberation. It’s disorder, chaotic, something unfortunate that needs to be brought to heel. 

Rancière doesn't collapse freedom into pure anarchy, but he's aware that
the liberty to do what you want is an essential element of government
by and for the people. My own conclusion is that freedom is only
possible among ethical people. So to build a perfectly free society,
we have to build a society where no one will be driven or desire to
harm others. I have no idea how that can happen, but it's a
wonderful asymptote to approach.

That understanding of freedom isn’t the freedom to live as you want and do as you like. It isn’t even genuine government of the people by the people. It’s the freedom of living under a particular set of institutions. The institutions are constraints, but they will shape people into their highest, most proper freedom. 

Yet even democratic institutions are still constraints. They ultimately involve coercion – police, armies, state violence whether by gun, jail cell, or fine. Institutions that punish malicious behaviour. 

Any punishment is constraining behaviour – it’s an ill done to you, which means that it takes away from what you can do. Just having to obey an institution’s rules does ill to you, even if it’s a nice institution that materially improves your life, as most democratic institutions do.

If you disobey the institution, you’re punished. And so for the threat of punishment, you conform your behaviour to the institution’s rules. You constrain yourself. The material freedom the institution may give you comes at a price of a degree of your liberty. 

Institutions are needed to constrain the chaos of real liberty. Democratic institutions are, accordingly, what transforms chaos into the ordered movement of a higher freedom – democracy. But what happens to a democratic society when they see freedom and liberty as an excess? . . . To Be Continued

Hating Democracy I: In Our House, Research Time, 18/10/2016

Reading Jacques Rancière is a lot of fun. He’s efficient – writing short, dense books. But he’s also fun to read – those books steer clear of over-technical jargon and they get straight to the point. There's nothing ambiguous about Rancière’s writing. You see it, it confronts you, and you deal with it.

Because it’s nothing if not confrontational. You don’t write a book called Hatred of Democracy and expect to avoid upsetting people.

Who hates democracy here? Certainly not Rancière, though he does hate a lot of what gets called democracy. Though he doesn’t name the individuals, the introduction to Hatred of Democracy expresses nothing but bile toward the racist nationalism and enforced secularism that's near-universal to his country France.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France's National Front, recently said that
she would ban all conspicuous religious symbols in all public places, if
she becomes President. In the name of France's liberal secularism.

When he wrote about that, my first instinct was to think of Marine Le Pen and Bernard Henri-Lévy as examples of each. 

It made sense to me at first glance. Maybe that’s because, while Rancière was writing in 2006, I was reading in 2016 so could see more obviously (and unfortunately) how Le Pen’s socialist nationalism* and Henri-Lévy’s secular liberalism dance together.

* Where have I heard of a formula like that before? It sounds weirdly familiar.

It's a peculiarly European problem. Even more peculiar than European – a Western European problem and very much a French problem as well. That singular kind of opposition to freedom in the name of democracy. Perhaps it’s Dutch too. 

A devotion to liberal secularism and tolerance turns you against freedom. 

You can split democracy in two ways, you see. One side, you focus on democratic institutions – parliaments, courts, political parties, bureaucracies, welfare services, public utilities, police, and so on. Call that, just for the sake of the argument we’ll be having over the next few posts, civic democracy.

Now look at the other side of what we call democracy in this split. This is the freedom to do whatever you want with your life as long as you don't hurt anyone. I often joke with my friends and co-workers, when they float the idea of doing something harmless that they haven’t before – “Of course! Why wouldn’t you? We live in a democracy. You can do whatever you want!”

Maybe just call that liberty. 

The problem is that you can very easily confuse civic democracy with liberty. As if conformity to the institutions of your country was the same as being free to live as you wish, as long as those institutions were governed by democratic norms like representation, management transparency, and the freedom to criticize them.

Patriotic French citizens demonstrate for their religious freedoms.

But institutions don't free you. At least not entirely. They can certainly provide you with benefits you need to secure your material freedom – like subsidized or not-for-profit utilities, welfare payments, or the protection of your civic freedoms. 

Institutions demand something of you that constrains your freedom – loyalty. Conformity. Since the institutions of a state are closely entwined with a country’s culture, conformity takes on a powerful moral imperative as well as a political command to be loyal.

Look at the example of France. Racist nationalism has grown there (and throughout Europe) in response to large waves of Muslim migrants. Public suspicion of migrants and Islam’s association with terrorism drives the alienation of that minority community. And that alienation tends to swing more members to embrace the fanaticism of terrorism in Islam’s name. The cycle continues.

The response is all too often to push Muslim migrants to conform to secular French life. The freedom of secularism becomes a freedom of fealty, turning away from how you want to live. 

Even though a headscarf doesn't hurt anybody and the moralities of those who choose to wear it are far more diverse than the garment’s opponents believe. And the secularism of the French constitution is rooted in its cultural Catholicism to begin with.

The French case, which Rancière writes about, is a very clear example of a common mistake people make about politics – taking civic democracy to be material liberty. As though loyalty to democratically governed institutions was the same as freedom.

This is just one of many ways you can call yourself a democrat while hating freedom. . . . To Be Continued