Trust in Experts Over People, Research Time, 28/02/2017

You know, when I look in some of those classic John Stuart Mill essays, I find a lot that’s valuable for the current era. And I also find a lot that’s racist and imperialist. It’s the mid-19th century in England – What else could I expect?

But some of the truly intriguing moments in these texts comes when they discuss an idea so outlandish, yet so strangely logical, that its utter barminess is fascinating.

One of the highlights of the Brexit campaign was hearing Michael
Gove say that the British people were sick and tired of listening to
experts. On its face, it sounds ridiculous, as if people were
purposely choosing ignorance. But that's not what was happening.

Here’s an idea that I found perfectly barmy, totally out to lunch, but which had a weird resonance today. It’s about the role of an elected parliament in the government of a really complicated society.

Mill’s talking about a society about as complex as mid-19th century Britain. New infrastructure is being developed, new technologies integrated into existing infrastructure. The social and economic networks and relationships of society are fluctuating constantly.

For him, this is a world that needs keen scientific minds and powerful research institutions to understand it adequately. And I don’t have to tell you that, if the intelligence of the average MP is a reflection of their public statements, we aren’t necessarily dealing with the world’s most swift bunch of thinkers.

And I say this as not only a democrat, but as a member of one of Canada’s major nationwide political parties. I don’t just vote in the elections of these idiots – I help find these idiots, campaign for these idiots, and work with these idiots in intense political discussions about the future of our country. These idiots are my colleagues and friends.

One day, they might even talk me into becoming one of these idiots. I’d have to be an idiot to run for office myself.

"Sick and tired of experts" was another way of saying the Tory Brexit
slogan, "Take back control!" It meant that people felt that having a
regime of technocrats manage their governance for them was a
mockery of their freedom as people. And all David Cameron
could think of for the Tory Remain platform was to talk about the
financial benefits of EU membership. Not any of those values of
peace and solidarity the EU was actually founded on, no.

Mill, one of the Western tradition’s leading theorists of democracy, says we can’t actually let these idiots make the real decisions about how to run the country. A properly run, or even half-reasonably functional, government could never exist if ordinary people were in charge of crafting laws and carrying out the business of governance.

Only expertise – technocrats, essentially – can run the government well. So you might ask why you even need a parliament or representative institutions at all?

The primary role of parliament in governance, as Mill spells it out in his Representative Government essay, is to criticize the technocrats who actually run the government on behalf of the people. Setting broad priorities, making sure everyone does their jobs well.

It’s part of the theatrical function of parliaments too. Their debates and arguments articulate the ideological divisions of the wider population. Parliamentarians play those arguments out in a straightforward way – actually arguing face to face with each other. It stands in for* the genuinely messy, potentially much more violent ideological collisions in the chaos of daily life in wider society.

* And maybe sublimates if you want to risk getting a little creepy about it.

A philosophical argument among parties in a parliament works its society through that conflict of ideas without anyone having to get shot over it. Providing anyone listens, of course.

Yet it seems remarkable to me that democracy and freedom would be such a foundational value for the originator of the modern liberal tradition, and he denigrates the real power of ordinary people to govern their society effectively. The two would make a contradiction.

I always find it curious when I see a moment in a great liberal democratic political philosopher that expresses such little faith in actual people.

Our Individual Freedom to Be Good to Each Other, Research Time, 16/02/2017

I'd say one of the most frustrating parts of modern politics* is how absolutist basic liberal principles have become.

* That’s separate from the infuriating, horrifying, terrifying, enraging, and fucking hilarious.

That’s not to say that there aren’t milquetoast, bland, emptily shiny liberal politicians or parties anymore. But that middle-of-all-roads multifaceted hypocrite new liberal with a vague conscience where it’s mostly expedient** doesn’t have the loudest voice in the liberal brand anymore.

As people, we humans tend not to understand that absolutisms of any
value corrupt that value and make it completely dysfunctional. I don't
actually think Milo believes what he says he does – I think he's a con
man playing riots for cash.

** Bill Clinton administration, basically. And Jean Chrétien.

Guess who I’m about to name as that loudest voice of liberal values today. Of course I’m going to say Milo Yiannopolous.

How could such a wildly racist, flamboyantly transphobic, rich dick, gaygeoisie, misogynistic professional bastard represent liberal values? I don’t mean the liberal values of openness or diversity. I just mean the one liberal value that seems to have become the only one that matters among the new generation of radical liberals.

Free speech. Milo promotes himself as a free speech absolutist – his tours are performance art spectacles of boiling bile, bombs that clear a safe space for the most vile ideas and epithets that the human capacity for hatred can produce. From a particular perspective, it’s an important human service.

From more sane perspectives, it’s a glaring demonstration that absolutism of even the most straightforward benefits – freedom itself – can become cancerous to free society.

These thoughts turn over in my mind as I read On Liberty. It’s one of the texts considered at the centre of liberal political philosophy itself. Its ideas inspire a tradition of popular thought that includes literally billions of people now.

I’m curious to know how a typical Milo fan would respond when he reads Mill writing that our obligations to be benevolent to others always takes precedence over our self-interest and self-care. That an essential part of living in a society means we have to help our neighbours before we help ourselves.

Our personal freedoms don’t force our responsibilities into the backseat.

And Mill considers it a mark of maturity to accept this attitude that my responsibilities to my neighbours, friends, and countrymen take precedence over my more selfish desires. Which implies pretty clearly that if Mill were to meet Milo or his fanboys, he would consider them the most immature man-babies he’d ever seen.

It wouldn’t necessarily be the content of what the Milo contingent says and screams that bothers him. Mill was quite the racist himself, as I can tell when I read some parts of his Representative Government essay.

No, Mill’s shock would be at their sheer obnoxiousness, violence, their collapse of their own souls’ decency into the crumpled ego of self-absorption. The absolutism of free speech*** creates a twisted, crumpled soul who believes that his only worthwhile expression is how loud and how much he can scream.

*** Or at least one kind of absolutism, the worst kind of absolutism we have to deal with today.

You go back to Mill, one of the roots of liberalism, and you find that our freedoms are limited by whether they’ll do harm. Most often, we consider that harm an active assault, and Mill gives those examples. But he also talks about systemic avoidance of harm.

Here’s a vital moral responsibility we all share in our society of liberty – educating the next generation of our entire society to be morally better than we were.

That’s a standard to which Milo and Steve Bannon would have you rather fall well short.

Freeing Your Mind Is Building Your Mind, Research Time, 13/02/2017

Still reading through some old John Stuart Mill essays, the classics you know. Still finding interesting stuff that can be politically relevant today in unpredictable ways. Like the chapter in On Liberty about personal development.

Sounds a bit like a self-help book, doesn’t it?

It's another one of those parts of On Liberty that no one reads when they’re introduced to Mill in university classrooms. The third chapter is full of ideas that don't fit easily into the standard definition of Mill – utilitarianism, liberalism, freedom of opinion, “shouting fire in a crowded theatre.”

We have a history of saviour and hero stories all over our mythology,
images of ourselves brought to a higher intensity – less petty, more
noble. Or at least stories about how to become more noble. I'm not sure
what, if any, significance there might be to the fact that a lot of these
characters in our contemporary popular cinema are played by
Keanu Reeves.

You know what Mill is doing in that third chapter of On Liberty? He’s building a fully materialist image of humanity. And here’s the type of materialism I’m talking about.

He describes humanity as a creature capable of greatness in understanding, science, morality, and character. We have the potential for utopian civilization. Our potential is grounded in our drives and our mind – our desires and our power of thought.

When we bring our desires to their highest intensity, we can achieve incredible power. When we train our mind to become the most enlightened, we can achieve incredible intelligence. When we develop our conscience to its greatest moral sensitivity, we can achieve incredible ethical balance.

When such an intelligent mind guides powerful forces of desire, we can achieve real, comprehensive greatness as individuals and as a society. A mind and body acting at their highest powers, in harmony with each other – the elegant creativity of explosive power with self-disciplined mind and conscience.

Our political leaders in these reactionary times clearly never learned that lesson.

In this conception of humanity as potentially perfectible, Mill has become something of a transhumanist. Human knowledge can perfect us, rise us above the filth we all too often drag ourselves into when we think our greed and violence makes us great.

Again, this is something that most of us – especially our political leaders – need to learn. Humanity can become angels if we perfect our knowledge and our moral conscience.

You know, I remember reading Nietzsche
remarking how much he hated English
political philosophy generally, with a
peculiarly hot venom for John Stuart Mill.
Yet when I read Mill's account of how to
perfect humanity's character – especially
how materialist, how machinist his
conception of reality is – it reminds me of
Nietzsche's thought and tradition. Not
anything worth defending as an
academic thesis. Just a little parallel that
tweaks my thoughts.

And this is entirely a material process – we don’t need God or any god to perfect human nature. Just the progress of science and a society-wide commitment to comprehensive education, political engagement, and introspective moral exploration of our responsibilities to our fellows.

It’s incredible how typing a single sentence can make you feel so pessimistic. I wonder if you felt pessimistic reading it.

But that pessimism only comes from how terribly unlikely that kind of scientific and moral enlightenment appears to us today. Human society may change, but the highest potentials of human existence are always present in each of us.

The really hard part of all this is, looking around at the chaos, oppression, and war of modern politics and society, how on Earth do we get humanity on track for perfection?

When I wrote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I ended with a chapter that discussed how to cause epic, significant political change in your society. The only way it could be effective – a revolutionary transformation that would not only upend and reorient all traditional values and ways of life, but actually stick – is changing people’s character.

Utopias is a follow-up book in that it's fundamentally about what the most noble human character would be – from personal and political perspectives. I may follow Utopias with a book exploring the highest human nobility from a divine perspective. But that's a 2030s project.

Perfection is the long, difficult, slogging process of actually challenging people in whatever media will most open up their self-skepticism* and changing minds. You reach out to people in the most effective way possible with words that will nudge them toward their higher, more noble possibilities.

* If they’re still capable of such a thing as doubting themselves, or considering that they might be making a mistake. Hardly a universal aspect of human nature these days, if ever.

But we have to believe it’s possible. Otherwise, no one will ever even try.

Free Speech Martyrs in History III: The People, Research Time, 10/02/2017

Running through some lessons from the classics – John Stuart Mill.

Socrates made for a prime example to argue for freedom of speech because the subsequent history of Western philosophy has shown just how right he was. His principle that you should always probe and question the unquestioned dogmas of your society became a cornerstone of philosophy as a tradition and democracy as a value.

You can probably tell where I'm going to come down on the modern
question of what constitutes religious freedom.

In Mill’s own time, European Christianity was undergoing extreme turbulence. There were pressures to secularize society. The Vatican was straining to maintain its political control over the governments of Catholic-dominated countries around the continent. Protestant Churches were splitting faster than bacteria, frequently in violent schism.

So Mill spelled out a democratic solution to this religious turbulence – the principle that all people require freedom of opinion. This argument was centrally targeted as religious belief – each of us had to engage with the divine in our own way. It would be as unique to each person as their own identities.

But these principles – freedom to critique authority and custom, freedom of opinion and religion – faced one obstacle more powerful than any one person who disagreed. The state – the power and authority of government to enforce dogma and opinion with the police and military.

If it hadn’t been for the judgment of a state institution, Socrates would have continued annoying his neighbours. The medieval and modern history of Mill’s Europe was stained throughout with atrocities against people over religious opinion. Those atrocities were worst when one side in a religious battle controlled the arms of the state and the other side didn’t.

I feel like John Stuart Mill tends to be stereotyped really easily. I met
a few academic philosophers who called themselves "Millians" or
"utilitarians," but even these professors would discuss Mill's own
writing as if none of the complexity and difference that I find in
even a relatively straightforward work like On Liberty just isn't there.

Ask the Huguenots, for example. St Bartholomew’s Eve was one of the earliest massacres in Europe’s religious wars between Catholicism and its rebels. A massacre of thousands enabled by the Vatican and the French government.

Mill was correct that the government should never be entrusted with endorsing and enforcing any religion. It makes belief itself subject to police and military action. We make a big deal, having swallowed so much Orwellian language, about “thought crimes.”

But state enforcement of religious orthodoxy on its populations was the original thought crime. And it’s been everywhere. There are such religious enforcer governments today – Saudi Arabia to the greatest intensity, Iran with some gestures of tolerance and tolerance for mild dissent, and the creeping religious authoritarianism of Orthodox Christianity in imperialist Russia.

You don’t argue against a state that also enforces religious belief. Not if you know what’s good for you.

So that freedom of religious opinion so important to modern liberalism is always a freedom from the state enforcement of religion. It’s the refusal to follow religious authority – no matter how many or how few police departments they control – blindly, as a matter of obeying the state’s laws.

Vladimir Putin with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, both heads of
Russia's state institutions and government. Not constitutionally, but
culturally and politically.

Returning to this argument in the classics of liberalism shows how monstrous modern conservative talk of religious freedom is today. Their religious freedom is the freedom to discriminate – in business, hiring, any rights or responsibilities – against those your religious dogma declares the enemy.

Denying service to gays, Jews, or Muslims. Refusing to supply reproductive health coverage. And using the machinery of the state – the legal and police forces – to enforce the dogma that such denials of rights is proper.

Modern America’s fascism’s central weapon is an ironic mirroring. Call a law that enforces an oppressive religious opinion with courts and police the protection of freedom.

This is one reason why you revisit a classic icon of liberal thought like Mill in times like these. To show you how to see the world for what it is – not simply as it appears at first, inattentive, glance. Not just for what someone with an axe to grind says it is.

Now that you see it, what are you going to do about it?

Free Speech Martyrs in History II: The Heretics, Research Time, 09/02/2017

So that’s one example John Stuart Mill used to describe how the suppression of free opinion harms society. The pestering presence of Socrates’ free opinion so offended the powerful of his city that they executed him for interrogating their tired received dogmas.

Athens’ leadership executed the man whose work literally produced the Greek Enlightenment in philosophy and science. Not a smooth move, leadership of Athens.

Bill O'Reilly was pivotal to popularizing, in the mid-2000s, the notion
among America's socially conservative Christians that the religion
is under attack in America among that country's socially
conservative Christians.

And the second example? Freedom of opinion in theological beliefs – the suppression of divergent Christian faiths. It seems a bit weird today, since a contemporary reader approaches On Liberty in a world of aggressive Christianity which sees itself under attack.

That aggression is the peculiarly American Christianity – heavily influenced by radical Evangelical Christian movements. I’m talking about a North America where apparently devout Christians are advocating to make discrimination legal.

Basically, it would be legal to refuse a person service or medical care, even fire them from a job, if not refusing would contravene your religious dogma. Want to keep your job while pregnant while unmarried? Or ask me as an employer to include birth control in the health insurance package? Or be allowed in my shop while gay?

Absolutely not! Because my god says no. Far more horrifying than this, is the radical American pastors lobbying and organizing in Africa for laws declaring homosexuality illegal.

Stephen Colbert was responsible for some of the best jokes about
how hilarious this conservative American paranoia about the
persecution of Christianity really was.

Meanwhile, American Christians believe their lifestyle and moral values to be under attack. Religious pluralism or official secularism becomes attacks on the Christian character of society. Even expressing values in favour of civil liberties is seen as a violent opposition to Christianity.

All this pontificating ignores the actual violence Christians face throughout the world beyond North America. Coptic Christians in Egypt and Christians throughout the monarchist, dictatorial Middle East face violence, terrorism, and discrimination.

North Korea has a goal of utterly eradicating Christianity from the country – using concentration camps as the first go-to. That’s only two of the worst among many examples of Christians facing police state oppression because in part of their faith.

Yet Trump, O’Reilly, and Limbaugh prefer to talk about the violence of fellow Americans using secular holiday greetings.

So it can be bewildering to read Mill talking about the state suppression of Christianity in Europe. Well, I suppose I should call it the state suppression of Christianities.

Mill’s Europe in the 19th century was a time of incredible flux in Christian religion. Protestant Churches were splintering and generating constantly, with huge social strife appearing over theological arguments that today are the subject of an otaku interest.

That American Christian paranoia seems especially ridiculous when you
consider how many Christians outside wealthy Western countries face
real violence and persecution. Look at this photo of funeral services for
some of the victims of December's bombing of a Cairo Coptic Church.

The Vatican was an aggressor in a Catholic context, as it fought efforts to bring many aspects of majority-Catholic states’ laws to the responsibility of parliaments and local governments.

And there were struggles throughout Europe’s industrializing societies to force Churches to leave their authoritarian, anti-science principles behind. Well, we’d still recognize that at least.

So in a continent wracked by all these conflicts over differing religious beliefs, it was a radical act for Mill to publish On Liberty. Here’s an essay that argued for free opinion about theological matters was an important condition for building a strong society and achieving essential human goods.

An argument that religious diversity is a path to human betterment. An argument that separated truth as a subject that mattered at all to religious doctrine and practice. One believed in a religion not because it was true and should be believed by all as a basic fact, but because it was your most natural expression of your own quest for the divine.

One enemy present in both of Mill’s examples that argue the necessity of free opinion – state authority.

Free Speech Martyrs in History I: The Greek, Research Time, 08/02/2017

So what are the justifications of free speech, when you go back to John Stuart Mill himself?

You can start with the standard Mill that everybody gets in their undergrad classes. Freedom of opinion and its expression, even and especially when it’s unpopular, is necessary for a functional society for the following three reasons.

We learn about the heroes and martyrs of freedom and justice as if
freedom and justice were the same. While they go together, and each is
the condition of the other's possibility, they aren't the same. Here's
Nelson Mandela, one of the world's most famous rebels against
injustice.

1) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is actually the truth, and can correct a mistaken mainstream.

2) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is false and the mainstream is true, but the challenge of those contrary ideas is needed to keep a popular truth from calcifying into an oppressive dogma.

3) Both the popular opinion and its challenger are true, and no one understands either well enough to see how they properly complement each other. But with enough work, determination, and hard public thought, the two sides of the issues can reach a new perspective where their alliance becomes natural.

Already, I’ve gone beyond the usual account of Mill’s justification of freedom of opinion. The textbooks* rarely go beyond Reason One: Some minority beliefs will turn out to be true after all.

* I really do think that humanities textbooks – the collections of excerpts and short essays, not the actual full books – are written under the presumption that students are stupid. This is why I never used a textbook in any low-level classes where I could make that call.

So this is the popular mainstream opinion about what Mill had to say about freedom of opinion. And it’s a pretty accurate view of the general popular dogma about freedom of opinion – don’t oppress my opinion, because it might turn out that you’re wrong, I’m right, and I’m entitled to my opinion anyway.

This is Kim Dae Jung in the 1970s, at a rally speaking against South
Korea's dictator Park Chung Hee. Kim spent his life as a crusader for
democracy in Korea, and went from serving several years as a
political prisoner to serving a five year term as President of the
Republic of Korea.

Except you aren’t entitled to it. Because only a few pages after going through these three reasons for freedom of opinion, Mill describes how you aren’t entitled to your opinion. It’s because every opinion should be open to critique, not just from other arguments and analyses, but from real facts that could disprove your opinion.

You’re free to form your own opinion, but you aren’t entitled never to have that opinion challenged or critiqued. That goes for mainstream popular opinion, and the opinions of isolated cranks and rebels.

But Mill is more often treated as a resource and a justification to shut down any oppression of opinion. On Liberty is, in many ways, an argument against silencing opinions. And there are many reasons why opinions can be silenced.

Mill lived in the 19th century, after all. There were plenty of dictatorships kicking around 1850s Europe – they were monarchies, but had either openly absolutist rulers or powerless parliaments. And there were plenty of oppressive theological disputes throughout Europe too.

So there were plenty of institutions and governments who were oppressing plenty of ostensibly free opinions. With all that in mind, who’s the first example Mill cites at length of a society harmed by the suppression of opinions critical to the mainstream?

A historically accurate depiction of Socrates.

The death of Socrates, the foundational story of Western philosophy. Mill depicts Socrates as the man who would have been a personal founder of a Greek Enlightenment, if the Athenian assembly hadn’t executed him for sedition against popular dogma.

The image of Socrates in the narratives of Plato – and the image that inspired the entire Western philosophical tradition – is the challenger of unquestioned dogma. And that dogma was false, or at least so simple as to become flimsy as moist tissue.

The least question could knock away the foundations of popular Greek moral dogmas. All it took was one reasonably insightful persistent critic – someone who wouldn’t give up pressing for deeper conceptions of what was taken for granted.

Socrates was a martyr for freedom of opinion in Mill’s telling. But look at the content of what he said and did. Socrates’ demand was that his society justify their moral beliefs – don’t just believe dogma because it’s given to you, because dogmatic belief leads to injustice. He was an advocate to build a more just, fair, enlightened society.

Which is different from freedom. Which is truth. . . . To be continued

What Kinds of Freedom Do We Deserve? Research Time, 07/02/2017

Another stop on my trip through the classics of political philosophy. I wanted to skip ahead to the early and mid 1800s to revisit some John Stuart Mill. I felt like it was a proper response to a political climate where riots break out at events that preach hatred as a sacred expression of free speech.

When I was working at McMaster, I worked multiple times on an introductory course on moral and political philosophy. Rowdy used a textbook with excerpts and essays that covered classics like Mill, Hobbes, and Plato alongside contemporary lights like Dworkin, and more ordinary issues-based articles.

The fight against fascism and racism gets deservedly ugly.

One of those issues that we covered were campus speech codes, an odd form of college law that doesn’t really exist in Canada. It’s most prominent at colleges in the United States, where whole forms of expression have been identified to be banned from discourse on grounds of racializing insensitivity.

Most of these codes are products of the politics of the 1980s and early 90s, and aren’t in use anymore. As you can probably tell today.

I hope Rowdy isn’t using those articles anymore, because they’re explicitly rooted in a Reagan-era context. The modern context is very different – now that white nationalism has become the dominant mode of reactionary politics in America.

I find it incredulous that all kinds of op/ed perspectives in mainstream American newspapers are so shocked – Shocked! – by the violent reactions to Milo Yiannopolous’ speaking tour.* Click that link above and read through some of the insulting, abusive rabble-rousing in the typical Milo performance.

* And remember that he’s only the most prominent of the right-wing speaking tours criss-crossing the United States, stirring up reactionary resentment and inspiring violence. Video sting journalist James O’Keefe recently egged on his audience as they brutally beat two protestors at his speech.

So I’m revisiting one of the central figures of modern liberalism, one of the most fundamental philosophers of free speech. It will inform my engagement with these toxic politics of our time as a writer, an activist, and as a person.

There’s the prologue to my Mill period. What’s the point of my doing it?

Millions of people listen to what this man has to say. So one problem with
turning back to the classic source of contemporary values is that their
noble arguments won't be prepared for the perversions modern contexts
have brought to their great ideals.

If I can say there’s a general theme to my exploring the great thinkers of liberalism and libertarianism, it’s to see the complexity that’s forgotten about in alt-right messaging.

If you look at the rhetoric that our generation of conservative provocateurs throw around about free speech, it’s a very simple idea. I mean that in the sense that it sees a straightforward imperative that in real life has many more complexities and qualifications than they acknowledge.

Here are two examples of this oversimplifying understanding that alt-right folks use to make space for their abusive, violent behaviour. Let’s start with the social media lynch mob.

From its beginning, Twitter has made a core value for its platform that it was a space for total free speech. The problem is that – having organized in other forums like Reddit, 4Chan, 9gag, Imgur – alt-right troll armies and their bots leap onto their Twitter accounts and spam a target with so much verbal abuse as to smack them in the jaw psychologically.

R U triggered, bro?

If you go back to the classical texts and try to see the original context where this free speech idea developed, you don’t read anything about this phenomenon. It didn’t exist in 1859, for God’s sake.

You get in “On Liberty” a few platitudes about yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre that I heard so often in six years of teaching academic philosophy that the phrase lost all meaning for me. But the point is that your right to freedom of expression and opinion can’t imply a similar freedom of social speech act when the context of your action does harm.

Here’s my second example: protests so intense as to cancel a Milo performance. It’s a simple refutation. The alt-right conflates having a platform in front of an audience of hundreds in the room and millions on the internet with basic free expression entitlements.

We have a right to free opinions, but not to a massive platform to promote those opinions. If Milo has it, then we all have it, and there aren’t too many who are financially and otherwise capable of mounting a cross-country speaking tour.

Here’s the problem. Try actually changing any red-pilled mind with these calm, rational arguments.

The Impotent Liberal I: My Arms Are Open! Research Time, 19/12/2016

“I may disagree with everything you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!”

One of the world’s oldest memes of fundamental liberal principles. It’s explicitly about free speech rights. But the right to free speech has implications that reach much more profound corners of human life than our rights to speak and promote our ideas.

The right to free speech means that all ideas are welcome in public conversation. That means you have to welcome the speaker as well – if they’re a partner in your public conversation, they’re part of your society.

The argument goes like this. There are no expressions or ideas that a
free society can never accept. But values based on such horrifying
hatred as white supremacy is utterly unacceptable. Can a democratic
society survive without rejecting Richard Spencer?

So the right to free speech implies – at least potentially – total inclusion in society. And that’s a fantastic idea. It’s the foundation of the ideal of world peace. And world peace is the liberal democratic idea taken to its most utopian ideal – so utopian that it could be spoken by an aging hippie smoking a spliff watching the sunset.

Here's the problem. And I’m far from the first one to say this. Hell, it comes up in nearly every philosophy class when people discuss freedom of speech. Someone enters this community where everyone is included and everyone can speak their mind. And this person says what’s on their mind.

He says that a huge chunk of the people in this open society shouldn’t be allowed to speak their minds, live in our society, or maybe even exist at all. He starts talking about how women shouldn’t work or speak, that hispanics should be deported, Muslims be imprisoned, Jews forced to Israel, and blacks repatriated to African countries.

In other words, into this liberal paradise where everyone is included and everyone can speak and think as they wish pops a white nationalist. Richard Spencer, Jim Dowson, David Duke, or Matthew Heimbach.

This is an old problem for liberal thinkers. And it’s so obvious a problem that it gets into introductory political philosophy classes as a fallback topic. How does a regime of tolerance deal with the intolerant?

Jim Dowson founded the racist white supremacist organization Britain
First, but left a few years ago and founded the white nationalist
Patriot News Network. This is a major source of pro-Trump memes
and propaganda throughout 2016.

Thing is, I don’t think I’ve seen a single philosophy class where the discussion didn’t just leave this question kind of hanging. There are arguments that, to be true to your principle, you have to include everyone – including the intolerant. And you just have to fight their against their arguments in the marketplace of ideas as hard as they fight for them.

You know what I think? How about “bullshit.” I used to believe in this argument, but two things turned me against it. One was the last couple of years in Europe and North America, when violently racist political movements have sprung up in pretty much every major country of the ostensibly liberal democratic West.

The term ‘marketplace of ideas’ was first developed in Victorian England. When John Stuart Mill wrote about this, public discourse was conducted in long, rambling, complex arguments. Even advertisements were full pages of text, complicated arguments for why you should buy this brand of rainboot over any other.

I don’t have to tell you the media doesn’t work that way today. So we can’t exactly argue about the idiocy of white supremacy as a moral philosophy. We have to fight using memes, sharable content, and social media organizing. Because those are the media weapons of white supremacy.

Liberal argument and tolerance alone can’t handle these people. Because a regime of universal tolerance will literally accept everyone. It even has to accept the viewpoints in its society of the people who want to reject damn near everyone.

Not exactly the nuanced, calm consideration of detailed
arguments that Mill envisioned in his 'marketplace of
ideas.'

Well, we can’t accept the existence of those people in our society. We have to eject racists and sexists. We have to reject white nationalism if we want to defend our liberal, democratic values.

Doesn't that make for a hypocritical liberalism? That we’ll tolerate everything but intolerance? Doesn’t that mean we fail to tolerate literally everything?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe get to this in the most dense part of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. They identify it as the fundamental weakness of liberalism – liberal thinking twists itself into knots over whether they should tolerate violent intolerance.

And we shouldn’t. Of course, this is the centre of a major critique of liberal thinking and politics. Yes, this is going to take a while to unpack. Yes, I’m going to do it here.

But holy shit, it’s important because the ascent of white nationalism to state power is a major political issue in Western society.

Liberalism can’t deal with enemies. Dealing with your enemies is the most important part of politics. Literally life and death. . . . To be continued

The Torture Hidden in Beauty, Research Time, 08/11/2013

Another smattering of crackerjack ideas from Edward Said. An idea that caught my eye yesterday was how he can spot a subtle imperialist attitude, how Said is able to recognize a terrifying presumption hidden in an incidental detail of a culturally noteworthy work. Even less than an incidental detail, he literally sees the terror of a moment that doesn’t even exist.

One lesson we can take from Fata Morgana: if there is any
true universal in humanity, it's the tendency of children to
pose for a camera.

You can get a clue as to what kind of idea he’s talking about by the name of a book he cites in the text, Walter Rodney’s 1972 work of political history, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. You don’t get much more confrontational than that. Having watched Herzog’s Fata Morgana again just before starting this research into imperialism, the notion hits me much more viscerally. Its images of desert desolation and poverty provide the required emotional weight to understand the human legacy of empire.

Arendt puts the beginning of the, definitionally speaking, imperialist period at 1884, the first year the “scramble for Africa” hit its full force. Said puts the start of this period at 1878, but he point is clear. Typically, imperialism is conceived as beginning with the mass military colonization of Africa. But the attitude and the socio-economic structures existed for centuries before that. Said cites a series of small, recurring discussions in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park about the source of wealth for the titular English estate: a slave plantation in Antigua. The aesthetically joyful shenanigans of the English idle rich depend on money imported from slave labour.

It only gets worse on the same page. Here’s a quote Said gives from John’s Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy. Remember that Mill is a great democratic reformer, one of the first activists for the rights of women in the West. Regarding the overseas colonies of Britain, they are—

“hardly to be looked upon as countries . . . but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with productive capital of their own [but are rather] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other tropical commodities.”

The racism and ethnocentrism of one of the central philosophers of the politics of individual liberty is clear. This is the legacy of imperialism. The attitudes of condescension and devaluation of foreign peoples persist even in those who are otherwise the most progressive people. It’s so insidious, we don’t even know it’s happening to us.

If I could give one critique of Said so far, it’s that he considers the imperial activity of American military interventions and business interests of the same type as the imperialist activity of the old European empires. And I think, following my friendly influence from Antonio Negri’s theory of empire, that’s incorrect. If I could describe Negri’s idea in a tweetable (and necessarily very inadequate, if punchy) form, he conceives of empire, as distinct from imperialism proper, as an ecological economic globalization. Imperialism without a head, without intention, without direction.