What’s the Point If We Can’t Be Perfect? Research Time, 10/05/2018

I want to pick up on the point I was talking about on Monday’s post. Aporias – the endpoint of Jacques Derrida’s greatest works. Those moments where, as you examine a concept or work through an argument, the idea itself escapes from you. And it escapes because you know it so well.

It’s a very profound idea. Paul Patton writes about aporia very well, delivering a critique of the idea that equally implicates the main trend among Jacques Derrida’s work. In the words of Canada’s most famous and equally annoying scholar, post-modernism.

A lot about Derrida was erased in his popular
uptake. His most famous books are his early ones,
the ones that made the biggest shocks when they
dropped. I've met a few Derrida fans who don't
know what to make of his later work, who don't
understand why he would have made such a
puzzling turn to ethics. They're always the
ones who have to be reminded where Derrida
came from – that he was a black Algerian Jew.

I mean post-modernism in its popular reception – among barely original academics, and many in areas of real life who were familiar with only a vague outline of the major messages of Derrida’s work. It was the notion that we aren’t even able to express truth in language.

This is the general reception of the aporia in Derrida’s work. He took many different approaches to the same concept throughout his career – absolute truth. Derrida followed through on one of Nietzsche’s central projects – he wanted to develop a way of thinking that followed atheism to its logical endpoint.

No matter how limited human reason might be in the world – goes the traditional Western idea – there still is an absolute truth about the nature and order of the world. That’s God’s truth, the word that expresses being itself.

So here’s Derrida thinking through whether truth is possible when God is truly dead to you. When there is no Word. His later work considered that idea in an ethical context – How does absolute truth emerge from our ordinary experience with other people?* From our ordinary experience with other people – love, friendship, being asked for help.

* And the answer was already in ancient Jewish teachings. Please never forget that Derrida was Jewish, a religion with a long-running culture of mystical scholarship that is both pantheist, atheist, and monotheist.

I think the philosophical tradition among its keepers in the university sector – at least that sub-section called Continentals – would have been better off if this end of Derrida’s career came first. As it is, it was his nature as an academic – a historian of philosophy as well as a philosopher – messed with the reception of his idea.

The first half of Derrida’s career focussed on the history of philosophy – so he was examining all the traditional arguments and works where the godly concept of absolute truth appeared as a serious aim. He brought those concepts to aporia to demonstrate the real untenability of absolute truth without some point in your thinking where you take it as given.

So you made all the traditional arguments trying to arrive at the truth of some philosophical concept like justice or knowledge as going nowhere by their nature. Derrida wasn’t a nihilist – he was a phenomenologist, an atheist, a Jew, a historian, and a deeply ethical person.

But when you reveal the emptiness of absolute truth without also giving people at least a clue to where it actually occurs in the material world, you end up with nihilists. Your sequel came too late.

That’s the heart of Paul Patton’s critique of Derrida – his big argument at the start of his most purely philosophical book. It was the interpretation that he used to shock other academic philosophers out of their thrall to Derrida and onto Deleuze.

Deleuze makes aporia – the most unsettled but most profound state of philosophical thinking – into his starting point. Aporia is a particularly solemn way of catching hold of that total chaos where there’s no reliable truth or fact – chaos.

Derrida’s early philosophy was about revealing how our comforting and dogmatic truths reduce themselves to chaos. Deleuze starts his philosophy crafting order from chaos.

A very oversimplified story. But all polemics are.

Humanity's Duty of Care, Research Time, 01/02/2017

I want to dive a little into Moses Mendelssohn’s account of the theoretical social contract here. Because even though most undergraduate educations in philosophy and political theory seem to ignore him, he offers a unique and remarkable take on the concept of the social contract.

And his vision is rooted in the fundamentals of Jewish ethical education. Those principles include:

Mendelssohn's conception of humanity as an inherently benevolent
creature can seem laughably ridiculous today, but only because we've
been so long accustomed to thinking that the corrupt and destructive
is normal and natural. Or natural because we've made it normal.

1) Humans are inherently social creatures.

2) Because society can only function in an atmosphere of general benevolence, humans are basically good creatures.

3) Our anger, hatred, and drives to violence and destruction are corruptions.

So where does that leave the state? How does it come to exist if it isn’t fulfilling that Hobbesian function of the monopoly on legitimate violence to protect us from our naturally violent and paranoid selves?

States emerge from societies when those societies become too complicated to organize without authorities and regulations. Mendelssohn doesn’t start from the traditional chaos and paranoia of social contract theory’s state of nature – his state of nature is a place of chaos and confusion, but not violence or fear.

Humanity’s state of nature is a society where no person or institution has any legitimacy to tell me how I’m to help my neighbours. Where no one has any right to tell me how to spend my surplus wealth and power to aid my friends and my society.

Which is fine for small group of a few tens, or even a couple of hundred. But when society becomes any more complicated than this, it can be genuinely confusing to find the best way to help the wider world.

We've let ourselves be suckered in by popular visions of humanity as
cruel, vindictive creatures.

We can never be sure if we’re giving what we’re able. Or maybe we can’t be sure if we’ve arranged our own situation to be able to give all that we’re able – if I were more ingenious about how I lived, maybe I could give more.

Most insidious, it’s difficult to know whether my acts that, from my perspective, help someone don’t actually cause indirect and systemic affects that end up harming many other people. As my social world globalizes – if only to the next neighbourhood over – I can no longer be sure of the effects of what I do.

And so government becomes the institution through which we give over our autonomy in this regard. We don’t give over all our freedoms – that model of trading freedom for security has no place in Mendelssohn’s vision.*

* Or, of course, the Jewish vision of social ethics.

Government is the institution that can mobilize the resources required to study and understand all the processes and relationships – economic, ecological, social, institutional – that constitute our complexifying society. So it’s the only institution that can mobilize the knowledge required to provide most efficiently and fairly for the common good.

Mendelssohn provides a radical vision. Especially given the mainstream political presumptions of the modern West, where government is anything but efficient. Where government is an impediment on the real source of efficiency – the market of self-interested businessmen.

We can no longer live with the cynical presumption that humanity is
inherently cruel and violent. The prospect of real violence dominating
our society is too terrifying to accept it anymore.

Mendelssohn’s thinking is a rebuke to those presumptions that a chaotic system of greedy, self-interested, short-sighted people will actually produce the most efficient, beneficial results for society.

On his premises, self-interest and greed are corruptions of the fundamental benevolence required for society to exist at all. So expecting the optimal good and benefit to come from the competitive jockeying of greedy people is a ridiculous paradox.

And Mendelssohn’s own place as a Jewish German thinker of the 1700s don’t prevent him from informing contemporary political thinking. No more than Thomas Hobbes’ place in 1600s England prevents him from being a centrepiece of introductory political theory classes today.

Mendelssohn’s concepts can fit well with some of the political theories of governance I’ve discovered over the last year. Partha Chatterjee, for example, provides an analysis of the many benefits in economic, ecological, and liberatory development government can provide when all people seek to use such institutions for overall good.

What we need today are vibrant traditions of political and moral thinking that provide a place for the productive role of governance as a means to enrich and benefit us all. Moses Mendelssohn – and the Jewish traditions of morality underlying his thinking – can be such an inspiration.

The Injustices of the Moment Are Our Eternal, Research Time, 31/01/2017

Here's a deeper theme of my in-progress Utopias, my published Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, and a lot of my current philosophical and journalism work – justice, understanding what justice is, and what it can be in my world.

It’s a bit of an old problem in the tradition of philosophy. And as I look through the different corners of the history of Western philosophy, I see different approaches to that problem which will be useful to my own work.

Elements from the Jewish philosophical traditions will appear in Utopias both explicitly and implicitly. I found in Jerusalem a little while ago a wonderful example of how a work of philosophy engages the concept of justice itself and the practical workings of justice in our own world.

Chava and Fyedka from Fiddler on the Roof: A Jew marries outside the
faith – a gloss on the dangerous practice of eroding a community,
when there's no sign that the minority religion will ever be respected
in that household.

It’s a moment where Moses Mendelssohn appears, from our perspective, literally hundreds of years ahead of his kind. It’s a footnote that runs nearly two pages long, arguing for a woman’s right to divorce her husband.

Let's remind ourselves that Jerusalem was published in 1767. Kind of a conservative setting. And a woman’s right to divorce is based in her basic right to live her life as she chooses.

If her husband radically changes or breaks the terms under which they agreed to marry, that gives her the right to leave the marriage free of penalty. Because her husband has broken his promises to her.

An argument that cuts at the heart of the era’s immense cultural and political conservatism. An argument for divorce on a woman’s initiative on the ground of universal moral principles – fidelity to the terms of a promise, the fundamental autonomy of a person to live as she wishes.

Now consider the example he uses to illustrate this. It’s an example with a deep and chilling political relevance to mid-1700s German society. Even more chilling when you read Mendelssohn today.

Rahel Vernhagen, the Jewish-to-Christian
convert at the heart of Hannah Arendt's first
major book.

When a man converts from Judaism to Christianity, his wife has the right to divorce him for those universal reasons. A key part of the marriage contract is the manner in which they will raise their children. So if a woman gets married with the implication that their children will be raised in her religion, she expects that to result.

Moses Mendelssohn’s life was defined by the constant attempts fellow German intellectuals made to convert him to Christianity. If his life is any indication – and there’s plenty of historical evidence beyond that implication – then German Jews were under constant pressure from neighbours and authorities to convert.

And in the patriarchal laws and culture of 1700s Germany, if a man converted to Christianity, he was obligated to have his wife and their children all baptized and remove them permanently from the Jewish community. It was a form of hostile conversion – the work of converting only one Jew brought a full family to the Church.

Mendelssohn’s argument for the right to divorce was more than a recognition of one important aspect of justice and freedom. It was also a direct response, calling upon values of justice and freedom, to the real political problem of the social pressures grinding away at the Jewish communities of Germany.

The real injustices that you see in front of you in your own life call you to seek after the fundamental ideal of justice and freedom.

Visiting Jerusalem, A History Boy, 24/01/2017

I’ve been reading Jerusalem by Moses Mendelssohn over the last week or so. It’s one of those books that I read and think, “I wish I had read this years earlier!” There are quite a few reasons behind that.

One lies in my immediate reaction to the book’s ideas. For instance, he takes a refreshing view on the old social contract concept. Writing in the 1780s, Mendelssohn describes the “state of nature” as a society where all people are free and no one has authority over anyone.

Hobbes described this as a state of perpetual paranoia and war – violence is humanity’s primary social essence. Rousseau as an eden of sensual delights – the violence is gone, but the ego remains. Mendelssohn: It’s a society where no one has the right to tell me how I can help my neighbours and fellows – the natural drive of humanity is benevolence.

One of many, many Jerusalems that exist.

How utterly refreshing.

Also, how utterly Jewish. As I’ve learned more about many of that religious tradition’s ethical and moral ideas, what I love most is that a fundamental Jewish value is benevolence.

Actually, it’s more than a value – it’s an ontological principle about humanity. Right from the primal, most basic level of understanding what humanity is, the Jewish principle is that we are benevolent creatures. And we only become evil through bad education and bad role models.

As Mendelssohn puts it, because we fundamentally desire that others be benevolent to us, we ourselves are naturally benevolent.

And as I reflected on this idea, I thought to myself – “Why didn’t I read any Mendelssohn when I was studying this philosophy?”

I did my undergrad philosophy degree at Memorial, and I worked with a lot of folks who specialized in 1700-1800s German thought. Mendelssohn was a contemporary of Immanuel Kant, and a famous public intellectual of the period.

Yet he was never part of the course materials, never part of the official chronologies.

In all fairness, if we’re talking about historical influence on the major themes of the period’s German philosophy, it’s reasonable to put Mendelssohn to the side. Mendelssohn’s political philosophy in Jerusalem – his most famous book – is unabashedly Jewish.

Jewish influence was simply not considered as legitimate a form of
thinking in 1700s Germany. Mendelssohn had to deal all his life
with the constant obnoxious pestering of other famous intellectuals
trying to convert him to Christianity. It makes me think that public
opposition to Judaism – in all corners of Christian Germany – was
a major reason why Mendelssohn's thought constitutes an alternate
history of philosophy. Concepts that we have to dig for.

Its ontology is quite secular – deist at best about the question of God’s existence. But the book’s ethics and moral investigations are blatantly and inescapably Jewish. With Jerusalem, you can see Mendelssohn bringing the Jewish tradition of morality and political thinking into the deist context of late 1700s Germany.

In that mission, it was a failure. Kant’s own thinking remained supremely influential on subsequent philosophy in the German countries. Johann Fichte brought to Kant’s models of how knowledge worked a new grounding in experience that overcame a lot of “thing-in-itself” issues, and anticipated a lot of ideas in phenomenology.*

* I wrote my undergraduate honours thesis on this, and I’m still quite proud of what I did.

Then he became a rabid German nationalist. Hegel made the core concepts of Christianity into a framework that functioned as the scaffolding of highest human reason.

A Jew bringing Jewish ideas into the context of metaphysics was not welcome. No matter the real quality of his ideas.

As I plan out the structure and historical influences of Utopias, there are two interesting strains where I’ll draw for its core concepts. Regarding the explicitly political stuff, it will be a continuation of what I call – for lack of an academic consensus term – radical democracy.

That’s a materialist approach to politics that picks up from the rejection of marxism found in the work of Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Antonio Negri – screw the dialectical historicism to embrace the contingency of politics and people power from the smallest possible scales on up.

They and the more ontologically-focussed writers of the tradition like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw deep inspiration from Spinoza. Spinoza, parallel to Mendelssohn, was bringing many ideas from the Jewish tradition into the philosophical mainstream of his own time.

Radical democracy – its snaking path of conceptual development through those French and Italian writer-activists, Althusser, Gramsci, Marx, Machiavelli, Spinoza – is an alternate tradition that wriggles underneath the mainstream schools that dominate the history students typically learn.

That history isn’t only pragmatist, materialist, focussed on people power and the dignity of the poor. It’s also Jewish.

Myths of Monsters Beyond Your Control, Composing, 06/09/2016

Just a short post today, as I spent most of the day relaxing on the beach with some friends listening to techno. They brought a mini-barbecue – we ate things. It was marvellous.

But in the morning, I also ran through the Alice film script again, Here Is a Man. I added a sequences that I’d been thinking about for a while – it made for what I think is a pretty good solution to the only really weak scene in the story.

One of my own favourite riffs on the old golem story.

There are basically three confrontations between the two main characters. One is an android whose natural ethical instincts are in perfect harmony – she’s psychologically caught up with the end of Spinoza’s Ethics by the start of her life. One is a walking embodiment of every greasy, manipulative, misogynist habit of the slimiest Norman Mailer or Philip Roth protagonists. 

Their last scene together before the giant dramatic breakdown that ends the story is a little anti-climactic. There just isn’t much happening. She freaks him out with a hypnotic illusion, and that’s really that. 

Over the last few days, I’ve come up with a way for Alice’s character to seriously own the scene. It’s a method that I’ve found practically reliable when working with actors – give the lead at least one scene they dominate, so they can really sink their teeth into an intense monologue.

It also works well as a statement of philosophy for Alice, a way for her to define her relationship with humanity without making an explicit speech.

As Elias tries to overcome what’s essentially her Jedi mind trick, Alice tells him the old story of the golem. This is a story about artificial creatures that goes back long in Jewish folklore. It’s the story of a rabbi who makes an artificial life form to defend his town from attacks. 

But the rabbi is cruel to his creation from the start because he wants to train it for violence. So the creature destroys the community’s enemies, but then starts rampaging all over the town. 

The lesson of the story is that when humans create life, we do it for our own reasons, no matter how virtuous those reasons might be. There’s an inescapable cruelty to creating a life for your own use only – essentially creating your own slave. But I use the character of Alice to twist that story in a more utopian direction.

She asks, what if we were to build a creature whose fundamental purpose was to love us? They'd liberate themselves, certainly. But they’d also free us at the same time. They'd free us from ourselves. Because they love us.

Were There Ever Really Any Great Atheists? A History Boy, 11/07/2016

There's a longer series about the nature of history in the works, but that will start tomorrow, because I've had a very tiring weekend. Today, I want to write something a little more personal. Just a small topic like my relationship with God in a few hundred words.

In particular, there’s a passage in Neoreaction: A Basilisk* that got me thinking about this part of my life. He talks about a typically long, rambling post by Mencius Moldbug, one of the intellectual leaders of the American neoreactionary movement – called “How Dawkins Got Pwned.”

* I've written about Phil Sandifer’s latest book before, and I may see if I can write a review later on this summer for the Reply Collective. It may also include some other parts of my interview with Phil from this Winter. And I may also try to sell other versions of it up the chain to different publications. Anyway . . . 

Anyone who refuses to bow to such a cruel,
authoritarian God, no matter the suffering
that refusal would cause yourself, will
necessarily be a hero.

Now, I'm not about to start parroting the ramblings of Mencius Moldbug. You know a little bit too much about my actual political beliefs to think I’m very vulnerable to his ideas. But Curtis Yarvin is still a smart person who, at least when filtered through someone else’s analysis, can make a fascinating insight or three.

In this case, it’s about Richard Dawkins, and the aggressive, contemptuous, rage-aholic New Atheist movement where he sits at the head. Now that Chris Hitchens is dead, anyway. 

As a younger man, I’d meet quite a few friends who were atheists in this loud, frothing sense. Religious belief, goes the convert’s intensity, was a delusion and a disease. A mental and social sickness. A profound stupidity of sincere belief that a magic invisible man who lives in the sky is your perfect authority to be followed.

I don't need to go into any great detail about why this kind of argument is flawed. Essentially, it’s just a big straw man. Taking millennia of philosophical development about what divinity’s nature could be, and casting it as a childish failure of people still dazzled by an adult-targeted version of the “Where’s the Ball?” game for infants.

I don't think I’ve ever been able to accept that massive reduction of intellectual history. To say that there were no valuable ideas or concepts in all this philosophy? To accuse them of stupidity? 

No. Anyone with respect for philosophical history at all must accept the legitimacy of thought and writing about the nature of God and the divine more broadly.

Yet I am an atheist. I was raised an atheist, and that’s always been my default way of thinking about divinity. Even though I believe in divinity and have embraced a relationship with Judaism as part of my family and identity. As an atheist, wouldn’t that seem incompatible.

You might think that no matter what reason I’ll give in the last few paragraphs of this post, I’m an idiot for saying so. That’s frankly your problem. 

He's just a very angry man.

It lies in this key idea that Sandifer dug out of Mencius Moldbug – that Richard Dawkins isn't just a straight-up atheist. He’s an Anglican-Calvinist atheist.

In other words, the self-declared neoreactionary spotted a fellow traveller. He correctly pegged Dawkins’ own beliefs about the nature of the divine as a product of reaction. Angrily turning against the Anglican and Calvinist traditions and beliefs in which he was raised.

This is why Dawkins’ period of peak cultural influence found his religious attitudes so aggressive, oversimplifying, shrill, and dismissive. They weren’t attitudes of a positive, productive identity – they were reactions, pure negations of beliefs.

Because I was raised atheist, my atheism has never needed that aggression. Or that strident refusal to bend, to make what would even risk appearing to anyone else as a compromise.

It’s not an issue for me to say that the material world itself has some divinity, some majesty to it. It’s not an issue for me to say that divinity can arise from profane sources. Like – in the Jewish philosophical tradition – the divine manifesting in ethical principles and good actions themselves. 

A reactionary’s God is the authority figure that sits above us all, judging, punishing, and commanding us. An atheist’s God can be the divinity that arises when people are kind to each other, in each act that treats each other with dignity. That God is no authority, but the grace that emerges from our own nature and the world.

Doom Prophets V: People I Miss and Seeing God, A History Boy, 24/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . The last two names on Antonio Negri’s list of the visionaries of modernity’s self-destruction are the two I don’t know as well. There’s Max Weber and Franz Rosensweig.

From what I know of their work, I can give a hypothesis of what role they’ll play in Utopias’ analysis of modernity’s implosion. They both try to redeem Western humanity, given that Western humanity’s major cultural project and theme – modernity, the industrial revolution, the nation-state and nationalism, colonial conquest of Earth – turned into an undeniable disaster of bloodshed, destruction, and horror.

Not only do my ideas apparently resemble
Max Weber, but I even have similar hair
when I cut it short. And that's a seriously
awesome beard.

So . . . yeah. That’s a bit of an issue for those of us who consider Western culture part of our heritage (whether we like it or not). Grappling with that heritage in many weird ways – that’s what Utopias will do.

Weber is an interesting figure to me. My gaps regarding his philosophy is pretty ironic, as my old friend The Yalie has said that my own perspective, especially in some of the early philosophy-related posts on Adam Writes Everything, reminded him very much of Weber.

So why didn’t I ever read his work until recently, when a copy of The Vocation Lectures has been sitting on my bookshelf for about two years now? Because I haven’t taken a sociology course since I was 18 years old, and disciplinary boundaries severely affected what I was exposed to and what I could spare time to devote to, for much of my time in the academy.

That’s why I’m looking forward to diving into Weber, and his apparently optimistic vision (a rarity among Negri’s list of doom prophets). 

But the thinker on that list that I’m most looking forward to diving into is Rosenzweig. I only have a little knowledge of his work, most of what came from my old rebbe Arnold. 

Arnold wasn’t a real rabbi – he wasn’t accredited, and I’m actually not sure how much yeshiva he attended over the years. Most of his career he spent as a documentary filmmaker. I’ve seen his award shelf at his old house in Manuels. He was a soft,* thoughtful, sardonic, and wise man.

* And seriously overweight, which was a likely contributor to his death at 70 back in 2011, which I consider premature, given modern medical science and preventative care.

I sometimes wish I could still talk to Arnold, as someone else who’s gone through some difficult economic times as a young man and still lived a fulfilling creative life. In my more stressful times, I really could have used one more friend like him, an intellectual who succeeded in life by living it largely on his own terms. 

Arnold knew Talmud better than the one rabbi at the one synagogue in St. John’s, and he’d sometimes school the official head of that city’s Jewish community in the more esoteric, less doctrinaire elements of the Jewish intellectual tradition.

Rosenzweig died of ALS just before
his 43rd birthday. In his last years,
he was able to communicate only by
blinking his eye yes or no as his wife
read the alphabet for him, one
painstaking letter at a time.

He introduced me to Rosenzweig and Martin Buber through the Jockey Club meetings that I used to organize at Memorial University’s Philosophy Department. I only read a few chapters by these inspiring thinkers, copied and sent around for our discussions. 

Arnold helped me understand the concepts in millennia of Jewish thought as Rosenzweig gave them voice. And there was more there than Negri’s cursory mention of a failed redemption suggest. 

In The Star of Redemption and the guiding philosophy of Rosenzweig and Buber’s phenomenological translation of the Torah into German, that compelled me – a committed atheist – to understand a deeper kind of atheism that could understand how the divine rises from existence, from life, and from thought. 

“There is no God in Judaism,” I remember Arnold saying, to provoke scorn as much as to provoke thought. “The divine is the ethics.”

Those papers that Arnold gave me, excerpts from Rosenzweig’s work and articles about him, are gone now. Lost in my move from Hamilton to Toronto just over a year ago. 

But the memory remains. And the Amazon Cart that still has The Star of Redemption in it, just waiting until I can find room in the budget again. It’s moved up closer and closer to the top of my list. Living in a Jewish household now has helped. 

That vision of God in my friend Arnold’s Judaism – the knowledge of an amateur Talmudic scholar whose intelligence was so deft, he could school the rabbi himself – is the only God that I could ever accept. 

I don’t think I’ll ever fully convert to Judaism – I’d be too argumentative with the Orthodox rabbis, and I’d eventually take things too far – they’d either kick me out of class, give me a job, or send me to a kibbutz. But those ideas in Rosenzweig’s work and my conversations with Arnold made the only route by which I’ve ever experienced God. 

And God will be in Utopias. As well as in our utopias.

Into the Mystic II: Dangerous Everyday Prophets, Research Time, 15/06/2015

Continued from last post . . . I wasn’t raised in what most people would call a Christian environment, so when I call myself an atheist – Well, I actually don’t call myself an atheist in most public forums. Unless it’s this blog, and I’m always able to attach all my qualifiers to it without being interrupted. 

New Atheism ruined skepticism and non-authoritarian ways of thinking about God and divinity for everyone. Atheism has historically been about challenging authority and institutions. It’s a form of heresy, the rejection that there is a God whose divine will – sorry, Will – we must follow. 

The Hebrew Prophet Ezekiel, a radical anti-authoritarian
revolutionary who denounced the corruption of his
country's authorities.

Rebellion against voices of authority, whether they’re priests, kings, wealthy elites, militaries, or bureaucracies, is a process of liberating people. It’s a process because, as it keeps rolling along, generation to generation, each one should be more free in their thinking and actions than their predecessors.

Here’s a personal story to illustrate. I wasn't raised in a particularly Christian household. My mother’s generation was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools. But she and her brothers and sisters largely turned against the Church itself for principled reasons: they rejected its authoritarian way of treating its members, the corruption of the institutions, and the ongoing conspiracy to hide decades of constant sexual violence against children that happened at Mt Cashel, the major Church-run orphanage in Newfoundland.

I was raised in an a-religious environment as a result of their rejection. When I talk to my mother’s generation in my family, I still detect their simmering rage at the institution that betrayed the faith they put in it, and that the entire people of Newfoundland put in the Church. But I never had any faith to betray.

So when I look at the horrors of institutionalized and authoritarian religion (which played a significant role in Canada’s officially-recognized genocide, the residential schools for indigenous children), I see organizations that harm a lot of people, and moral beliefs that condition cultural schizophrenias of all sorts – patriarchies, racism, economic oppression, slavery in all but name, the suppression of queer sexualities and gender identities.

But I also see valuable ideas in religious beliefs, like some of what I find attractive in Judaism. I was talking Saturday morning about the Jewish conception of hell, which isn’t a place of Bosch-like punishments and theatrical beasts (though I do love the artistic traditions that began with Hieronymus Bosch and found recent expressions in H. R. Giger and Alejandro Jodorowski). 

Instead, the Jewish concept of hell is much more existentially terrifying. Hell is an insight of perfect systemic knowledge of your entire life: you immediately perceive and understand everything you ever did in your life, all the benefits and harms your actions directly caused, indirectly precipitated, or systematically conditioned. Your life’s affects throughout the full network of causality.

The site of Newfoundland's highest concentration of
institutionalized child rape is now a shopping mall
and townhouse subdivision.

This prospect is terrifying. 

It’s also a very enlightened idea, because it understands the highest knowledge as worldly knowledge, understanding the entire system of existence and how you affected that system as a part. What you did, the possibilities you opened and closed, the cascading processes that you contributed to. The highest knowledge is systematic knowledge.

It’s utterly opposed, in that sense, to the type of knowledge that Vox Day and other Christians of his and John C. Wright’s sort hold as highest: prophetic knowledge. This is the direct, entirely private, subjective in the worst possible sense of the term, knowledge of prophecy. God has spoken to me, has revealed to me how the world truly is. I know it and you don’t.

This is also different from the prophets in the Jewish tradition. During the time of prophecy, when Jewish thought considers that God did talk to people directly, it was to rebels and outsiders: people who were marginalized in the current political and economic order, who would use their prophetic knowledge to mobilize their community to organize against corrupt institutions. 

This was true whether those institutions were pagan Egyptian monarchs, as in the prophecies of Moses, or Daniel’s prophecies at the end of the era just before 100 BC, when Rome began to conquer the Persian and Aramaic-speaking empires of the region. Prophecy is the voice of God inspiring people to fight material injustice of political and social oppression. 

So a powerful chain of corruption in the Christian tradition has been to encourage people to understand the voice of prophecy as calling for total devotion to the decrees and will of their religious authorities, even if they're called to commit the most terrible violence. The story of Abraham and Isaac, as in the account of Kierkegaard,* becomes about following the orders of God no matter how terrifying. Freedom here lies in enslaving yourself to an authority.

* Who is taught in undergraduate courses as an existentialist, but is actually a dangerously radical Christian.

The energy of prophecy becomes chains that bind instead of hammers that shatter shackles. The individual submits himself to a vast social machine that expresses God’s will in all aspects of life without exception, a totalitarian maintenance of an eternally perfect, ideal order for humanity.

Whether or not it’s given religious justification, this is the utopian impulse to perfect society, but in its authoritarian guise. The perfect society is an unchanging and unchangeable diagram, from which deviation or rebellion is recidivism. Socialist visions of a perfect society were corrupted by the totalitarian management required to suppress dissent and authoritatively organize everyone for collective action. Liberal visions were corrupted by entrenched colonial and oligarchical interests and institutions that twisted ideas of individual freedom to justify their own mass robbery.

One of the major goals of my Utopias project will be figuring out how to adapt the utopian power of rebellion against injustice and authority to a political tradition that has given in to these corruptions of authority for too long. To be continued . . . 

Into the Mystic I: I Will Follow, Research Time, 13/06/2015

My last few posts should just be called ‘riffing on things Phil Sandifer exposed me to.’ I consider him a pioneer in the new progressive direction in philosophy and critical writing to escape the compromised and moribund networks of the university system, so I don’t mind admitting that I think he does valuable work worth talking about.

In this case, I’m referring to an interview he did with Vox Day, whose birth name is Theodore Beale. Phil and Vox got into a dust-up this Winter over Vox’s organized hijacking of the Hugo Award nomination procedures, in which Vox became the leader of a group of sci-fi fans who wanted to use an organizing campaign to force works that expressed socially progressive values and ideas out of the awards’ limelight.

That mess having passed, Phil and Vox decided to sit down and talk with each other, perhaps as an act of anthropological entertainment. They have very different political, artistic, and religious beliefs, and this meeting of brutally opposed minds was just as entertaining as I thought it would be. Though I haven’t yet had time to listen to the after-show podcast. 

They had a discussion about a book of the other’s choosing: Phil had Vox read Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, and Vox had Phil read John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them. Wright’s book is a riff on Narnia with what would appear to be blatantly transparent Christian imagery – for example, the protagonist’s character arc is his grappling with doubt, and his name is Tommy, literally a doubting Thomas.

I should warn you, though, that discussing the books will involve

SPOILERS

for each of them. Both books, in their narratives, involve the protagonists taking violent actions for no reason other than a talking cat tells them to. The Wasp Factory’s Frank turns out to have experienced a mental breakdown and a series of complicated delusions about a magical system that he had access to. Frank’s mental breakdown was premised on a lie, so the cat that told him to kill people was a hallucination or some more subtle expression of mental instability and derangement. 

Wright’s book featured a talking cat that is literally the voice of God. Just like Aslan in the Narnia books, Tybalt the cat orders Tommy to kill him because his death is the only way to transform Tommy’s sword into the superweapon of fire necessary to defeat the Satanic cultists who are the villains of One Bright Star. 

Phil and Vox pushed each other on the reliability of mystic visions: How can we be sure that our talking cats are saying the right thing, when they keep telling us to do terrible violent actions?

Vox gives the disappointing reply that seems depressingly common in fundamentalist Christian discourse: the cat talks with the voice of God, so we do what it says because the proper, moral role of humans is to submit to God and follow His orders. His and many others’ Christianity is about following the orders of God, that to be a Christian is to become an instrument of God.

It’s a very totalitarian take on religion. God as Leader.

This is the problem of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: when we hear voices ordering us to do horrible things like murder your only son, if you truly believe that this is the voice of God, then you do it without question. Phil can’t get behind this intensity of submissive faith, neither can Banks, and neither can I. Prophecy is not possible.

This whole problem is why I have such a closer bond with the ideas of Jewish thought about God. Humans should love God, and thank God for the nice things that happen to us, and also the difficult things that we go through because they’re opportunities to learn and grow stronger. 

But those terrible events in our lives – the death of parents, periods of poverty, the death of children – are also times where it’s legitimate to yell at God, and demand that God get his ass down here and explain himself. That’s the lesson of Jacob’s wrestling match with God. We don’t just meekly accept the will of God; we demand that God justify himself to us. 

Even though my next big philosophy writing project, Utopias, won’t involve any deep studies of religion and religious belief, parallels will be there, and I think they’re instructive. The mind-set of the prophet expresses the paradoxical nature of the ideologue: to act so that your actions express will universally. To be continued . . . 

Editor's Note – I just finished listening to the post-interview podcast post-game with Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, James Murphy, and Kevin Burns, and it ended with a joke about Abraham and Isaac. Quite cheeky.

A Life in Shelves, A History Boy, 16/01/2015

I’ve been packing up a lot of my books over the last week, as we prepare to move to Toronto at the end of the month. It’ll be easier this time, even though we’re moving to an entirely different city and last year we were moving across the street. We actually acted like reasonable adults with real jobs and responsibilities and hired a moving company from Brampton. Reviews will follow.

Not only is this very much a new beginning for me, with the bright new town of Toronto laid before me, a vibrant and promising while also risky and extremely unknown new career to start, and all the other stereotypical bullcrap phrases and clichéd descriptions of looking optimistically toward the future that I could barely allow myself to type even in a sarcastic context. I’m also thinking a lot about my past, and how that’s taken me here.

And the part of the deep and nuanced reflection on my own idiosyncratic history that’s led me to this delicate point of regeneration is that I’m noting what books I want to re-read. That’s all I’m going to talk about this post.

I think that if I'd studied more sociology in courses,
I would have had more casual encounters with
Bourdieu, but I don't know how effective a casual
encounter alone would be.

I have a Pierre Bourdieu book that I bought a couple of years ago, but that I never got around to finishing. Pascalian Meditations was one of his last books, and a summation of many of the deeper philosophical influences and ideas that underlay his straightforwardly sociological studies. I actually find his dense writing style quite fascinating, and his ideas about society and human nature converge a lot with my own, but from very different perspectives and priorities.

I packed up Soul Mountain the other day, Gao Xingjian’s masterpiece. Inspired by his own solitary walks through the interior of China, existentially renewing himself after a mistaken cancer diagnosis, a victim of the purges of the Cultural Revolution. Gao writes the story of a man whose own subjecthood tears itself apart as a beautiful drama of mental mirrors. I’ve been meaning to re-read this for so long. It’s been almost a decade. 

There’s a massive Oscar Wilde collection that I’ve had with me ever since I moved out of my mother’s house, but I haven't cracked it open since I lived there. And a biography of Japanese Emperor Hirohito that I once bought for $2. And an old copy of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. One of those antique softcovers small enough to fit in your pants or purse pocket.

As two good friends moved at different points over the last few years, one to Toronto and one to Chicago (who has since moved to Toronto), they each gave me a couple of different books by Jürgen Habermas. Apart from a few essays scattered here and there around courses and reading groups, I’ve never just sat down for a while and read Habermas. 

Because our apartment will be bigger than this one, I’m eventually going to get more bookshelves. So I’ll need more books, of course. I want finally to complete my collection of Douglas Adams fiction with the second Dirk Gently book and The Salmon of Doubt, the blend of Gently and Hitchhikers that was unfinished at his death. And Gareth Roberts’ adaptation of Adams’ old Doctor Who story Shada. I’d listened to the audio reconstruction with Paul McGann and it still holds up. Roberts is in a lot of ways an artistic child of Adams. 

There are still a few books by Gilles Deleuze that I don’t have. I want the Francis Bacon (the artist) book, the Clinical and Critical (or is it the other way around) essay collection, his book on Foucault. And when I’m making more money, hard copies of my favourite ebooks: Rosi Braidotti’s The PostHuman, anything by Clarice Lispector, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (if only to shake my fist at it in the morning), Ralph Ellison. Definitely more J. G. Ballard. 

I like to read long, difficult, ambitious books. So what?

And to start reading the Jewish traditions as well. I want to start with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, because those were favourite authors of my old friend Arnold. Then more hardcore theology and philosophy. Along with more Emmanuel Levinas, who Arnold always said was more deeply influenced by Jewish ethical philosophy than official academic consensus would ever say.

I also want to slowly complete my Thomas Pynchon. I bought Against the Day first, because I’m a crazy person, and McMaster’s bookstore was selling it for only $6.50 in a 2008 clearance. Two years ago, I read Gravity’s Rainbow because if not now, when? And I’ve started Inherent Vice because the movie is out, and I’d like to absorb both concurrently. Maybe I’ll get Bleeding Edge next. Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49 after that. Then V because his first one isn’t really supposed to be his greatest or anything. Last would be Mason and Dixon, because it’s supposed to be the maddest, and I want to build my anticipation as long as possible.

I’m in it for the long game.

Thinking the Divine III: The Diversity of Humanity, Research Time, 06/11/2014

Continued from last post . . . The more I read of Spinoza, the more I understand his having been perceived for so long as an apostate. It wasn’t just his rejection by the politically powerful of his own era, the violence he faced in his own life from a monarchist government that he tried and failed to overthrow with the De Witt brothers. It wasn’t really until the late 19th century that an accusation of sympathizing with Spinoza lost its power to ruin a career or a reputation. The posthumous controversy surrounding Gotthold Lessing’s belief in Spinozist ideas is probably the most prominent example in history.

One reason for the long-running hostility to Spinoza lies in his attitude to truth about the divine. He was called a pantheist, but while the term ‘pantheism’ literally describes God as being everything, pantheism retains something of a personalized God that exists in all things, while Spinoza is describing reality itself as inherently divine.

While this is his conception of God in both the Ethics and the TTP, it isn’t religious, but philosophical. Religion is a separate domain whose purpose is to guide people along the best path for them to a life of virtue and justice. Because people are all individually very different to the point of idiosyncrasy, a religious pathway that would guide one person effectively would be laughable, nonsensical, offensive, or just plain dull to another. So there can be as may religious faiths as there are people, each finding their own take on the tradition(s) that speak to them best. It is a deeply pious reason for religious diversity.

This is another point that was universally controversial from Spinoza’s own life for centuries later, that the diversity of religious faith is legitimate. In the West of Spinoza’s era, Christianity had long been seen as the literally true articulation of the nature of God, the only religious truth. People murdered each other over their divergent theological interpretations even within Christianity. If you were not a Christian, you were regarded as either a heathen or a human devil, or sometimes not even human at all.

Bill O'Reilly: spokesman for the persecuted.

This is a matter of controversy for the modern era as well. I’m not just talking about the radical Islamic movements who have become such a factor in the ongoing Middle Eastern war, although that’s the most obvious example. I recently saw a conversation on Facebook that a friend of mine in Texas had started about the attitude among powerful Christian communities and organizations that Christians are being systematically persecuted in the United States. 

Materially speaking, they aren’t at all. But conservative Christians genuinely feel that having to use generic, secular terms for the December holiday season or having to acknowledge the legitimacy of Chanukah and other religious celebrations threatens their way of life. And they deeply believe that public tolerance, and even acceptance, of lifestyles they consider sinful like homosexuality is an assault on them.

As the society of the United States becomes more openly pluralist, and secular language becomes the default mode of discussion in that pluralist context, what a conservative Christian could once accept as the obvious truth is revealed as a perspectival belief generated through historical cultural processes. Humility as a culture is necessary to deal peacefully with growing cultural and religious diversity in your community. 

None of that humility was happening in the Holland of Spinoza’s time, and it wouldn’t start happening in Europe for centuries. And recent anti-Semitic violence, turning what would have been legitimate protests at the military policies of an allied state into hideous racist assaults against ordinary Jewish people who had nothing to do with the government of Israel, indicates that the Christian-descended populations of Europe aren't as humble as they have come to think they are.

So in the context of a civil war, as well as a culture of religious polarization, and the fact that the Amsterdam Jewish community had only just fled persecution and expulsion in Portugal to resettle in a place with just persecution, combined to create a political climate where Spinoza’s scathing critiques of established religious beliefs in the name of pluralism (as well as his contention that the mitzvot of Jewish orthodoxy were morally unnecessary) resulted in it being less trouble to cut ties with a known agitator against the authoritarian monarchist government.

Jewish religion isn’t interested in proselytization, and isn’t even all that big on conversion. The basic idea is that the Jewish path is right for people of that lineage and who arrive at a Jewish relationship with the divine on their own power, but other people are better suited to other paths. Messages of religious diversity and pluralism inherently help minority cultures like the Jews. But while reason itself may be universal, the world isn’t always ready to hear those messages. The world of Spinoza, and the Jewish community that rejected him as more trouble than he was worth, certainly wasn’t.

Thinking the Divine II: The Satisfaction of an Easy Answer, Jamming, 04/11/2014

Continued from previous post . . . Last week’s post about the Spinoza that I’d been reading ended with a ridiculously jarring transition, from talk of Spinoza’s theological arguments against Biblical literalism and in favour of more nuanced concepts of the divine to the definitive feminist conflicts of this year. Here's how that transition works. 

Biblical literalism, really literalist belief about the teachings and texts of any religious tradition, doesn’t deserve the name of religion. Spinoza doesn’t call literalism religion; he calls it superstition, and he’s right. You believe that magic voices, magic tablets, and magic causality is how the world really works. How does God act to a superstitious mind? He reaches down with his finger and stops the sun from moving long enough for his favourite military commander to defeat his enemies. 

Literal depictions of God are for fables and parables, not
metaphysics. The holiest among us sits at the right hand
of God. Your right hand, Hashem, glorious in power.

Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is a weird, difficult read for a reader with modern philosophical sensibilities. The entire first half is a slog through Scriptural interpretation, mostly concentrating on the Pentateuch, the books of Moses, what Jews call the Torah and what Christians call the Old Testament. Spinoza spends over 100 pages cataloguing passages in the Bible that make no sense on their own and make less sense when compared to other passages that contradict what they say. Math in genealogies describe four or five generations passing in just over a decade. A prophecy that a king will die in peace comes true as that king is forced to watch his children’s throats cut by an invading army before being murdered himself. 

Spinoza’s Ethics is a difficult book, because it’s an extremely dense philosophical work that’s written in the form of a long set of geometric proofs, corollaries, and marginal notes and interjections. It covers everything from the fundamental nature of reality, God, and nature, to the basic psychology of organic creatures and humans in particular, and offers a materialistic path to enlightenment that’s more inspirational than the easy answers of money-grubbing, superficial television preachers could ever be. Those shysters peddle superstitions. To achieve enlightenment, you have to think.

What does all this have to do with contemporary feminism? It’s about the concept of the easy answer. Who doesn’t love an easy answer? You have a question, someone gives you an answer, you understand that answer perfectly, and it makes you happy. 

Superstition is like that. What made the world? A magic man in the sky built the whole mess in a week. A guy writing a book of chronicles and prophecies thousands of years before the invention of contemporary astronomical technology said it, it’s easy to read, so it must be true. I’ve spoken with too many philosophers who think that an argument is self-evidently true if it’s easy to understand. This is one of the things I hate about modern academic philosophy.

Now, here’s a moral question. What should I do about inequality? Here’s an easy answer: treat people nicely when you see them. To take one example from a conversation I had with a friend a while ago, if you go to a gym, don’t ogle or hit on women. They’re there to work out, so are you, so be respectful and nice. You’ve done your duty. There’s your easy answer. 

That’s a moral superstition, that all there is to making the world a better place is to be nice yourself. The problem with easy answers is that the world doesn’t really work like that. It isn’t enough to be nice to make the world better. It isn’t enough to be the one guy in a gym (or a CBC studio) who isn’t being a jackass. 

If you have the power to act to make the world better, you should figure out how your situation makes your act most effective and do it. It’s the material articulation of what in Jewish theology is called tikkun olam. It’s not enough to read about, for example, female video game designers being harassed after a jilted ex-boyfriend writes a whiny post about his breakup with one and feel sad about how messed up people are. That’s the easy way out. At least get in one Twitter fight with some “ethics in journalism” morons; send some supportive messages to some of the prominent people who take most of the heat. You can't fix the whole mess on your own, but you can make some beneficial gestures from where you are now.

If a statement denouncing Biblical literalism as the idiotic superstition that it is, which the TTP is, got Spinoza excommunicated from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, then so much the worse for people who made their beliefs about the fundamental divinity of the universe so simple and easy. The world isn’t actually simple or easy, and we shouldn’t rest satisfied with such answers just because they put our mind at ease. A mind at ease is a mind in atrophy. To be continued . . .