Whither Capital IV: Sabotage or Complicity, Research Time, 04/06/2018

So Cultural Studies – the academic revolutionaries – knew they had to battle for a kinder world on the field of culture. The question now was how you’d do it.

Well, they had a long-standing channel to communicate with the public. They were researchers, writers, regularly published in respected journals. So they would research, write, and reveal the hidden vectors of oppression and routes to liberation in the most unexpected places.

You probably know where I’m going with this. I know where I’m going with this. And I don’t want to condemn the discipline, I really, sincerely don’t. But the field’s focus on the analysis of pop cultural properties isn’t exactly the most effective form of cultural change.

Now, those analyses really do have the power to change minds. They can help illuminate how subtle moral conditioning and ideas worm themselves into what we typically think are innocuous entertainments. But there are two problems with that.

Is it responsible to rest with merely describing what is wrong with your
society, when you depend on those fundamental wrongnesses to make
your diagnoses? I don't know, actually.

First and most obviously, this can’t be the only technique in the toolbox for social change. Some folks specialize, and that’s great. I work for some other channels of social change right now, and plenty of channels are active. My first critique is an institutional one if nothing else.

You know what I mean. They may have trained themselves writing for paywalled research journals. But the most effective pop cultural criticism projects since the start of the discipline have been in streaming tv and blogging.

The blogging project was explicitly defined as a magical ritual, on top of that. It would have been seriously questionable to a tenure committee.

But Slavoj Zizek’s documentaries about how to understand cinema psychologically and philosophically reached huge numbers of people. Elizabeth Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum has become a leading edge in popular understanding of Doctor Who, and a gathering point for the global sci-fi trans and queer communities.

Cultural Studies as an academic discipline writes powerful critiques of exploitive institutions, institutions that have state, economic, and social components. These are complex institutions like global trade networks, the mining industry, state military colonialism to wipe out indigenous people and cultures. Institutions like universities that perpetuate the financial exploitation of students, and the class stratification of societies.

Now you see the problem, don’t you. Here’s an academic discipline based around developing multi-faceted critiques of exploitive institutions. But its home is in an increasingly exploitive institution – the post-secondary education system.

Culturally, universities foster cultural conservatism by elevating wealthy donors and families in their support networks. Universities force levels of indebtedness on more and more people to the point of macro-economic catastrophe.

Universities protect networks and organizations like nationwide fraternity houses, which foster gendered violence. Researchers who are elevated to high-status positions in universities rapidly become corrupt and hypocritical – imagine a global justice and anti-colonialism advocate who rewards young female scholars from South America with career opportunities in exchange for sex.

Wait, you don’t have to imagine that last one. It’s Thomas Pogge of Yale University.

Cultural Studies was complicit in the institutions it was critiquing, because it could only function in the network of those institutions. Now, this discipline grew from the generation of researchers who grew up in the first period of mass-level university education. For the first time, working class and minority researchers were joining the university sector.

But it was still a sector built for the wealthy, male, and mainstream culture. No matter how much you may criticize the elites, if you have to play by elite rules to do it, your critique will always be incomplete.

Despotism as Over-Writing and Overriding Thought, Jamming, 31/03/2018

A couple of days ago, I finished a white paper for a Toronto-based think tank / consulting firm on democratic governance. I’m not going to get into the details of it right now, because it’s pretty dense.

Happily, the firm’s research supervisor enjoyed what I wrote and had some great recommendations for the second draft. A lot of his suggestions had to do with signposting – letting a reader know explicitly why you’re making a particular inference or reference.

If we understand the world according to only a single set of ideas,
we'll do serious injustice to people who think differently, and
impoverish our thinking and our civilization. Spirits must become
more than ideas and practices.

I always need an editor’s hand with signposting in a lot of my non-fiction work. I immerse myself so deeply in the research material and the concepts that what appears clear to me needs to be made more explicit. The connection is there – I just sometimes have to be reminded to say it blatantly. I can be too subtle for my own good when I write.

The paper explores the chaotic and dangerous nature of online social media platforms. They can encourage democratic movements – the Arab Spring, Idle No More, Stoneman Douglas – or revanchist, reactionary movements among all ideologies – the alt-Right, left-wing Putin boosting.

One of the best comments I got from my editor was that I should add, in the final section of recommendations, a brief response on whether these platforms should be nationalized to control them in the public interest.

I think this would be disastrous. Because while the rapid chaos of barely restrained social media can encourage dangerous extremism, nationalization would put media that can also encourage democratic revolution in the authoritative hands of the state.

In most of our political conversations today, talk about the danger of state authority is a libertarian idea. I take a different tack, following the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – along with the philosophical current in which they were major players. Their conception of the state’s dangers is rooted in their concept of despotism.

As much as we fear Trumpism – and there's plenty to fear in his regime
of egotism, corruption, and validation of racism – his politics merely
makes explicit the inherent oppressive danger of state institutions.

We associate despotism typically with despots – dictators or authoritarian rulers whose power falls short of the Führer ideal, while still moving along that trajectory. But Deleuze and Guattari talk about the despotic machine – this is the state itself.

When the material power of a state institution is barely or not at all restrained, it overcodes everything in the territory it’s responsible for. What do I mean by overcoding? It’s a technical term, referring to institutions that orient more and more (and eventually all) of people’s activity to the state.

In a despotic machine, if you want to do anything in your life, you have to run that activity through some kind of state machinery. State institutions, regulations, and rules determine every aspect of life. Not simply in terms of conditions – like laws, safety or environmental rules.

I mean state institutions and machinery determine and actively shape cultural and social development. Diversity and indigeneity are wiped away by state mandates for uniformity.

Here’s a simple example. It comes from touchstones in Deleuze and Guattari’s own work. Franz Kafka was a Czech Jew living for most of his life in the Austro-Hungarian empire, whose thinking and work was informed by his sardonic attitude toward the bureaucratic drudgery of his day job, as well as his personal engagement with Jewish mysticism.

As useful as state institutions can be for supplying common goods to
huge populations, the institutions are very dangerous. They can all
too easily be used to oppress people, and force the many ways of
living across a population into a single, uniform character. That's the
power that Deleuze and Guattari called overcoding.

Kafka had a complex identity and set of ideas, whose linguistic influence was Czech, Hebrew, and Yiddish. But the language of his fiction writing and daily business life was German. This was a state imposition on his identity, which was more complex than the monarchist political morality and subtle German supremacism that the Austrian state imposed on all its citizens. It didn’t matter whether you were in Vienna, Prague, Ljubljana, or Timisoara.

Here’s a more complex example. Last year, there was a very strange court decision in British Columbia. The Ktunaxa people sued the provincial government to stop the development of a huge ski resort on their sacred mountain in the Jumbo Valley, where their religion holds that a grizzly bear spirit lives.

The court mandated that an area of the mountain be set aside from development for Ktunaxa worship. According to the laws of the state of Canada, freedom of religion requires that the Ktunaxa have a place set aside on the mountain to practice their faith.

But the Ktunaxa’s ontology of the divine has nothing to do with having a place on the mountain to worship. The mountain itself is the material manifestation of the bear spirit. So any resort development would be an act of violence against their divinity. Full stop.

Ktunaxa thinking sees the mountain as the manifestation of divinity. Canadian law sees the mountain as a place where the Ktunaxa need some accommodation to practice their religious beliefs. What is a matter of existence for the Ktunaxa is a matter of cultural practice for the Canadian state.

The court judgment couldn’t even comprehend Ktunaxa ontology, let alone acknowledge it as valid. Their entire way of existence was invalidated, overcoded by the state’s systems of meaning. That’s the despotic character of even the most democratic states.

You Come to Swell the Numbers, Advocate, 26/02/2018

I’m not going to write about philosophy today. One is that most of the philosophy I read this weekend was for a book review I have to write, so I’m not going to throw it out on the blog.

I started work on a new novel manuscript this weekend too, but I only just finished the prologue. On to page three! Yeah, not much to say here.

But I’m coming to protest on Saturday. It’ll be a good protest, a damn fun protest, a beautiful protest, and a necessary protest. The rage will be necessary, and channelled through the power of a group.

So this Saturday, there’ll be a Justice for Tina Fontaine protest, and yeah of course I’m fucking going.

There are two arguments that I can imagine getting trotted out about this. One is the legalist’s, the other is the quietist’s.

To Mr Legalist

The lawyer’s argument is the most insulting to me, because it’s so reductive. These are the people who say that Jian Ghomeshi deserves his job and office back at CBC because the criminal trial found him not-guilty. Who reduce all truth to the verdict of a jury.

Rather, they expand what was designed to be a narrow, difficult standard of proof to stand for the entire truth of the matter. Yes, a jury decided that Ray Cormier’s drunken ramblings weren’t sufficient grounds for criminal conviction. Would “Justice for Tina Fontaine” really be complete if this one evil jackass went to prison for 25 years?

I don’t even believe in the sufficiency of retributive justice as an individual, and I came to that decision as a Westerner. Indigenous Canadian cultures lived under justice institutions – the customs and methods of redressing crimes – whose grounding principles were restorative, communitarian values. Centuries of cultural continuity.

Do you seriously think Indigenous Canadians would have only the punishment of a perpetrator in mind when they chant “Justice for Tina Fontaine”?

To Ms Quietist

I understand the centrepiece of this argument, I truly do. But you can’t just say that this is only for Indigenous people and cluck sadly as white extremist opposition goes unchallenged.

Remember what I said about the communitarian values at the centre of justice questions larger in scope than “Who did it?”

Tina Fontaine – and everyone else who’s met an untimely death after a life of neglect, suffering, and marginalization – doesn’t achieve justice when a jail cell closes. Because people still live as neglected as Tina Fontaine was.

Many of the causes and conditions of that neglect are the structure and operation of Canada’s government institutions. It may not be the residential schools anymore, but the child welfare agencies in some regions are very effective with the spin they’ve put on the basic process.

As a person who lives in Canada, I’m enmeshed in the same institutions, the same cultural currents as everyone else in this country. If our institutions and cultural beliefs, common sense, and habits are set up in such a way that many people needlessly suffer neglect and indignity, we all have to work together to change them.

When you’re suffering, you need to know that you have friends. That minimal level of friendship – respect and solidarity – is the relationship that constitutes community.

I’m not going to be some presumptuous ass trying to speak for Indigenous people. I haven’t gone through any experience like they have. But if anyone needs to know that they have friends, at least I’ll be there.

Swell the numbers until everyone joins.

Lives Deprived of Flesh, Research Time, 25/07/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about an article I’m working on to be published at the Reply Collective. It’s a rather complex study of what philosophical creativity is. It includes an analysis of Rebecca Tuvel’s article on the possibility of transracial human existence.

I read the article, and I didn’t actually think it was very good. I think Tuvel had the right to write the article, contrary to a lot of the more intense opposition to her work. See, Tuvel’s critics made the mistake of thinking that her goal was ever to write anything at all about real transgender people’s experiences.

Tuvel’s article doesn’t ever discuss real experiences, and if her approach there accurately reflects all her work, she never does. She practices an entirely abstract conceptual analysis.

Would you trust anyone who had a simple, clear answer for everything?
That kind of person is usually a con-man, whether he's wearing a
plaid leisure suit or a televangelist's perfect makeup.

She contrasts and analyzes a series of abstract arguments from principles and claims. These arguments are about what it would take to change genders and races. They have nothing to do with the actual experience of real transgender people – if they did, their ideas would be nowhere so clean, orderly, and simple.

Too much of contemporary philosophy mistakes this simplicity and clarity for a superior way of understanding the world because it’s so simple and clear. But the world isn’t easy – it’s a messy, difficult, painful place, and the truths of lived experience are hard to understand in all their curving, multifaceted dimensions.

Any conclusion that you come to easily, you should suspect. Just as you’d suspect a salesman whose pitch is too slick.

When I read Milton Friedman, I feel the same way.

Hell of a record scratch right there. But I see the same kind of reliance on the ease of abstract arguments, turning away from real complexities that would make your conclusions more difficult to hold. A philosophy informed entirely by the most simple, abstract arguments is completely inadequate to understanding any exceptions.

Here’s an example from Capitalism and Freedom that makes for a wonderful illustration of Friedman’s over-abstraction. It’s part of a larger argument about how education should work, and how people’s preferences for their children’s futures affect educational outcomes.

His writing on monetary policy and the role of
currency in national economies is genuinely
enlightening. When he stays in the boundaries of
his scientific discipline, Milton Friedman is a
remarkably insightful thinker.

Friedman considers why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people. His reasons are – what’s the word? – kind of ridiculous. He says that a central reason why wealthy people have fewer children than poor people is because the advanced education that wealthy people often receive is more expensive and requires greater investment.

Poor people, meanwhile, have more children because their education will be paltry. Poor people, after all, will only ever do simple work like manual labour or front-line service work. Since they don’t need as much education and training as the children of wealthy families who become doctors, engineers, and Ivy League university professors, poor families can produce more children at lower cost.

Yes, this is what he says. Capitalism and Freedom, chapter six, pages 86-7 of my edition. This is seriously Friedman’s argument in one of his most popular books. How on Earth did a man who would put this argument to paper win a Nobel Prize?

He abstracts away from the real, complex situation of actual families to focus specifically on his arguments for how to improve America’s education system. In doing so, he turns away from letting messy reality disprove his most infamous premise – that all people act optimally rational all the time and that all families are precisely planned.

Turning away from real complexity toward the simplicity and ease of an abstract argument makes your thoughts into lies of distortion. The simplicity of Friedman’s abstraction in this example erases the real injustices of education access and family planning capacities across wealth levels.

The simplicity of Tuvel’s abstraction in her paper this Spring erases the real injustice and suffering that transgender people face. Worse, it implicitly equates them with the deranged saviour complex of America’s most famous self-alleged transracial person.

The imperative to “Keep it simple, stupid!” does not always apply.

A Gift For Monstrous Men, Research Time, 11/05/2017

Here’s an analysis from Machiavelli that has some troubling relevance for 2017, as if we needed to be troubled any more than we are already.

In yesterday’s slightly rambling post, I commented on a couple of chapters from Book II of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It was about how the growth of oligarchy and the corruption of institutions wrecked the people’s faith in democracy.

Yet their freedoms to speak and organize still existed, allowing the faithless and resentful to organize a full overthrow of the democratic institutions they felt were worthless. That was disturbing enough because of how similar the political and social situation in the United States today is to that five century old description.

This is Donald Trump with his friend and longtime business partner,
Uzbek billionaire Lev Leviev, a diamond magnate who rose to the top
of the business class of an autocratic police state dominated by a single
ruthless man. Donald would be envious.

There's a set of chapters in Book III that I find even more disturbing when I watch the open kleptocracy of the Trump family.

Machiavelli writes that a kind, virtuous person dedicated to the public good in their work and life can only thrive in particular circumstances. So what kind of society lets such a good, generous person rise to the top? Where do the nice folks finish first?

Your society has to be dominated by values of equality, respect for everyone, and the fair submission to the rule of law. Not only must we profess that, we actually have to live by those values.

The most successful businesses are the ones who never cheat or cut corners, and provide services and goods that are primarily benefiting society. We have to live diligently, frugal but with an aesthetic sense to appreciate fine things. No one is greedy and no one cheats.

Police and security forces are never out of line, never too rough, always serving and protecting all people equally. No racial biases (conscious or not), no systematic pressures on minorities, no corruption, no allowing solidarity among cops to defend the violent or greedy. Everyone answers to the law not because it’s powerful, but because it’s just.

As I describe this, I find it very hard to believe that such a society has existed for centuries. Machiavelli describes Republican Rome in those terms, but even there, I doubt such harmony was ever universal.

Such a society is utterly unrealistic, but that near-impossibility is the only kind of community where our ethics would actually be adequate to the world. Where doing the right thing always resulted in your benefit, fame, and wealth.

But even the money didn’t matter! Everyone considers more income than would make you and your family pleasantly comfortable utterly unfair and gauche. We would all actually be satisfied with enough to live a nice life, and spend our excess wealth and power on the public good. That would bring everyone happiness.

As a society corrupts itself, says Machiavelli, such virtuous people dedicated to public good find it more difficult to thrive. It’s a downward spiral from the first misstep to ruin. Virtuous, good people have more trouble in society the more greedy people surround them. The greedy’s name for the good is the sucker.

The more corrupt, monstrous men dominate and hold powerful positions in a society, the more public life will be a gift to the monstrous.

Manifesto, Doctor Who: Thin Ice, Reviews, 01/05/2017

When “Thin Ice” dropped this weekend, I read a tweet from Gareth Roberts which made me think the episode would be just as I expected. “Another v good #DoctorWho. We've had that one at least 5 times but who cares when the leads are so watchable and loveable?”

A totally traditional story. It’s early in the season still, and our narrative is still in Bill’s first extended trip in the TARDIS. So it's natural that this will be another fairly straightforward adventure to see how Bill flows on adventures with the Doctor.

Even the 19th century costuming evokes the early eras of Doctor Who,
when the Doctor was a figure who called up and mocked the images
and morality of imperialist England.

Those were my expectations. It’s not a spoiler to say that the story met my expectations. Doctor Who produces stories of consistently solid quality today. But in doing so, went well beyond them. “Thin Ice” is a totally traditional, incidental little story that turns the show’s tradition on its head.

Saying how means

SPOILERS!!!

“Thin Ice,” for all those reasons, is a simple, traditional Doctor Who story. Its beats even call back to the early years of Doctor Who itself. So many comedy drunks stumbled into being devoured by an alien in the Pertwee era.

Doing the Classics Right

The Doctor infiltrates Sutcliffe’s organic fuel foundry with the Groucho Marxist comedy sarcasm of Patrick Troughton as his twisting insults were always supposed to be.* If the leisurely ominous exploration of “Smile” sampled the Hartnell era’s signature styles, I think the whole season might give us a tour of the classic story beats. 1963-2013.

* If only any writers in the Troughton years were capable of writing with the wit and rhythm of Sarah Dollard. Unfortunately, the best we got was, “Well now I know you’re mad. I just wanted to make sure.”

Another aesthetic mashup in Doctor Who: the cyberpunk imagery of
antique diving suits in 19th century England with the kaiju story of a
giant monster lurking under a metropolis.

Alien monster attacks the unsuspecting people of London. Doesn’t get more traditional than that. Bill herself gives voice the the logic of the tradition. She speculates about whether Sutcliffe could be an alien, because it makes sense to her that someone responsible for setting this creature on innocent humans was an alien.

A New Era

In a moment, the tradition is shattered. Sutcliffe launches into probably the most blatant and explicit rant of aggressive, violent racism that I think has ever been heard in Doctor Who.

We’ve had characters speak elegantly of their contempt for slaves and lower classes. We’ve had complicated metaphors for colonial histories and ideologies baked into entire alien biologies. The most notable one in the Pertwee era, actually. It was called “The Mutants.”

I don’t think we’ve ever had a character on a televised Doctor Who story just blast someone with a flaming vomit of racist verbal abuse. I stand to be corrected, but I think Dollard has hit new ground here.

Another point that breaks the tradition: He could only be such a racist slimeball because he’s human, such a petty dickish rat because he’s human.

Like "The Beast Below," in "Thin Ice" we discover that a majestic sea
creature has been enslaved by the narrow-minded acts of humans. But
in that older story, humanity's flaw was our fall into violence out of
desperation. Sutcliffe explains that he enslaves the creature to
exploit it as a resource to make him rich and put him in power over
even more people.

A Craftsman’s Tools

Yet we’re still in a very traditional story. It’s neo-traditional, but given the length of the Moffat era, we have to admit that the early years of his own tenure now count in the period of Doctor Who’s tradition. Even though he still runs the place.

The template of “The Beast Below” is now a traditional template to introduce a companion. First Amy Pond, and now Bill Potts. Here’s its structure, remarkable in that it achieves complex character development in very little time.

The companion experiences a story that itself is a narrative articulation of the Doctor’s ethic, letting the companion articulate hir own ethic as a creative reaction that complements it. You’ve now given the companion a comparable ethical complexity and profundity in 45 minutes as a character who’s been developing for 54 years.

Moffat was a genius to have thought of it. It’s a beautiful, elegant, and fantastically efficient narrative template for Doctor Who. As a tool for writers, it’s probably the greatest work Moffat has ever produced for Doctor Who.

It must make you feel terribly old to have your own work become a tradition in your own lifetime. Hell, before you’ve ever left your current job.

Yes, hello, it's me. What is it? What do you want? Why are you staring?

Behold the Doctor

But what is that ethic? Because it’s different in “Thin Ice” than it was in “The Beast Below.” In their superficial details, Dollard wrote plenty of parallels between the two stories. Starship UK was a dystopian Noah’s Ark in space, a sea creature underneath an ahistorical London.

Now we’re in the real London, a London lampshaded as real. Regency London never had non-whites in the movies Bill watched, but as the Doctor says, “History gets whitewashed.” The Doctor, going far deeper to the heart of a crusty old Brexit-voting grandpa watching at home with the family, declares that even Jesus was black.

Not only do we see the real multi-ethnic London of the 1810s, Doctor Who acknowledges the real erasure of all human complexity in so much of the media we’ve seen depicting our history all our lives.

“The Beast Below” gave the Doctor the ethic of a solemn, kind guardian. He was an ancient soul with a heavy, burdened heart, and an immense kindness. “Thin Ice” gives us a different Doctor.

The character no longer burdened by the years-long weight of the old Time War idea, yes. Most importantly, the Doctor articulates a very different set of ideas about who he is and why he does what he does.

As Sandifer put it wonderfully in his review of "Thin Ice," Bill does
what few companions have done in Doctor Who: put the material
realities of human privilege and inequality front and centre through
who she is – both her character and her position.

His own speech to Sutcliffe articulates some of the oldest ethical wisdom of humanity. True progress is measured not in factories built or methane emitted, but in how well you treat the least of us.

On screen, the Doctor describes it in modern terms, as how well a society treats those who are least privileged. An open embrace of progressive values. It gives me hope that Doctor Who will continue to embrace social progress and change, even as Brexit drives the BBC and all of English society into a sucking muck of depression, xenophobia, and isolation.

If anything, it means that the BBC know who the largest and most devoted fans of Doctor Who in Britain and around the world are today – nerdy, intellectual, smart women, including many of ethnic minority women in their different countries. You don’t purposely alienate the central fanbase of your biggest global moneymaker show unless you’re a complete idiot.**

** I mean, there are definitely complete idiots working in Britain. But it seems that there are enough non-idiots at BBC Drama to keep at least this much of the country in sane shape.

Those are the values explicitly spoken by Jesus, the values of justice that Britain, as a Christian country, should embrace. Not that it’s anywhere near that. But neither is anywhere else.

A just world is a world where each of us is treated with equal and total respect. A world where we do no wrong to each other, at all levels from individual insult and theft to systemic scales like an entire planet’s economic system. That’s not just Jesus’ message, but the ethic of the entire Abrahamic way of life.

Genesis 14. Lot’s people graze their animals in other people’s fields, and justify it by Abraham’s message that God promised the land to him. As Abraham’s heir, the land is Lot’s. But the rest of Abraham’s people ask Lot, even though he’s the rightful heir of the promise – “That doesn’t give you the licence to steal from people!”

Even a promise from God doesn’t break our promise to God, which is also our promise to each other. The promise of justice.
• • •
In 1964, David Whitaker, Doctor Who’s first and primal script editor, axed a story called “The Masters of Luxor.” It was axed because, at its core, was a pious expression of fealty to God, and the ethic of the Doctor was a stance of passive wonder at the eternal beauty of the entire universe of space and time.

He replaced it with “The Daleks.” It’s the story that establishes the fundamental ethic of the Doctor, even though it was in its simplest form. It was literally the second story of the whole show, and it was written in a week. Of course it’s simple.

The Doctor fights evil, fights racism and oppression. He fights for justice.

Economics for the People, Jamming, 27/03/2017

So I had a great time live-tweeting the New Democrats’ Youth Debate this weekend. And watching it as well.

I continue to be impressed by Guy Caron, for one thing. Whether or not he wins the leadership, I hope his profile, power, and influence in the NDP, in Canada, and global progressive politics grows.

There are two aspects of that hope. One has to do with his tireless advocacy for basic income. Basic income is a transformational economic policy, for two reasons as far as I understand the issue, economic and moral.

While I think Caron and Niki Ashton are the best candidates among the
NDP leadership field, Caron's intellect makes me think him best suited
to be Canada's Finance Minister. In that role, he has the potential to be
epoch-making, beginning a process of economic transformation not
under the emergency conditions of Varoufakis in Greece, where crisis
and sabotage caused his failure, but in a prosperous, resilient Canada.

In a strictly economic sense, basic income is a solution to poverty and inequality. By taxing profitable corporations, wealthy individuals and families, and stock transactions fairly in comparison to the rest of society, you can provide funds for everyone to supply their basic needs of food and shelter.

That lifts people out of poverty, and gives otherwise desperate, hopeless people an anchor in their lives. As modern industry continues to automate and artificial intelligence advances, there will simply not be enough good jobs in the economy for the world’s entire population.

There probably aren’t enough such jobs already. But basic income in an automated industrial society would keep demand high enough to prevent economic collapse. If unemployment rates are huge, but economic productivity high due to automation, the economy will end up collapsing – Very few people will be able to buy the huge amounts of goods and services created.

This (along with his motives to simplify and reduce welfare state bureaucracies) is why the model neoliberal economist Milton Friedman first proposed basic income. But there’s a moral reason why basic income is necessary for a state’s welfare obligations too.

Basic income removes morality, blame, and condescension from our welfare systems. There will no longer be an excuse for you to spit on those who don’t hold jobs, as if they were all lazy good-for-nothings. Surely, some of them are.

But maintaining demand levels in the face of widespread automation and job loss – high productivity and low employment – doesn’t give a damn if a jobless person is a bitterly disappointed ambitious striver or a 400 lb mooch. And neither should we.

Milton Friedman. The era of the conservative libertarian economist,
the shadow of Mt Pelerin, the neoliberal consensus, the fetish of a
free market that has never, could never, and will never truly exist,
must finally come to an end. Their ideas have wrecked the dreams
of generations.

If you want to get high and mighty, you can say it’s about justice. But I prefer not to be high and mighty – humans rarely deserve it. But we shouldn’t let our moral beliefs about who does and doesn’t deserve to life a dignified life interfere with how we want to maintain our economic prosperity.

I mean, who are we to judge? Who is anyone? Only God can determine anyone’s actual moral worth. And even when we’re dealing with God, there’s plenty of room for appeal and argument.

But here’s the second, and I think larger, cause of the hope I see in Guy Caron’s candidacy. For too long, people like Friedman and the conservatives, libertarians, and oligarchs who’ve followed his teachings have had total public ownership of economics as a science.

The people who speak the language of economics for the public are people whose policies and ideas are rarely in the interest of public welfare, health, and prosperity. They’re people who represent the interests of oligarchs.

Caron is an economist who is dedicated to using the science of economics in the interests of the people and the common wealth. As his profile rises, he joins Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis as leading progressive economists. He’s joining a global leadership of people rededicating that science to the service of the people.

Original Inequality I: A Taste of Swiss Beats, Research Time, 01/03/2017

So I picked up my old book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau essays. Still diving through some classics, reading the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam.

Even aside from the larger scope of what I’m planning for Utopias the book, as I read him, I’m thinking about our own political situation today. Inequality has become one of the definitive political issues of the 21st century West – fighting inequality is the mission statement of today’s progressive left from Athens to Vancouver.

I'm one of the Bernie-Would-Have-Won folks. Not because of any love
of Sanders himself – I have a lot of problems with how he ran his
campaign for the nomination and the current focus of his public image.
But he and Donald Trump both ran on a platform of dismantling the
freewheeling new liberal economic model that's been dragging
humanity down. I wish his social democratic approach to that
project could have gone toe-to-toe with Trump's nationalism.

From Miami to Seattle, there’s the more pressing issue of resisting and surviving President Agent Orange. But there’s still an underlying idea that growing and catastrophic social and economic inequality laid the conditions of that reactionary wave.

So I picked up one of the classical texts in the Western tradition to think through the problem of social inequality. Rousseau was a rebel against the popular themes of his time – that European civilization was maturing, coming into its own as people learned to live as free citizens of enlightened, open governments guided by knowledge and wisdom of the new sciences and revival of ancient learning.

Absolutely fucking not, he said. The first of not enough punks and rebels in the history of Switzerland.

Instead, he offered an image of 1700s society as inherently corrupt, built on oppression. As a left-wing person taking part in left-wing political conversations in the 21st century, we’d today tend to think of that oppression through the era’s colonial empires. Not Rousseau, though.

Imperialism was at the heart of European culture – when The Origin of Inequality dropped in 1755, the Seven Years War between France and England was about to begin. England, France, Spain, Holland, and Portugal all held colonial territories and outposts throughout the globe. Europe was wealthy from colonial industry.

Rousseau peppers his essay with a few images of savages to illustrate his image of the truly free person. But he uses the same foul language of imperialist, racist thinking. These are almost figures of speech to him, but thankfully not the actual basis of his thinking.

The philosophy scholar Peter Gay wrote an introduction to my edition
of Rousseau's political essays. It struck me, looking at it now, how
important he described Rousseau's own origin and life in Geneva
was to his thought. However abstract and universal your thinking,
there will always be ways that your own history and the problems of
your own society and time shape you.

The Origin of Inequality keeps to an abstract plane. There are moments all over where he talks about how ludicrously difficult it would be for these tribes of 20 or so primitive people to achieve the basics of technology. As if you could just stumble into building the first iron smelter while foraging for apples.

He describes the state of pure human equality as individuals alone. We wander around a world where we’re relatively under-populated, with abundant resources. We only come into contact with others occasionally, hang out for a while, satisfy whatever sexual or social needs we might have, and move on again.

General isolation and no scarcity. These are the conditions in which humanity is at its most equal – the only state where no one has any debts to each other, no one serves another, and everyone is free.

When we meet each other, we aren’t rivals, because everyone has everything they need in such a condition. With life no more complicated than that of a naked wanderer with no worries, all our natural feelings of sympathy and love are never interrupted. Everyone is wonderful to each other because there is no material need for resentment or conflict.

Such a world never existed. But it’s a conceptual exploration. Rousseau is asking: What is the simplest state of human existence in which we could still be human?

But if society gets much more complex than the simplest possible, which it always is, inequalities begin to form. When society is complex enough that no one can provide for all their needs on their own – which is pretty much any population size and any level of relative scarcity – we rely on each other, fall into each other’s debts, exercise power over each other.

So inequality is the condition of the corruption of the happy, caring attitude we’d all have toward each other if we had no troubles in life. Corruption of our better nature constitutes itself in the first exercise of power over another.

The first moment where we push someone, lean on them, coerce them. The moment where we take even just a little bit of someone’s freedom away. . . . To be continued

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

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.

Tell Me Your Truths, Class: Detained, Reviews, 22/11/2016

I'm a bit of a theatre nerd. The first long-form work of drama I ever produced was for theatre. So some of my favourite episodes of television are the bottle episodes. “Detained” was the Class bottle episode.

Just a few special effects like the classroom door floating in the blackness of no-space. The CGI shots of the transdimensional asteroids. The explosions and prop chaos during the asteroid crash and other shenanigans with a smoking asteroid. Everything else is carried on the strength of the dialogue and actors.

On those grounds of basic criticism, “Detained” delivers. Patrick Ness’ dialogue has its clunky moments as usual, but all the actors pull off some powerful, nuanced moments. The episode’s entire concept is about forcing the actors into intense literally confessional scenes. This is Doctor Who does No Exit. Literally.

Because,

SPOILERS

warned – they are genuinely in hell. A one-room prison in a pocket beyond space and time where their only way out means confessing their closest secrets about how they feel about each other to each other.

Many Kinds of Truth

So let’s get the basic premise out of the way. Quill puts the Scooby Gang in detention so they don’t mess with her while the events of the next episode are happening. A freaky asteroid smacks their classroom through the rift and knocks them into a no-space.

The asteroid turns out to be a prison for alien murderers. The only way to find out about their situation is to hold onto a piece of the asteroid and let it take you over. And when you channel the asteroid, it forces you into a confession. A suitable piece of mystical police state technology for the Whoniverse.

It isn’t just a matter of being forced to tell the truth. Truth is more complicated than just facts. Because the gang want to learn facts.

They each take their turn with the asteroid so they can learn enough facts about it and their situation to escape – they can each only handle the asteroid once before it fries their brains, the asteroid is a transdimensional prison, they’re trapped in their classroom with the consciousness of a multiple-murderer. And so on.

So far, so Doctor Who. Affordable TV budgets and high drama with cracking scripts, mad ideas, and quality actors. But since I’m doing philosophy at the same time as I’m talking about science-fiction television, I should ask – What kind of truths are we dealing with here?

Each of their interactions goes in the same pattern. They remember the most intense confession they’ve ever made (or almost made) before, then give a similarly intense confession about their friends in the cast, then force the asteroid/prisoner to reveal a secret about their situation.

Truth as Integrity

You confess so that the truth is known, because you’re compelled to say what’s true. This is why confessions are so powerful in the criminal justice – it’s literally the unfolding of truth. The burden of a secret is lost when it’s told. You don’t feel the pain of hiding anymore.

That’s Matteusz’ confession. He recalls coming out for the first time, to his dying grandmother, who knew from the start and didn’t care. The one member of his family who accepted him was the first to be told and also the first to leave. And he was left with the family who kicked him out.

That’s the same nature of his fear of Charlie, of Charlie’s alien nature, morality, capabilities. There is that deep love, but Matteusz’ fear slowly eats away at his love. Saying it lets them work it through and become closer for it. That’s the ethical confession.

Epistemic Truth

A confession is also how you see the world, how you understand what’s happening to you. Tanya’s first confession is of a shameful moment, when she continued to hide the fact that – after stealing a handful of candies as a child – she had planned from the start to steal. While she told her mother that she thought the sweets were free, that at the time she’d understood it not to be stealing.

Tanya’s confession to her friends is also about how she sees the world. She confesses her belief that she isn’t truly their friend because they think of her as a kid sister and not a peer, that they’ll never understand the kind of life and challenges she faces as a black woman in Britain.

What she confesses isn’t true in a factual sense – The rest of the gang are her friends, and while they may not all (except Ram, and oddly Quill) have experienced systemic social racism, as friends they can come to understand it themselves. The bonds of solidarity she doubts are really there.

Tanya’s is an epistemic confession, an expression of her own perspective on the world, which can be mistaken or incomplete while still being true. It’s the truth of how she sees the world.

The Facts

Then there is simply the factual truth. When you know something concrete about your world, and precisely. Typical for Ram, that’s his confession. He’s a stereotypical footballer again that way, always a simple soul. Saying what he thinks and doing what he wants. Heart on his sleeve no matter how hard (and badly) he tries to hide it.

Ram confessed to his father that he had an alien artificial leg. And he confessed to April that he loved her, but knew that she didn’t love him.

There it is. Behold! Check it out!

Responsive Truth

What do we learn from April? She’s a paradoxical character – Phil Sandifer is right that April’s paradoxes and subjective complexity makes her the most intriguing character on Class. But there’s more to these paradoxes.

April is notable for her personal strength to deal with immense burdens and traumas like her link with the Shadowkin and her father’s attempted murder-suicide. But the show first depicted her as this cloying school keener – the only one who cares enough about the school dance to set it up, even though everybody goes.

She doesn’t express her strength on her own. In ordinary situations, she’s content to be passive and unnoticeable, even if she’s lonely or isolated. Her strength only emerges in response to these terrifying challenges. She has a paradoxically weak strength – April is only an agent when she’s reacting.

So her confessions are reactions. She remembers testifying against her father in his criminal trial after his murder-suicide attempt – expressing a terrible, painful truth because the situation itself demands it. A confession that takes immense personal strength to make, but it would never have been made if not forced to.

What forces it? In the original instance, it’s the need to redress a terrible crime – more than having broken the law, April’s father violently broke the intense ethical trust that bonds a father and his family. That situation calls April to act.

In the moment, Ram has just made a powerful confession of love and trust that she doesn’t know how to reciprocate, and might not be capable of reciprocating. A radically powerful development in a relationship of profound trust calls April to respond.

She summons all the strength she can to make the ethically best response – the consequences will be dealt with, but the response cannot be avoided.

This is a truth of justice.

• • •
Charlie’s confession is a combination of all these. An undeniable truth whose expression unburdens a corrosive secret, pulled from him by the sheer danger of the situation and the need of those he loved.

Yet it’s also a mistake of a sort, based on the folly of his perspective – his deep guilt that thoughts alone require the same ethical culpability as the act. The Rhodian (and Kantian, and Christian) morality that the desire for a crime is indistinguishable (in pure reason, or in God’s eye, respectively) from its commission.

And like all their truths, this is left hanging. Tanya is still alienated from her friends, Ram wounded and April alone, Charlie shouldered with an otherworldly guilt, and Matteusz hoping and doubting he can handle his love’s alien nature.

There will always be consequences. And so more confessions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White Privilege in Miniature, Research Time, 28/09/2016

I wrote last week about the Shallow Pond Problem. It’s a common problem in contemporary moral philosophy – a seemingly straightforward way to apply abstract principles to large, complicated political issues.

That’s what you want philosophy to do, right? Take complicated practical matters to the most abstract level, where you can apply simple concepts and arguments to the problem and get clear answers for intractable problems. 

Looks innocuous, doesn't it. But don't be fooled by its simplicity. Or
maybe I should say, don't let yourself prefer the simple.

The Shallow Pond goes like this. You’re wearing an expensive suit while walking past a shallow pond. In the pond, you see a child drowning. Obviously, the ethically correct decision is to wade into the pond and rescue the kid. It ruins your suit, but ruining your suit is acceptable collateral damage for saving a child’s life.

That’s the simple setup. Here’s the application to complex real-world problems. Because your slight sacrifice (wrecking your suit) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (saving a drowning child), then your slight sacrifice (donating all you possess but a subsistence income) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (donating it all to charities that provide live-saving care to the desperately poor).

I've known professional moral philosophy academics who find this argument seriously compelling. Peter Singer first put forward the argument in a professional philosophy journal, but it’s inspired other philosophy professors to become activists / lobbyists on behalf of global poverty relief.*

* Though like most human projects, corruption and hypocrisy have followed. 

How effective those projects actually are at work doesn’t undercut the moral imperative, which is entirely conceptual. 

From the first time I heard the argument, I had deep suspicions about it. But I couldn’t always put my finger on it. I think back to my earlier days in the academy, and I remember one common factor in all these times that I felt suspicious of a straightforward, clear argument. But I couldn’t argue against it myself because I couldn't root my suspicions in reasons. It was just a feeling at the time.

I learned how to explain and understand my suspicions as reasons when I learned one deceptively easy way to argue against such seemingly obvious conclusions. It’s deceptive, because I don’t think a lot of folks realize how easy it is to undercut an obvious conclusion.

He's a good writer in that he can easily suggest complex ideas in very
simple writing, but I want Appiah to dive into the complexity!
I know he can.

Cut up the premises.

Last time I talked about Kwame Anthony Appiah’s arguments around the Shallow Pond, I did it in a spirit of disappointment. Because it was an annoying example of the academic’s mistake – considering replies to others’ objections to your ideas as actual elaborations of your idea.

I wanted to read cosmopolitan moral / political attitudes and principles in application to policies and examples, or work through other social problems with a cosmopolitan lens. I wanted to see the idea become complex, not defend itself against arguments that are from a whole other world.

And I mean that seriously. There are many ways you can divide philosophical thinking into categories. However many ways you feel like splitting them up, however many principles you can think of for categories. 

But for the same of understanding what I (and Appiah too) think of approaches like the Shallow Pond problem, let’s think of methods and goals. Two categories of philosophical thinking:

1) Simplifying complex problems to develop obvious, straightforward answers.
2) Developing concepts adequate to real-world problems, so we can better understand very complex situations.

I don’t consider simplifying complex problems as a sensible way to live. Thinking that complex problems always have easy answers gets people into ridiculously horrible messes. 

That's really all Appiah’s response to the Shallow Pond problem is. Incredulousness. Do you really think you can solve world poverty by throwing money at it? It seems like you can, but in a world as complex as ours, everything short of real systematic change is nothing but a patch that falls away after a while.

Speaking of global transparency and corruption, Trump-connected
consultant Paul Manafort is only the most recently-visible one of
literally tens of thousands of people who become multi-millionaires
skimming the money from the activities of massively corrupt
national leaders and wealthy businessmen around the world.

Look at one project in Pogge’s Global Justice Program – advocacy for global financial transparency to stop illicit financial outflow from poor regions of the world. Whether through outright corruption or corporate tax cheating, more than a trillion dollars leaves the holdings of local economies in poor regions of the world. Ending global poverty has a simple answer – keep that money in the local region.

But think about what you’d have to do to achieve that. Yes, you can build a system of international law and well-funded international agencies to support it. Yes, you can advocate for laws against such financial chicanery in the countries most victimized, and local agencies that enforce those laws.

You also have to change global corporate culture so that people don’t naturally gravitate to behaving as tax cheats and money launderers in the first place. So that everyone in the culture feels shame when they fail to pay taxes or pay their hosts and collaborators their fair share. 

Donald Trump bragged that not paying his taxes and stiffing his business partners made him a smart businessman. He’s an ordinary part of an international business culture where this stance is also ordinary. Imagine what you’d have to do to change that entire culture.

So yes, the statements are easy. But understanding what it would take to achieve them is tremendously difficult. How to build airtight laws, how to shepherd those laws through the legislatures of many different institutions and governments (which requires understanding the cultural, moral, and political dynamics of billions of people), how to isolate a moral principle in a society and develop activist techniques to push that principle out of popular favour.

Thinking complicated problems are easy to solve because stating the solution is itself easy. It's a key sign that you haven't dealt with very many actually complex problems in your life. If you want a definition of white privilege that won't get anyone's ethnic hair up on their backs, explain it in this abstract way.

The statements are easy. But the world is complex. I prefer to work in the thought that adapts us to the complex. We can get the work done that way.