Save Us VI: How to Save Ourselves, Research Time, 17/12/2015

Continued from last post. . . . But it started here, and included this, this one too, and also this.

His argument that Modernity is essentially a worldview of total relativism and the impossibility of truth lays down precisely the role Leo Strauss will play in my Utopias manuscript. The symbol of the fear of humanity's smallness.

Steve Fuller and I may fight a lot, and snark at each other on Twitter, and got into quite a few philosophical dustups over the course of the longest book review ever written. But he taught me a valuable lesson about medieval Christian philosophy, theology, and culture.

Happy Xmas, everybody.

He taught me that this was a culture that believed the entire universe to be an open book. We just had to figure out the right way to read it. Nature is God’s expression, analogous to the Bible and the life of Jesus. Just as we become more divine by understanding the Bible and Jesus' life, we become more divine by understanding nature.

Metaphors and religion aside. Human knowledge is capable of understanding the universe. We just have to figure out the best methods and frameworks to do so. 

I say there can be many such methods and frameworks. They can vary by context, or what particular problems have to be solved, or some other fulcrum. Maybe we’ll drop some or add some or transform some over the years. Maybe we’ll discover that some need to be combined, or some need to be fragmented. 

The universe is really complex. We change and it changes. Our modes of knowing change as we better understand what we apply them to, and they change as we adapt to changing conditions in the world. But we can know it.

When I dropped the “metaphors and religion” there, I took you to my philosophical perspective about knowledge and the universe. This optimistic, practical, adaptable pluralism about knowledge is basically Gilles Deleuze’s solution to the problem of relativism.*

* The historical chain goes like this, very roughly. 1) Medieval theology: God made the world and made us to understand it. 2) Modernity: Human knowledge’s pinnacle is the absolute. 3) Post-modernity: There’s no absolute, and therefore no true knowledge. 4) Pragmatism: A form of knowledge is valid if it achieves the results we want. 5) Speculative Pragmatism: Knowledge has many forms and applications, and is valid if it helps us understand the world.

As for Strauss? He’s a retrograde. But an excellent representative of retrograde thinkers everywhere who think no knowledge is valid unless it expresses at least some of THE absolute. Basically, either religious or secular people whose only standard for valid knowledge is a religious or secular version of Category 1 or 2 above.

But Strauss is even more extreme, which makes his argument in Natural Right and History even more useful to me rhetorically. Because his analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ mechanistic view of reality centres the relativism that he thinks destroys knowledge in modernity itself, he can function as the ultimate conservative.

I fully admit this might be a ridiculous metaphor that
won't help anyone understand what I mean at all.

He and Heidegger both become – if you’ll let me make a completely weird metaphor that may not make any sense at all –  these weird neutron stars of arch-conservatism in the Utopias book. They emit totally different kinds of signals that resonate in a weird way, which expresses the same conclusion.

Only a god can save us. Either the universe itself changes, and takes us along with it, so that human nature becomes less destructive – God intervenes to save us. Or we return to a universal belief in a divine natural law that grounds the eternally true rights of man – we submit entirely to God to save ourselves. 

Modernity turns from this. As does liberalism, the definitive political philosophy of modernity. Liberalism is inadequate in many ways. Most notably in our current economic politics, its extreme individualism makes us hostile to our ethical obligations toward each other. 

In that, we have to move beyond traditional liberalism, to preserve its virtues like freedom of speech and thought, and the ideals of democracy, while overcoming its deficiencies.

And in this broader context about truth, knowledge, and our relation to the divine, we should be thankful for another aspect of liberalism, the West's first philosophy of freedom. 

I say Strauss feared humanity's smallness because of his presumption that human knowledge needs a divine or eternal ground (absolute and universal human rights, in the case of what I've been reading in Natural Right and History) to be valid. Without access to the eternal, we're eternally small, insignificant, and ignorant.

Modernity is the cultural way of thinking about ourselves as not really needing that eternal grounding. Knowledge can grow and progress. In giving us the tools to understand ourselves as free, liberal thinking gave us the ability to free ourselves from our limitations.

Save Us V: The World Is Lost But I’m Found, Research Time, 16/12/2015

Well, that turned into a couple of nice false starts. But here we are at the actual start of what I wanted to say about Hobbes when I was writing my follow-up to the Only a God post.

What Leo Strauss has to say about Hobbes is rooted in Strauss' own attitude about truth. The problem of truth – particularly the natural universal rights of man als Männer – is the conceptual core of Natural Right and History.

Here's the pragmatist answer to the problem of
relativism. Many truths doesn't mean there are no truths.
Each truth is partial, limited to a particular unique
domain or set of concerns, and only God knows the
totality of all that truth. But God isn't exactly
forthcoming with the answers, so we have to figure
all this out on our own.

Okay, so what makes truth a problem? 

See, Strauss is a textbook example of someone who thinks that saying “There’s no one absolute eternal truth about X" is the same as saying “There’s no truth at all about X, and you can believe whatever you want about X.” When X is the list of human rights, shit gets serious.

It’s the fear of moral relativism, but in a context where anything that falls short of moral absolutism is total relativism. And Strauss’ analysis of Hobbes is how he roots moral relativism in thinking that goes back well further than the usual suspects like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The real relativist, as far as he's concerned, is Hobbes. The reason is intriguing, though. It has to do with the implications of a thorough mechanism for knowledge in Hobbes’ thinking.

Before I lay this out, I want to say that these aren't my views at all. I’m walking you through how I understand Strauss’ argument. I think that argument is fascinating as a set of ideas and inferences, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

If everything that exists is a mechanism, then humanity has no powers to progress beyond what we can already do. That includes our thinking. We can only think, plan, and act in a way that’s peculiar to human existence alone. So we can only understand the world in human terms.

If we want to understand everything in the world (the ostensible goal of scientific inquiry), we’d have to understand everything in the world on its own terms. But we only have human knowledge frameworks to work with, so can’t know the world in itself. 

So humans gaining knowledge of truths beyond human experience or thinking is impossible. Reason is impotent. But action isn’t. Mathematics is a human way of knowing, but it does allow us to study how mechanisms work and manipulate them.

The heavily oversignified central illustration of
Hobbes' Leviathan.

Non-human mechanisms are permanently alienated from humanity. But we can use our knowledge of mechanism in the abstract (mathematics and the derived applied sciences) to wrench those alien bodies to behave according to human possibilities.

This is the mind-set of Modernity.* The book of nature is in a language we can never know. But we can burn its pages and remake the world in the human image. Strauss thinks this is a disastrous path, and so have many environmentalists over the years.**

* The epoch, that is. 

** Further notions that environmentalism should properly be a conservative dogma, as it was back when it was called conservationism, and resulted in the creation of America's national park system. But in the 1960s, the movement became critical of big business because of pesticides and pollution, so became the province of hippies. Environmental consciousness still hasn’t recovered the same political power it had in John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's day, and I don't know that it ever will.

If humanity is so lost in the world that we can only find ourselves, then we'll make sure we can be found everywhere by steamrolling our nature, our character, our way over everything. That’s modernity, says Strauss. 

So we have to figure out a return to the pre-modern mind-set when we rooted philosophical thinking and argument in real endpoints: the actual, absolute, universal answers to our questions.

Hoo boy. To Be Continued . . .

Save Us IV: The Real Idea, Research Time, 15/12/2015

See, the interesting thing about this esotericism idea is that it’s basically the presumption that there are hidden meanings in texts. There’s a conspiratorial twist to it, because it seems Strauss talks about a true hidden meaning, what the author was really trying to say.

The esoteric conception of writing seems to be that a great author is always subversive, but hiding his subversion to avoid persecution from a hostile public. So while he might appear to be a particularly nuanced thinker of his current epoch's mainstream, he’s actually a radical pushing ideas that the masses and the powerful would find horrifying.

A provocative thing to say, that Strauss' vision of
interpretation makes philosophy into a tradition of
conspiratorial thinking. Hard to put Spinoza in the
same category as David Icke.

Investigating this hidden meaning, and what it could be, is interpretation. This is the bulk of what philosophers today do: they study the great works of their field's history and interpret them. 

Most of the interpretation that goes on in today's academic world* is ersatz at best, empty wheel-spinning too often, and masturbatory at worst.

* I was quite happy that Kastely’s Plato book wasn’t one of these. While it didn't have a concrete political program in today's context, his interpretation of Plato himself as a radical democrat – almost an anarchist by some lights – at the heart and origin of Western philosophy is a message we should all hear.

Professors in the humanities are under intense career pressure to publish as much and as quickly as possible. They have to demonstrate research productivity with regular articles in the most prestigious journals. 

Peer reviewers at such journals are under pressure to reject as much as possible because of a high volume of submissions, and to maintain a reputation of prestige that comes with a high rejection rate. 

So the easiest way to pass these gatekeepers is to write an interpretation with enough formal rigour to pass muster as an argument, and that otherwise fits the general paradigm of inoffensive historical scholarship. Original, but nothing that really challenges the profession’s conventional thinking.

This isn't just what professors face when they have to
grade their papers, but also when they become editors
of the most prestigious journals in their fields. They
have high rejection rates to maintain their prestige, but
because they're so prestigious, they get an enormous
number of submissions from ambitious young
professors desperate for a publication credit that
could make or break a tenure-track job application.

Yet here you are writing in a tradition whose landmark works actually did challenge and change conventional thinking. This is a paradox I'm glad I've stepped away from.

But take Leo Strauss seriously and you face the idea that philosophy is a tradition of conspiratorial trickery. The great works of philosophy changed their culture’s way of thinking, but were only successful because they made a radical new way of thought look like it followed naturally from the ordinary.

If a writer expressed his radical ideas too blatantly, the shock would make the population reject the change. Socrates is the example. He was the most confrontational, nakedly honest philosopher in the tradition.** And that total honesty got him executed for political crimes, as a subversive challenging Athenian morality and tradition.

** I think Spinoza comes close, but his most radical work The Ethics was weird enough to be blatantly radical but still escape reactionary wrath. Besides, he had already alienated the entire Dutch public with the open atheism of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

This is what I think is so valuable about Kastely's book.*** He not only makes Plato an esoteric thinker – hiding a radical democracy in a work, The Republic, that’s typically taught as Plato’s totalitarian vision of the perfect society.

*** And what I tried to express in my dialogical review last month. But I think I let the dramatic aspects of the dialogue overcome the more philosophical examination. It’ll be better next time.

He’s an esoteric thinker on a mission to redeem his old teacher, by incorporating him into a method that could be more successful at challenging popular morality and political culture than open confrontation. And this is supposedly Plato's real mission.

This is an idea of Strauss' that breaks with the usual talk of interpretation. It gives interpretation a precise, correct content. There’s something to discover in a great philosophical work that was there from the beginning.

Strauss quite likes this idea that there’s a single real true meaning always out there for us to discover. The idea that there is no such truth is one of the notions he considers to have destroyed political thinking and philosophy generally. The stereotype is that this idea came with postmodernism.

But in Natural Right and History, Strauss argues that it comes from Thomas Hobbes. To be continued . . .

Save Us III: You Hide to Stay Alive, Research Time, 14/12/2015

I had to put Leo Strauss down for a while. Normally, I like to read a book all the way through, but two related things about Natural Right and History made me step back from it. 

One was that after the first two chapters that laid out some directly original political thinking, the book delved into exploring different epochs of Western political thinking. A long chapter on ancient Greek thinking had many ideas that were quite useful to me and my current project. Same with his chapter on Hobbes. But as I moved forward?

Is this small, unassuming man who you'd
barely notice if you bumped into him on
the street really a revolutionary? Maybe
his anonymity and the ease with which
you can dismiss him is a revolutionary's
greatest weapon.

Related to that is a curious idea about how Strauss actually wrote. The notion that Strauss is the hidden (in plain sight) Yoda of neoconservatism doesn't seem to fit with most of his writing and teaching, commentaries on the classics. 

But Strauss also wrote a book on esotericism in writing, and there's a curious comment about John Locke in Natural Right and History that fits with this. Basically, Locke looks horribly inconsistent in that he wrote many books that said the Christian books of revelation contained all the moral teaching you’d need.

Yet it also wrote the Treatises on Government, two books that justify liberal democracy, at least in his prototypical theory, with entirely material and practical grounding. Christ and the Christian God are nowhere to be seen.

So Strauss talks about this idea that, in politically turbulent times, it makes no sense to speak openly and frankly about your political views if they displease the ignorant / deceived masses or the state / rulers and military. 

You have to hide your true beliefs to avoid the fate of Socrates: arrested and executed for laughing in the face of popular morality and encouraging others to do so. Every open revolutionary faces the same danger: the consequences of the revolution’s failure. And most revolutions fail.

So philosophical texts that seek to change people's minds, causing a genuinely transformative social revolution, can’t do so explicitly. Readers will resist you when their views are directly challenged. And if the politically and militarily powerful of your society are directly challenged?

This weekend, I attended the JAYU Human Rights Film Festival as a representative of the Syria Film Festival. They closed this year's screenings with a film called Trials of Spring. It followed several women’s rights activists in Egypt, through the 2011 revolutions and their aftermath.

The main leader in focus was Hend Nafea. She took part in many protests against the government of Egypt: against Hosni Mubarak, the interim military government, Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally against Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Over those three years from the revolution until mid-2014, she set up organizations to provide legal aid to activists arrested by the regime, fight against a pervasive climate that permitted all intensities of violence against women. She was one of the most visible and important leaders of popular resistance to oppression from both the military and the Islamists.

An explicit revolution will always have enemies,
because you will have already declared from the start
that you actually are revolutionaries.

In 2014, the Egyptian courts, controlled by Sisi’s military government directly, sentenced her to life in prison, so had to flee to the United States. Nafea continues to advocate and network with others working toward a democratic Egypt.

She spoke her mind explicitly, and was punished for it, like millions of others across Arab and Persian societies after the 2011 revolutions. Only Morocco and Tunisia have secured anything like democracy. 

King Mohammad of Morocco was happy to transition to a constitutional monarchy, and Tunisia was lucky to have had a strong labour movement and a weak military. Everywhere else, there’s been crackdown and mass murder.

What would Strauss say? “See what you get?!” or something along those lines. Yet he was a revolutionary himself, apparently, without making a noise. His revolution would change the culture such that the autocracy would collapse naturally, without anyone knowing a thing. Before I can really understand what he means by this, I need to read more about esotericism, what kind of revolution this would be. 

I have to figure out how a person can look utterly inoffensive, and yet spread idea that constitute a genuine revolution. Until I can get my hands on some books about this idea, and where Strauss engages the idea itself – giving away his key – I feel like I won’t be able to understand precisely the meaning of Strauss himself.

Until then, there’s still plenty to learn about different aspects of political philosophy. Particularly, some of his ideas about Hobbes – who's important to the Utopias project in his own right – are quite illuminating. 

So if I may continue from the last post . . . 

Save Us II: Only a God, Research Time, 11/12/2015

Continued from last post . . . You know, I remember at the height of the Greek debt crisis in international news, a lot of journalists who thought they were very witty would joke about ancient Greek philosophy. 

Lakewood Church in Houston is the largest church in
the United States, regularly drawing crowds of more
than 40,000 to its weekly sermons. So I'd say that
North America is still a pretty damn Christian place.

But that pagan culture no longer has any direct influence on the Greek character. For about 1600 years, Greece has been a Christian country. Christianity changed the philosophical landscape of Europe categorically, but a lot of ideas and concepts from the pagan world survived and defined the Christian world-view.

When I was reading Leo Strauss talking about these Greek concepts of humanity’s corruption, it reminded me of Christian ideas.

I’m not a Christian myself. But I was raised in the West, Newfoundland in particular, so the Christian religious and philosophical tradition influenced my culture pervasively.

Even though I write and think in my nonfiction work from a perspective that keeps God out of things,* I did draw on Christian imagery about Eden. Edenic thinking describes humanity as inherently corrupt. In environmentalist thinking, this is usually part of a dualistic way of thinking of nature and humanity.

* This isn't the same as an atheist perspective, though in short form, that's how I explain this part of my approach. Basically, since Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity deals with human politics and scientific principles, I see no need to bring God into things. 

There’s the natural on one hand, and the human or technological on the other. Nature is a positive pole in an Edenic thinker: beautiful, harmonious, self-sustaining, godly. Humanity is therefore the negative pole: ugly, destructive, violent, debased spectres of death. 

The version of the story of Eden that I remember best
from my childhood.

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity argues against this way of thinking about the world and humanity. Not only because it's untrue. That’s the least interesting part to me. But I argue against it because, even though many environmental activists and philosophers think this way, the idea’s message is that activism is useless.

If humanity really is inherently (that is, essentially, inescapably) corrupt, then the only way that nature will be safe from destruction is when humanity is gone. There's nothing we can do to make ourselves better, or live in less destructive ways. 

Humanity is fallen. No, check that. Man is Fallen. In the very nature of our being, we're corrupt. So aspiration to be better is inherently futile. Strauss paints this notion as the centre of Machiavellian thinking in the modern tradition of political philosophy. 

The Machiavellian idea: the primary goal of politics isn't raising ourselves and our communities to some more noble way of life or set of virtues, but simply keeping us all alive in a hostile, violent world. 

This idea forms the basic core of modern political thinking, in combination with the Hobbesian idea: the only reason communities even come together in the first place is to avoid violence. Any higher goal of justice is impossible.

It’s also that side of ancient Greek political thinking that describes human justice as a diluted form of the divine. Human justice resembles true justice, but is limited in accord with our abilities. Humanity is permanently debased.

Martin Heidegger was remarkable in
expressing so much of conservative
Christian philosophy in the context of
a thoroughly atheist existentialism.

Is there any relief from this hopelessness? Not really. This is why Calvinism is so bleak. It's a form of Christianity that defines humanity's relationship with God through the Eden story: the essence of humanity is a corruption that we have no power to heal on our own.

So the only way out of our corrupt nature is through the grace of God. And we, being inherently corrupt beings, have no way to earn this Grace. We're infinitely distant from it. All we can be is what we are. Grace is an intervention from beyond being. A crack in reality to save us.

I reject this simply because it is so pessimistic. It makes us passive, hopeless, depressed. We dwell only in our corruption, fixated on the permanently abject status of our debased nature. 

If we accept this, we’ll never work toward justice, because we'll consider justice infinitely, categorically, and ontologically separate from human possibility. And I have a very complex, nuanced argument why I can’t accept this.

Because fuck that. To be continued . . . 

Save Us I: Abject and Garbage, Research Time, 10/12/2015

Your political priorities have a lot to do with what you think of human nature. What we’re capable of, and what’s impossible for us to do. 

The message, common in American political discussions
after horrifying gun violence incidents, that the only
defence against a crazy person with a gun is your own,
preferably bigger, gun, has a genuinely interesting
philosophical idea behind it. It's that humanity can
never become mature enough to solve conflicts
without violence, and your only defence from
violence is your own readiness and ability to kill.

G the libertarian once wrote me, “Don’t you believe in human nature?” He implied that human nature was inherently violent, selfish, animalistic, cruel. That’s why governments could never be trusted to ensure people’s welfare or a fair society, because leaders and officials would abuse their power. That’s why people needed to stockpile as many guns as possible, to defend themselves against governments and other groups who’d suppress and destroy them.

Inherent. Think about what that means. Immutable. Essential. Unchanging. Unchangeable. That’s how we’ve historically thought about human nature. No matter what we think that nature is, it is what it is, was, and always will be.

It’s taking humanity a long time to understand that change is possible. Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze. Me. We still need to learn the message.

Different civilizations have had different conceptions of what human nature is. Reading Leo Strauss on human nature is pretty slippery, because Natural Right and History doesn’t quite take an explicit stand on the subject* once he gets into the different epochs of this concept.

* And this is weird. I started reading Strauss thinking he was going to be the centrepiece of modern neoconservatism, but his own writing seems quite detached from the politics of his time. I’ll have to get hold of some of Shadia Drury’s work about Strauss, as she’s the primary source for this argument.

It’s going to take us a while to get through this. But it’ll be interesting. 

So Strauss spends a chapter examining the ancient Greek concept of human nature, and its political implications. His sources are mainly the philosophical writings of Plato and Cicero. 

The short version of this whole argument, exegesis, interpretation, and riff of overlong sentences and dry language goes like this.

Many heroic Greek thinkers have a disturbing tendency
to get themselves killed by the local statesmen.

Ancient Greek culture’s predominant philosophy culminated in Stoicism, of which Cicero was the most famous and politically powerful.** Skepticism was at the heart of this philosophical tradition, but so was political engagement.

** That didn’t stop him from getting killed by the imperial army after falling foul of the rulers. Killing your opponents has a much longer history in politics than peaceful compromise. At least when states are involved.

Because Cicero’s Stoicism began with Socrates. Socrates was the ultimate negative philosopher, whose method – when he was alive – was assaulting people and their beliefs, so that they could be torn down. Socrates believed that real knowledge of political and moral truths would be invulnerable to his dialectical attacks. If they weren’t, well then watch your world burn.

Plato developed this basic idea in a more profound direction that wouldn’t necessarily make enemies of your entire community. In Plato’s hand (or rather his pen), Socrates’ aggressive skepticism became a philosophy of aporias. 

There’s still no answer to the problem of whether you have knowledge of the good, but at the end of any of Plato’s books, you understand the question much better. You remain perplexed about what’s right, but you're not confused anymore because you understand the concepts around the problem. 

Aporetic thinking had a huge resurgence in philosophy during the late 20th century, particularly with Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. But ancient Greek society developed aporetic thinking in the direction of Stoicism. 

I'm coming to the conclusion that this is probably a
better analogue in popular culture to what kind of
person Socrates was than I was ever taught in class.

In this model, so says Strauss, there is a form of perfect and true justice. But this genuine justice is strictly in the domain of the divine. Humans are corrupt and can’t access true justice.

Humans aren’t completely debased, though. Depending on how you interpret the idea, which for the Stoics was an open debate, humanity could achieve a diluted form of divine justice. The concept of human justice as a dilution of the divine was an acknowledgement of our essential corruption. Yes, it’s something like divine justice, but not. The best we can do.

Or perhaps it was a secondary form of justice, different in character from the divine, but related to it insofar as it was justice at all. The secondary form of justice has a purpose, however: uplift. 

Humanity could pursue justice, and in doing so, repair our corrupted nature. The pursuit of justice wasn’t a compromise, but a route to restore our lost divinity. To be continued. . . . 

Speak Ancestors III: We Believe Because We Discover It, Composing, 03/12/2015

Continued from previous . . . So where exactly are we in understanding this myth of the golden age. Yesterday, one of my commenters I the Scientist talked about an article where a sample of right-wing media pundits were asked about when they considered their society’s golden age to be.

It worked out that each of their golden ages was a rosy memory of their society at about age 10.

Was that poll scientific? I highly doubt it. Was it even an interview-based qualitative study of a representative sample of remarkable test cases? Maybe in overlong-name only.

The joke suggests that there's a little immaturity to
modern conservatism in North America. I wonder who
could possibly ever think such a thing.

But you see the truth in it, even though you admit that the whole phenomenon of nostalgia’s power over conservative politics is way more complicated than this. It’s a metaphor that reads almost as a joke, but it expresses just enough truth to compel you to think about it.

So what does that idea say?

At first glance, it says that today’s radical conservative, at least the one powered by nostalgia for a golden age, is at heart a scared little boy who wishes he could still live in a world without realistic concerns or problems. 

Where all you needed was a hug from mom or dad to resolve any issue or conflict. Life as Growing Pains. But that’s not what all utopian politics are about, even the utopias I might find abhorrent.*

* That’s going to be another aspect of my Utopias manuscript when I examine the ideas and concepts of modern conservatism. Even utopian frameworks I find destructive and terrifying – like hardcore libertarianism, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism – has its governing concept of the perfect society.

That idea, that conservative nostalgia is really for life as a 10-year-old kid, has more to it, something that’s linked to real political revolution. And it’s a point Leo Strauss makes, oddly enough, given his reputation. 

When you’re 10 years old, you don’t really have a strong drive for rebellion, at least not if you were raised in a stable, relatively secure home environment. The authority of your parents is usually enough for you to trust. 

In other words, when something puzzles you about a moral or ethical issue, you go to your parents as the expert authorities. And their answer is authoritative. You have no problem believing them, your immediate ancestors.

When a son is closer to the traditional beliefs of his father
than he would ever have admitted as a youth. Not that
this photo and caption constitute any speculation on the
real identity of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Kylo
Ren or Supreme Leader Snoke. Certainly not saying
something wildly implausible, like that one of them
turns out to be Luke Skywalker. I bet you one of them
turns out to be Luke Skywalker. I'd bet on it being Snoke.

Rebellion kicks in as a teenager when that ancestral authority isn’t enough. You probably won’t even end up straying far from your parents’ beliefs. Most people don’t. But their word isn’t enough to satisfy you. You look for something deeper.

This is what Strauss means when he talks about Socrates, and his role as an agitator in the culture of his Greece. Greek society was destabilized thanks to war. And at the same time, the culture was getting accustomed to regular peaceful interactions with many neighbours thanks to Mediterranean trade. 

They were meeting perfectly nice people who didn’t prescribe to any of the same myths or religions they did. Brotherhood and solidarity was building among people who would never have otherwise done so, as their ancestral traditions were too different.

Strauss writes about cultural collisions as engendering the first seeds of philosophy in a people. If people with different ancestral traditions and first principles about the nature of existence can also be decent people, then the traditions and their principles alone aren’t the necessary paths to truth and goodness.

This is the truth that would make a son kick the shit out of his father. The principles that mainstream culture believes to be true need a higher ground than the tradition of belief in them. Merely asking for that ground displaces and disrespects traditional authorities. 

Yet that role is necessary. We have to discover for ourselves the truths that our traditions (and all the different traditions) express in their peculiar, colloquial ways. We’d sound like total skeptics in the immediate term. 

But when we do discover them, they’ll have an even stronger foundation and a wider application than any other principle that’s come before them.

Speak Ancestors II: Corruption Everywhere, Research Time, 02/12/2015

Continued from last post . . . Edenic thinking shows up everywhere in human culture, I think. At least, I have a very good guess that it does. The thought comes up everywhere, whenever we’re frustrated with our situations, irritated, facing any problem that just won’t go away. “Things never used to be this bad. It used to be better.”

"A long time ago, things were better," you often think.
But Eden was never real.

I don’t refer to thoughts like this as they occur in places like Aleppo, Benghazi, Yemen, a Congolese coltan mine, or other places where there is genuine and horrible suffering. 

If the only relatively recent historical contrast you have to practical slave labour in a dangerous mine, is actual legalized slave labour in a mine while the Belgian army threatens to massacre your whole family if productivity falls, then you have genuine, horrifying, and serious problems. I feel pretty safe saying this.

The Westerners who don’t have to deal with this question also have serious problems. They’re the type of problems that cause slowly creeping anxiety and the crackling terror of total financial collapse and poverty being a constant possibility haunting your soul at every waking and sleeping moment.

Not that I or anyone else I know in this economy have had any experience with anything like that. 

Unemployment, underemployment, precarious employment, household debt, personal debt, uncertain income, the stress of having to hustle multiple jobs just to cover basic expenses. These are common problems in countries that, compared to the abject poverty that still exists in a lot of the world, are egregiously wealthy.

These social problems that cause stalking anxiety are what motivates people to reminisce about a golden age that never was. The good old days. “It was better back then.”

When the traditional values of your culture are associated with its distant past, and the distant past is associated with the good old days when things weren’t as bad as they are now, you tend to associate traditional values with the good. 

Revolutionary politics are fundamentally about how the
future can be better than the past.

Leo Strauss calls it the veneration of the ancestral. The modern world is a corruption of a relative paradise, just as is every modern world. The human lot in existence is to keep falling farther into social corruption and decay. Being new or novel isn’t exciting, it’s a new way to fall apart.

I’ve encountered this idea so many times over my life. Not only from reactionary and conservative politicians and pundits in the news, but in my non-fiction work. 

The Edenic attitude is all over a lot of environmentalist philosophy. It’s inevitable when you think about it, even though it’s a mistake. The entire modern era is defined by technology, and unrestrained technological development is the cause of our global ecological crisis / collapse. 

Writing Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, I often found myself looking to China for examples, simply because their ecological disasters were the most over-the-top, ridiculous, surreal, deadly, and horrifying of anywhere in the world. When I was looking for the most theatrical pollution events in the world, I found them in Beijing and on the Yangtze.

I also continue to find them in Canada, particularly in the biggest pollution runoffs from tar sands development in Alberta. The human health crises alone are becoming staggering, and the imagery of the land being torn to pieces to dredge oil mud from it is utterly shocking.

So the frequent appeal in environmentalist thinking is to reject technology and return to a rural, non-industrial status quo. The teenagers working in that coltan mine would be okay with that. 

Wang Renzheng is a Chinese artist who vacuums the air
of Beijing and solidifies it into bricks. His art is the
creative of smog bricks. It reminds me of another reason
I called the insanity of modern technology theatrical:
the artistic reaction to ecological destruction is some of
the most surreal and insane creativity in human history.

But the primal question for environmental activism is whether the price of erasing industry is too high. I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for modern medical technology, for example, and neither would a lot of people. 

While industry and capitalism has helped a lot of people live more dignified lives, we always have to ask whether it’s worth it. The more productive question is whether we can make the deal better, so we don’t have to give up as much as before in ecological destruction to enjoy the fruits of industry.

That means fighting traditional values on all fronts. Fighting the conservatives of the right wing who refuse to consider moving our industry on from oil. Fighting the conservatives of the left wing whose environmentalism slides into ludditism and misanthropy. 

Fighting any values that say the solution to a modern problem is going backward. Because the impulse to improve humanity is about going forward into the new, not backward into an imagined ancient time.

Speak Ancestors I: A Masquerade Conservatism, Jamming, 01/12/2015

A lot of the greatest minds of human civilization(s) have thought about the fundamental problem of politics as the collision between progressive and conservative values. So how does it break down?

Part of what always bugged me about
Fiddler on the Roof (apart from their not
casting Zero Mostel as Tevye in the film
version) was that Tevye bound himself to
his traditions, even when it broke his
family apart. They were a fundamental
part of his Jewish identity, and his
identity as a person. But he never
thought about why he held his traditions.
That thought doesn't mean you abandon
your traditions, only that you examine
them, their value and meaning.

Tradition is inescapable in any society. Generations accumulate, and over just a few decades of relative social stability, a contingent set of norms, institutions, presumptions, and perspectives feel necessary and obviously true. 

When you defend tradition because it’s tradition and tradition is correct, you should be called a conservative. That’s the idea I get when I read Leo Strauss discussing the political philosophies of deference and critique in the abstract. 

But this idea doesn’t quite fit with how people come to think of themselves as conservatives in real life. Or how people think of themselves as liberal, progressive, or whatever word you think best expresses the push for social change. 

The word ‘conservative’ means a lot of different things depending on what country you’re standing in when you say it. I’m used to the American meaning, referring to literalist Christianity, an uncomfortable haze of racial bias, and strong anti-government feeling.

But that isn’t conservatism, at least not according to what I’m reading at the moment in Natural Right and History. Here’s an example. Literalist Christianity, despite being the faith of many millions of people in the United States, is a fairly new development. 

The conservative take on Christianity would be to read the Bible as a series of complex metaphors, allegories, and ethical quandaries. You know, the proper way to be religious. Instead, American religious leaders and practitioners have innovated a strange new way of reading the Bible that contradicts scientific discoveries and common sense. 

As Strauss analyzes conservative thinking as such, he finds a very Edenic vision of morality and justice. The notion that tradition alone is a guide to true justice depends on the presumption that looking to the past will improve our morality.

That implies that people of the past were more moral than people of the present. If you follow the chain back far enough, then the origin of civilization was a perfect state, or at least as close to perfect as humans can ever achieve. 

Part of what I can't stand about Bill Maher is the stupidity
of his atheism. It's as though he's been surrounded by
Biblical literalists so long that he's incapable of
understanding religion with any clarity of nuanced thought.
I miss the old days when public atheists actually
engaged religious philosophy and ideas. Atheists were
smart back then.

Modern conservative politics features rhetoric that evokes such a golden age of their civilization, and the politicians publicize themselves as working to return society to that golden age. But the true golden age never existed, at least not in the form that most of these politicians describe.

The golden age often evoked in right-wing political discourse – the “again” of Make America Great Again – never existed. The purely Christian society never existed, for example, and neither did a fully technological society without a real government. 

These ideas are innovations. Those who identify themselves as conservatives in contemporary Western politics will deny it, but they’re just as dedicated to changing their society along the framework of a new vision as the left-wingers whose ideas they oppose. 

It’s just that the right-wing progressive agenda depends on myths of the golden age and America’s corruption from a damn near divine origin (in the Constitution), if they want to keep their supporters. 

Because their supporters still believe that whatever the ancestors did was good. They just believe that the ancestors did different things than they really did. To be continued . . . 

The Fastest Possible Revolution, Composing, 30/11/2015

I picked up some Leo Strauss again, after having put the book down during some hectic weeks. But I think his ideas, particularly as they’re expressed in Natural Right and History, are undeniably insightful about the utopian, revolutionary drive in humanity.

Strauss is supposed to be the philosophical inspiration of the neoconservatives! you shout. And you do. Because it’s true, at least as far as popular discourse – the flows of punditry and political analysis throughout television and the internet – is concerned. 

Is this man a Straussian? No, he's Bill Kristol.

If I involve Strauss’ ideas in the Utopias manuscript, and it looks like I will, it’ll be as a demonstration. The idea that the intellectual leaders of the neoconservative movement that took the American military to Iraq are dedicated Straussians is an intellectual conspiracy.

I literally mean a conspiracy. This article traces the first appearances of the modern consensus Strauss-influenced-the-neocons meme to have begun with an article published by Lyndon Larouche. Larouche apparently claims in this essay that several figures in the Reagan Administration and their associates were followers of Strauss’ political philosophy.

Then Larouche makes an absurd claim that Strauss’ political philosophy is profoundly opposed to his Promethean nature as an engine of progress for humanity in the ever-progressing power of our technology to conquer nature. 

Larouche, in his heyday, was an American communist revolutionary who attempted to build his new society on the recruitment model of a cult. Right down to allegedly brainwashing citizens to have a completely different set of moral presumptions, premises for a morality of Marxist utopia.

From this man and organization came this conspiracy that many in popular discourse believe. I took it for granted so much that I started reading the book as research for my Utopias project. Yet if its source really is a fellow-traveller of Jim Jones, the notion must be absurd.

As I read in Strauss this weekend when I was relaxing with Natural Right and History, you find the truth of a phenomenon by examining its origin.

Yes, Lyndon Larouche is still around and doing things.

In material history, the connection between Strauss and Team Wolfowitz is the product of a philosophical Marxist L. Ron Hubbard. But the myth is widely enough believed that examining conservative thinking AS IF it were true can now teach us a lot about what contemporary conservative ideals are philosophically.

We can find the noble concept that sits in horror at how much violence and war has happened around it. No one ever thought of this concept until after the fact. But it’s the unspoken attractor in the phase space of society. It never even existed until after enough events, actions, and thoughts expressed it. A tendency that manifests without governing.

The conspiracy that the neocons are Straussians is so widely believed by now as to make Strauss part of the intellectual atmosphere of the real conservative movement. Some young Republican is probably reading him now, because he’s heard the same conspiracy theory that the liberal press believes. He just likes what he hears.

What would he hear? I think there’d be two principles.

1) Democracy is the best form of human government we’ve come up with, and people shouldn’t have to live in constant fear of their government. 

2) The world will be at peace when all people are free and treat each other as brothers – this is the natural right of all people for justice, arrived by reason.

I don't think Strauss would be amused to hear
how I talk about him, but he's dead. So he
can become a retroactive inspiration
without making a big deal about it.

That second principle makes Strauss sound more like an anarchist than a contemporary conservative. He describes how democracy leads to a peaceful society where everyone helps each other. But becoming such a society requires everyone to follow their powers of reasoning well enough to uncover the truth for themselves.

This is still revolutionary. Even if the universal truth reason discovers is pretty much what you already believed, if you’re really using your reason, then you’ll have turned against your society anyway. You’ll reject your starting moral beliefs because they’ re products of authority, not reason.

That’s a tough transformation, as if the only way to build a democracy is to be their Socrates, only actually effective. Person by person, you inspire and nudge them to be more mindful of freedom, and to care for others. That makes a society full of people who wouldn’t kill or hurt another.

But that’s a really slow process. The Bill Kristol that lives in our collective head, the magazine editor of neocon doctrine, believes that this will be when every government in the world is democratic. And we can just bomb and invade our way to global democracy.

“As fast as you can!” is not the same as, “As fast as is possible.”

Who Can Determine a Whole Culture? Research Time, 29/10/2015

Let’s look at this problem of fate again. Who we are depends on where and when we were born and raised. It’s not controversial to say that a wealthy man from Kolkata will have a different personality (and positionality) than a poor woman from Namibia or a working-class trans man from Toronto.

The problem of fate for our moral thinking goes deeper than personality. Leo Strauss gets so steamed with the social sciences because he sees what its historicism implies for thinking. 

Our place in culture and history determines the limits of our cognition. They make up the horizon of what we can even conceive. Historicism, as he understands it, means that what each of us can think about coherently is beyond our control. 

Is a world without absolute universals really a world
with nothing to believe in? I don't think the contingency
of reality needs to make us nihilists.

Because our culture determines the horizon of our thinking without any input from us, Strauss worries that total cultural relativism about moral and political values will result. It’s a nihilist’s world.

But there’s a limit to Strauss’ influential conception of historicism. It comes out of his own writing – against what Strauss himself believes – when he starts a long discussion of Max Weber.

Weber is one of the Big Three of the foundation of sociology.* Strauss was delivering the lectures that became Natural Right and History in the 1950s. You engage the fundamentals of Weber’s thinking, it means you’re engaging the fundamentals of the whole social science field.

* Say it with me everybody: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber.

So Strauss talks about Weber’s key idea that social actions and changes are all constituted by individual agency alone. A society isn’t an entity with its own agency, but the accumulated acts of everyone in it.

Today, we know what that sounds like. It’s a chaotic system where a lot of individual units behave in ways that look unified, controlled as a whole. But they’re the much more complex causes of an aggregate.

When the whole is a culture, individuals determine what happens at the social level. Yet textbook cultural relativism implies that the society as a whole has all the agency over an individual. 

But this still works with Strauss’ worst notions of historicism, relativism, nihilism. Not some monolith like Society™, but all your ancestors’ and community members’ thoughts and actions make the fixed limit to your own thinking.

I’m not yet sure where Strauss is going with this. I’ve only read a little bit into this chapter so far, so I’m just explaining the idea and where I stand in relation to it. But this is how my ideas on it are shaping up. 

A philosophical inspiration to us all.

The real counterweight to this picture of historicism as nihilism comes from a simple fact. Social change is real. It takes time for the change to become comprehensive, but a culture’s attitudes and ideas change over time. If the horizons of our thinking are fixed by our ancestors and community, then each of us would be copies of the past. Social change would be impossible.

And social change clearly comes from individuals. Just roll with Weber’s idea that only individuals – acting in unplanned, messy aggregate – have agency in society. So individual activity prompts and leads social change. 

Each of us has the power, as individuals, to change how we think and understand the world. We can change those limits of our conception, figure out new possibilities for existence itself. 

Strauss says that philosophy is the search for wisdom, and he considers that wisdom the correct answers to universal metaphysical and moral questions. I say philosophy is the tradition of thinking of new ways to think. Social change in the mind before it proliferates through the world. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Our motivations for agitating for social change might include fidelity to some moral value you consider universal. It might not. Unlike what Strauss believes, you don’t need a universal truth to motivate changing your society in a more just direction.

The quest for justice comes from a realization that anyone can have at anytime. Something is wrong. Something has gone wrong. Something is not working. We must repair it.

A Science of Humanity III: Only the Eternal, Research Time, 27/10/2015

When I was a grad student, I'd meet people who thought
philosophers came up with trippy, strange ideas. That
we were essentially professionalized hippies who
could explore the astral plane in thought. They were
always a little disappointed when I'd tell them how
sober, technical, and reserved most writing in
academic philosophy was.

Continued from last post . . . What is truth? It’s a question that can only be taken seriously when you mock it. “What is truth, man?” he said between puffs on his joint. Ask this question in a serious tone and you don’t sound like a reasonable person. You sound like a pretentious philosophy student.

I say student because, as I worked my way through the academy of university philosophy, you never heard the experienced, long-tenured profs speak this way. Their questions were always about Thinker X’s conception of truth, or comparing different isms about the nature of truth. It was good scholarship, but not innovative philosophy.

The students were no better. I’m counting myself among them, the kids who asked profound questions that they didn’t even know how to think about. After ten years of studying the tradition and writing books and articles that contribute to this tradition, I’ve still only just figured out how to ask the question thoughtfully.

You’ve got to know your way around that question – What is truth? – if you want to understand the most profound way Strauss got his hate on for sociology. Same with the rest of modern conservatism. 

Theirs is a very old-fashioned concept of truth that roots the true in the eternal. If a principle is true, it must be true eternally. Or else it’s meaningless.

The question gets appropriately profound when Leo Strauss asks about the truth of political principles – questions of natural human rights. The first major chapter of his Natural Right and History confronts historicism about political rights. 

His description of historicism: Because different cultures and eras hold different political principles, there’s no true natural right aside from these contingent shared beliefs. No universal standard of human rights. 

“There cannot be natural rights if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable.”

Strauss doesn’t say their names, but it’s clear to someone who knows their ideas that when he’s talking about the endgame of historicism, he’s talking about existentialism.

If Martin Heidegger is one of your
philosophical enemies, then you have
good taste in villains.

Mostly Heidegger, because of the brutal results of having your existence entirely determined by a fate beyond your control. You can’t control where and when you pop into being. So you can’t control what culture you’ll have. 

If you can’t control what culture you’ll have, then you can’t control what rights and principles will be universal truths to you. There were only two possible reactions to realizing this fact of your existence.

1) Embrace your contingent, happenstance existence for all it’s worth and dive in to whatever set of ideas drives your culture in your era.

2) Fight against the happenstance nature of your life, and live in angst trying to find space for genuine, meaningful choice. Individually, maybe through trying to live your life on your own terms. As a group or a society, building networks and friendships that resist mainstream trends. 

Strauss mostly talks about option one. Martin Heidegger was his most profound opponent, philosophically. I’m not sure how much Jean-Paul Sartre, who gets the most credit for option two, figured on his radar.

Embracing your contingent fate means that you entirely give in to whatever beliefs about rights and justice your culture finds intuitive. You don’t believe in a standard of justice that transcends what a given culture finds instinctual at a given time. 

If you believe in a universal standard of justice at all, it’s because you’ve uncritically accepted your culture’s intuitive beliefs. If you’re lucky, as Heidegger believed himself to be, you’re born in a culture whose intuitive philosophical orientations let him conceive of the contingent nature of human fate at all. 

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to conceive of the emptiness of universal concepts of justice. Strauss won’t stand for this. He won’t give up on the philosophical tradition’s quest to discover universal standards of justice. 

It's not to Strauss' credit that he seems to ignore Jean-Paul
Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. Their existentialism
foregrounded human freedom and political action,
whether for his anti-capitalist social justice vision, or
her critical feminist priorities.

Existentialist philosophy is, for Strauss, only the most extreme and clear form of the historicist beliefs that dominated philosophy after Hegel and the social sciences that developed in the second half of the 19th century. The historicist frameworks of social sciences make them a factor that will inevitably obscure the search for universal justice.

But you don’t have to get stuck in the Strauss-Heidegger impasse. Believe in transcendent eternal truths of morality, justice, and politics. Believe in the historical contingency of all human existence, thought, and ideals. With all their problems. 

Or choose another way.

I think about the truths of justice ecologically instead of humanistically. We don’t need a set of rights that applies eternally, because no set of human rights claims will make sense in a world without humans. 

Human cultures have a lot of variant principles, and figuring out which principles of justice we should hold is a matter of figuring out which principles and demands for justice define our time. 

Underneath all that variation are some invariant truths about the human need to be happy, sheltered, joyful, and loved. In all the variety of human culture, we should strive to achieve that one common ground.