Time to Give Up Your Fear, Research Time, 25/05/2018

One final criticism of liberal thinking in Paul Patton’s use of Gilles Deleuze’s weapons on the subject.* It's based on liberalism’s aversion to risky, rapid political change.

* This was already a good book. But it would have been so much better if he’d done that very thing, without ever referring directly to Deleuze.

Liberal thinking is inherently gradualist. There was an old joke in Canadian politics that a New Democrat is a Liberal in a hurry. Well, that’s the Liberal Party at its best, anyway. The next generation really is farce.

We live in a time of unprecedented political developments.
The most powerful social movements emerge from
complex, self-organizing networks of cooperation.

What the Liberal doesn’t realize when he tells that joke is that the joke is on him. What a liberal calls careful caution, it's more sensible in some circumstances to call fearfulness. What a liberal calls a commitment to gradual reform, it’s more sensible in some circumstances to call cowardice. Or worse, a blatant willingness to prefer an unjust status quo to the risks of a radical change.

Risk averseness is its own kind of risk when circumstances require risky behaviour. Here are some political examples that are bound to be controversial. The anger they generate in simply discussing them is enough to frighten a liberal away from mentioning it at all.

An oil pipeline is slated to move through ecologically sensitive territory, where an Indigenous nation also has its territory. The protests from environmentalists and Indigenous people are unprecedented. The situation is manifestly not okay.

What does a liberal do? Well, in the case of what a Liberal does, they put their fingers in their ears and talk seriously about compensating the oil company for their trouble, like they can’t afford it or something. Because The Economy™.

And that follows pretty much what liberalism does as a philosophy. Social change, in this perspective, is always a matter of slow-moving reform, mitigating all risk. That has its problems.

I’m not about to be one of those left-wingers who grumbles about the reformists. When I read Antonio Gramsci, particularly some of his pre-prison essays, there are a lot of slugs thrown at “reformists.” The social democratic parties, the trade unions that are happy with general improvements in work conditions – everyone who falls short of full revolution against the ruling class comes in for scorn.

Gramsci gets a little more chill once he’s had a few years to rot in a cell. You can really reflect on yourself when you’ve been reduced to the barest murmur of a life. But I see some of this talk when I check out the forums and articles of young marxist academics and Communist Party members.*

We shouldn't ignore our democratic instincts which show us that the
current trends are not something you can negotiate with. You can
only achieve social progress through reforms when there's a social
consensus behind their goals. We can't rely on the consensus that
privileges human rights and peace about police and war.

* You don’t see the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada getting into this pettiness. So I respect them that much.

That kind of talk just doesn’t work anymore. The progressive social movements aren’t interested in taking over the state – we’re much more radical, in that way, than the Communist guerrillas of the 20th century. Radical in our peacefulness.

The progressive social movements of the 21st century have largely understood that the structure of the state is the problem. States were designed as police apparatuses. You can’t liberate people by forcing them into obedience to an authority, no matter who’s in charge of that authority. An order is still an order.

Liberation is about having to rely less and less on the state to live a good life. And where we have to rely on states, they should be tools always at our disposal. That’s a deeply radical shift in the entire way we treat our states, our governments, our leaders.

I’ll get into it over the next while, once I catch up to my notes about Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s new book Assembly. But for today, I want to make this last point about the weakness of the liberal state of mind.

It’s that presumption that nothing fundamental needs to change. Reformism that takes all the underlying system of institutions and relationships as basically okay, just in need of a tweak. Some more funding going here, tax things a little differently over here. Enforce those laws, but decriminalize these other things. Fine enough.

But good intentions can still be part of a problem. Sometimes, polishing the status quo isn’t good enough to achieve the world you want.

Noble Enough to Fall Short, Research Time, 23/05/2018

The last chapter of Paul Patton’s book about the political aspects of Gilles Deleuze's ideas contains what I think is an exquisitely concise argument about the weaknesses of liberalism.

I mean, aside from the weaknesses we’ve been talking about for the last few days already. But this late passage in Deleuzian Concepts walks through a summary of a very profound problem that I don’t think the liberal approach to politics can handle.

So it goes like this. Because we’re philosophers, Patton focusses his argument on a beautiful summary of what John Rawls was doing in building his reconstructive liberal concepts. We go to the source of the most intense innovation in the concepts themselves – that’s the philosophers. And if you’re talking the 20th century revival of progressive liberal political philosophy in the North American academy, you’re talking about Rawls.

There's a lot to admire in Rawls philosophy, but I've
always found it kind of frustrating. I think it's because,
even before I could fully articulate it, his liberalism felt
inadequate to me, incomplete. As if I could tell he was
leaving out something important, without quite
understanding what it was.
The desire for your own enslavement, your own
disempowerment, your own depression. Politics as
suicide.

Patton teases out four political purposes in Rawls’ liberalism. They’re very noble purposes. But they leave out one important part of human existence. Here’s how it breaks down.

Purpose of Liberalism 1. Discovering the common principles among disputing political factions.

This is a wonderful thing to accomplish – the original position, followed through faithfully, does help you isolate what components of your identity are shared across all people. It helps identify the common ground that can be a slim anchor for peace in an intractable conflict.

Purpose of Liberalism 2. Harmonizing the goals of individuals and communities.

Another product of that original position – where you have to imagine what a community would look like when you have no idea what your place in it would be. So you have to think about the good of your community when you could end up as the lowest of the low in it.

So the original position thought experiment becomes, in this context, an exercise in sympathy with the good of your community – not just of yourself or your family. Not that you’d sacrifice yourself or your family for your community. But you’d be more amenable to helping yourself and your community at once.

Rawls gave us a reminder that there need never be a zero-sum game in life. We need this reminder badly, especially at times like these.

Purpose of Liberalism 3. Demonstrating the limits of conformity possible in a community.

This is a product of the full scope of liberalism, beyond just his original position thought experiment. One of the main goals of liberalism is to allow individual freedom, and so in that simple sense, conformity of culture of any kind is a severe problem.

In that, Rawls comes closest to inching into thinking becoming. But he only ever conceives of being a divergent character – not actually diverging. Oh, well.

Purpose of Liberalism 4. Exploring the limits of possibility for practice social progress in the near-term – a gradual utopian movement of better society.

Because in conceiving of a society where no one is badly off means conceiving of a better society than we live in.

It all sounds great, but there remains one shortcoming. How do we actually get there, once we imagine it? Is that still philosophy? I think so.

It Makes No Sense to Call Us Liberals, Jamming, 22/05/2018

Carrying on with another short reflection about liberalism. I went to the Andrea Horwath rally up in Brampton today. It seemed like the most exciting thing to happen in Brampton in years, though in this context, we are dealing with a pretty low bar.

As I work more in the different vectors of resisting oligarchy and nationalism in North America, one thing annoys me. It’s just a contingent little quirk of the rhetoric,* but it just plain bugs me.

* And if you want to get a little too poetic about the whole mess, aren’t we all, really?

Why do nationalists keep calling us liberals?

I mean, in a way, I’m happy to be misidentified by the people with large private arsenals of weapons. They might not be the most accurate in tracking us down, so they’ll kill some of their own when they invade the cities to end the liberal slime once and for all.

I hope it's at least recognized that my side of politics recognizes
liberalism for the inadequate model of thinking it is.
I snapped the photo myself after her speech in Brampton's Bombay
Hall yesterday afternoon. Stood on a chair. I think that's a cute
moment – I love photos of photos.

Conservatives and nationalists that don’t have large arsenals of weapons? Them I’m okay with. We can talk, even if I find some of them jerks.

The Dershowitz Problem I talked about yesterday is the perfect example of this. Paul Patton explores more of this idea in one of the most interesting passages of his book on Deleuze and Guattari’s political thinking.

See, liberal philosophy** is fundamentally about identifying and protecting rights against state violation – a boundary of personal sovereignty around yourself that every other personal also shares.

** I’m distinguishing the singular character of the philosophy from a lot of the ways liberal politics have been done over the years. All political projects end up including aspects of every relevant philosophical concept that it interacts with as it develops. But the concepts themselves are pure structures.

Liberalism’s essence as a philosophy is the civil right – the negative right to be free from interference in expressing yourself. That’s why liberalism is such a great philosophy for protecting people from privacy violations or defending them from state intimidation and power.

But it’s awful for protecting you against the corruption of your economic system. It won’t protect you against the oligarch, the robber baron, the pirate hedge fund. They won’t steal from you specifically, but they’ll change the conditions under which you can earn your keep. Yet there’s no liability on liberal principles because the zone of personal sovereignty only regards direct, personal violations.

If you aren’t directly and intentionally seeking to cause some particular harm in your actions, you aren’t responsible in a pure liberalism. Even if you’re looting the public treasury with tax breaks and industrial contract giveaways, defunding to dysfunction a state institution that people rely on isn’t a harm.

Because there are no responsibilities in a pure liberalism to each other beyond leaving each other alone. So you’re free to do what you want, no matter the indirect harms your actions cause. You only have your civil rights.

Civil rights definitely can’t be dispensed with. But in terms of what we need to live well, civil rights are incomplete.

A Principle Without Limits, Jamming, 21/05/2018

So I read this fascinating and very sad article about Alan Dershowitz. He pretty much single-handedly invented the political theory and ideology of civil libertarianism, the activist path of the principles in John Rawls’ liberalism of ideal fairness.

Very short version – because I actually want to keep today’s post short. The article is a pretty detailed argument, based on Dershowitz’s history and approach to his career, that his natural ego is leading him into a substantive mistake. He doesn't want to leave the media limelight yet, and so he’s continuing to advocate for the rights of a prominent individual against government scrutiny.

Trouble is, that individual is Donald Trump. Now Dershowitz’s rhetoric has gotten pretty slippery, probably because the atmosphere of his more frequent conversations on FOX News* will tend to push you into more heated casual declarations than you’d make if you were able to think for a second.

* If you're going to defend Donald Trump, then this is the only American network that’ll have you on quite so regularly.

Consider for a moment what kind of person would think intuitively
that civil liberties are always of absolute importance. It would be
someone who never had to question seriously his access to the
material grounds of all the other liberties he needed.

Read the article as Dershowitz becoming an example of the limits of his own ideas. Ever since the brief flowering of open naziism in the United States last summer, circles on the left have been talking about the paradox of tolerance.

If you're going to allow free speech for all perspectives, that has to include perspectives that all those who live differently than me deserve no rights. So the liberal, taking his views to the absolute, can allow people to destroy liberalism. People can elect a dictator at the ballot box who will never allow them to exercise democracy again. And they’ll want it.

A liberal can’t conceive of someone who would want to be enslaved, or would want to enslave others. They’re unable to conceive of enemies.

The nationalist right can definitely conceive of enemies. I see it every day in the everyday talk of nationalist circles online. Their entire political agenda is based on identifying the enemy and purging it from their society.

So we on the progressive side have to overcome both problems. We can’t think of the nationalist as an enemy on the racializing terms that they do – that would make us nationalist. We also can’t accept the liberal paradox of tolerance – that would leave what social freedoms we have open to attack.

Our answer is that we recognize our enemies in those who would define politics as eradicating enemies. And instead of eradicating them, we neuter them. We block them from building power. Instead of a strong leader, show them a greasy criminal. Mock their dehumanizing rhetoric as the bullying it always was.

Always encourage people to conceive of the power of their own potential, their own ability to reshape the world if they join in the effort even a little. Let society become revolutionary.

What Kind of Politics Is This Anyway? Jamming, 17/05/2018

Yesterday, there was no energy at the end of a long – but very pleasant – day for me to blog. Right now, I have barely any energy left, but I want to throw a short reflection together.

I wrote earlier this week about one of the limitations of Paul Patton’s book Deleuzian Concepts – It’s too securely rooted in the academicians’ sub-discipline of ‘Deleuze Studies,’ so he doesn’t explore the most interesting directions that come from what he finds in Deleuze’s work.

He’s writing mostly for an audience of academics who specialize on writing secondary material on Gilles Deleuze’s books and life.

What the conservative disciplines of philosophy call "Continental" is
just the stuff that they reject for challenging their own ways of
thinking too much. If John Searle couldn't understand what Derrida
was on about, we should just dismiss what any of their contemporaries
had to say. Because John Searle is such an admirable guy.

There’s another, wider audience he’s talking to. Unfortunately, it isn’t a wide enough audience to reach that most interesting path of thinking either. There’s a part as well where Patton talks about political theorists throughout North America.

His argument – which did apply quite broadly – was that Deleuze and Guattari should be read as political philosophers. Their major run of joint works were fundamentally political – from the long sections of Anti-Œdipus that were explicitly an analysis of capitalism and statism as a political-economic processes.

And so on for all the other works they made together. Kafka: A Minor Literature was about a mode of cultural resistance to a hostile and racializing mainstream. I feel like calling it multi-vector creole resistance. A Thousand Plateaus contained several different analyses of different dynamics of stability and chaos rooted in human life – psychological, political, economic, cultural, ethical. And beyond.

All of it deals with issues of progressive politics that are quite mainstream now. But in the academy, they aren’t considered political theorists at all. Patton doesn’t say it, but he means that they’re still called “Continental.”

But all the designation really means is that Deleuze and Guattari are rejected by departments across North America because they don’t speak the typical language of liberal philosophy. They don’t talk about rights, principles, and universality.

They come up with entirely different language to talk about things that are much more important for how societies actually work at all. They talk about the material dynamics among institutions and forces that destabilize – maybe it’s a better description to say “deterritorialized” – human societies. Among other things, but that’s a major focus. That’s inherently political – and yet they aren’t political theorists.

So Patton effectively calls out the mainstream of North American philosophy departments. But he does it without saying so. Because no one will read a call-out. A call-out is – from the perspective of the called-out in our university faculty – ‘terribly rude,’ ‘an unnecessary hostility,’ ‘a crude polemic.’

So you trick them. Explain the true nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas in words they’ll understand. Simple language. Basically, it’s just, “Guys, they’re just not liberals, okay?”

I mean, it doesn’t go so far to say that this is a better philosophy than liberalism. Maybe I’ll write about that part tomorrow. Or on the weekend.

Cracking at the Paradox of Fascism, Composing, 29/03/2018

Sorry it's been a while. I was actually in hospital for a few days since the weekend, but I’m back in reasonable health now. And as of yesterday, I have a new position as an instructor at a new college in Toronto. So the past few days have been really disorienting.

So getting back to this blog today is very much an exercise in grounding myself again. Returning to a regular research and writing routine, as a habitual part of my day, making sure that even on the messiest days, I’ve got a calm space.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that philosophy had a therapeutic purpose – He wasn’t the first one to say so, of course, but he was the first one I happened to come across who did. Therapy wasn’t the only purpose, of course. But it could serve that function if you needed it – a minimum expression.

By Brunhilda

Meditation. Focus the mind. Think. An activity that sometimes is much too difficult.
• • •
Here’s a paradox for you. It’s a political and conceptual paradox. Call it the paradox of totalitarianism. Those who are most afraid of losing their individuality will shed it themselves.

It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. But it’s an old problem in political philosophy – not always phrased explicitly, but quite old. Spinoza was the first to ask it.

Why would a person fight so strongly for their slavery as if it were their freedom?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tackle that problem themselves, thinking of the political context of their own time. It was dominated by the same currents as ours. Globalized liberal capitalism was kicking into gear. Ecological pollution was reaching crisis points. States, corporations, and other institutions were developing far-reaching control into the everyday lives of citizens.

In the 1970s, what did people in the heart of capitalist countries fear? Communism. The creeping embrace of an ideology that fused us into a unified, undifferentiated mass. The state and related institutions had total control over your life, down to the smallest details. Individuality becomes forgotten. Conformity is all that matters.

Not all people, of course. But it was a cultural tendency, which the right-wing politicians of many generations opposed violently and intensely. The North American examples are clearest to me, because this is where I live and this continent is the epicentre of the current movement in this direction.

Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley, Andrew Breitbart. These are just a few prominent people who aggressively advocated against any political or social ideas that would reject or curtail our individual freedom.

Above is a perfectly reasoned argument.

Not about individual cases, of course, like criminals.* I mean in the sense of the civic contract, the way all citizens of a community regard each other – as individuals, free to pursue their own lives as they wish.

* Heavens to Betsy, we must never think of treating criminals with dignity! If we did, they wouldn’t be criminals. I kid, but sometimes I hear of something so sickening that sarcasm is my only way to keep from breaking down.

Here’s Ian Buchanan’s take on how Anti-Œdipus expresses the paradox of totalitarianism today. You become so afraid of an authority stripping you of your individuality that you suspect all political, ideological, or moral difference from your own individualist thinking.

If people have communitarian beliefs – like a notion that making a promise binds you to keep it – stamp it out as a betrayal. It’s taking advantage of your freedom to give yourself over to the enemy.

And in enforcing total discipline to defend yourselves against the enemy that would rob you of your individualities? There’s your answer.

Each Together I: Democracy and Community, Research Time, 17/09/2017

So this has turned into a pretty hectic week. I think there have been a few too many long days, and I haven’t gotten a lot of rest. I’ve been reading, but it’s been tough to sit down and write this week.

I also want to blog a bit more when GF and I are in France later this week. Our Germany trip this winter was fantastic, but we kind of lost track of time. And daylight. This time, we’re just bumming around central Paris for six days, not going back and forth from Amsterdam to Berlin.

I feel like this will be the first contemplative getaway I’ve had since I was in Calgary a couple of years ago. And the first such getaway I’ll have had with GF Gilly.

For the last century or so, we've developed a special kind of social
alienation that keeps us separate from each other. Trapping
ourselves in pods that keep ourselves from other people. We've
developed a distaste for other people. I mean, it's not as if there
aren't a lot of folks in our social circle we'd rather not hang out
with. But we lose a lot from turning away from our communities.
Understanding polis-era Greek culture and values helps us get a
sense of what we can achieve together.

Meantime, I want to get back into some philosophical thinking. My piece that I published at the Independent in St John’s last month was a good template for the kind of philosophical journalism I’ve wanted to try out.

But work on my larger projects is still rolling along. I’ve gotten plenty of ideas down about Arendt’s most philosophical masterwork that I still want to discuss.

More than discussing it, I want to figure them out with you. The Human Condition is a book that’s dense with ideas, and while I know those concepts are important for the political thinking I’m developing for Utopias, it’ll be tough getting everything sorted.

I’ll start with one thing that puzzles me about this book. Arendt refers back, all the time, to the ancient Greeks. When I first read The Human Condition ten years ago, I couldn’t understand why she did this. Also, I thought that she did so in a way that valorized the Greek way of life, that she wanted us, somehow, to return to Greek existence.

Reading the book again now, I understand better what she was doing. For one thing, it’s much too simple to read her account of the polis-era Greek identity and concept of community as wanting our return.

Only a year after thinking this about Arendt, I was defending my interpretation of Nietzsche against a peer review critic who said the same thing about him. No, of course Nietzsche never wanted to return to polis Greek ethics and sense of selfhood. He understood that this was impossible, that you can’t return to something that’s been broken down.

When I was younger, I was never very fair to Hannah Arendt.
Not many people were.

Funny, how I found it so easy to understand that about Friedrich Nietzsche but it took me a while to see it about Arendt. Everybody has to learn, I guess. At least I managed it, a little.

Anyway, there are a lot of different reasons why her work concentrates on the polis-era Greek conceptions of political life. Those reasons are threaded through the whole book, and deeply connected to her critique of contemporary life and the conditions of 20th century capitalist existence.

But that’s a bit of a heavy topic to take up in a 600-ish word blog post that I write as a philosophical exercise and to unwind at the start of a busy week. So I’ll make a few initial reflections and move on.

There’s a lot to love in the political philosophy and culture of polis-era Greek society. When you look at the history of the West,* Greece is where that civilization began. Greece developed the most valuable idea of modern society – democracy.

* In this context, when I’m talking about the West, I mean the civilization that began from the waves of Greek settlement around the Mediterranean and later Roman Empire. So this includes the Latin, Germanic, Slavic, and Arab cultures.

Sounds great! Greece invented democracy. But it wasn’t the modern democracy that foregrounds individual rights. Greek democracy would never have had space for anything like Robert Nozick’s radio show argument – that our necessary liberties include the freedom to renege on our promises and obligations.

A lot of our popular conceptions of polis-era Greek culture are filled
with oversimplifications and misconceptions. Hell, until recently, we
didn't even realize that they'd painted their statues.

The first democracy was a thoroughgoing communitarian set of values. Today, a lot of us tend to associate these values with authoritarian societies. As in, there’s a dominant culture that we all have to defer to. That’s how a lot of socially conservative thinkers portray their values – communitarian means conformity.

But that wasn’t true for the polis Greeks. They were communitarians, but the values of the community were subject to change. That was literally the activity of the polis squares. People went there to face off and debate the moral values of their community, and the leadership decisions they should make when dealing with neighbouring nations.

It was an atmosphere of friendly rivalry. Individual ideas could square off and argue over a ton of different visions for how the community should live. Leadership proceeded by consensus, and consensus was achieved by convincing all the other community leaders of your path.

Most of the time, it was a matter of negotiation. Some ideas fall by the wayside and some are adopted. Some put away for a while to re-emerge later. Some outright rejected.

That old society where our first values of democracy began was a curious and fruitful combination of communitarian solidarity and individual freedom to contribute to the decision-making process of your whole community.

That’s a vision I think 21st century social democracy should work to restore in our public morality and politics.

But Greek civilization isn’t something we should resurrect. Nor should we want to.

Is Freedom Really Free? III: Fairness Peace and Fear, Research Time, 14/07/2017

When I was looking back through Antonio Negri’s Empire to prepare yesterday’s post, I found a beautiful line.

“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts. To us it seems completely obvious that those who are exploited will resist and – given the necessary conditions – rebel.”

It’s a very deep truth about humanity. We rebel in the face of exploitation – we fight for our exit.

The very real division between libertarian-leaning and anarchist-leaning folks these days is over what constitutes exploitation. If you take Negri’s lead, exploitation is a matter of an entire economic system – the global network of relations that constrain the choices of millions of people into a series of shit deals.

One (among so, so many) humiliating result of
signing a contract with Donald Trump. I still can't
believe he's actually the President of the United
States. For fuck's sake.

The libertarian has a much narrower conception of where exploitation could arise. Look at Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, any of the trolling social media activists, and a lot of the popular communications coming out of the major liberal think tanks today.*

* Before you have any conniptions, yes, I do consider libertarianism the logical extension of liberal values about politics and economics. It’s the trajectory of any individualist logic. It needs leavening with values of community and universal brotherhood to avoid its own perversity.

Friedman, early in his great popular work of philosophy Capitalism and Freedom, describes the utopian liberal ideal. He describes a society where there’s barely a need for a government because the community can govern itself through free, voluntary associations and agreements.

That does sound genuinely wonderful. In a society where no one wanted to hurt each other and no one ever got hurt, we wouldn’t need government. The idea needs a whole hell of a lot of development. But that’s what the book is for. I'm writing a blog post well before I'm ready to get this thing written.

Instead, I want to focus tonight on a more critical question about Friedman and the libertarian perspective in general. Why does Friedman think it’s good to get rid of government? What’s the reason for his distrust?

Conveniently, it’s in his book. Yes, the most peaceful way to construct a society is through voluntary associations and agreements between all the individuals in that community. But he’s extremely pessimistic about whether an entire community of people can reach genuine agreement in real time.

No constitution is ever accepted by literally everyone. Not even the current (and second) United States constitution. The contemporary right wing in America may worship their dogmatic icon of this document with all the mystic rage of a prophet. There was plenty of opposition. Just read The Federalist Papers and you’ll see that.

But Friedman's focus on government as the only significant force
of constraint on people doesn't hold up to our individual
experiences. In everyday hypocrisy, everyday cruelty, we still
have to fight for our rights. Even if it's just the right to party.

Humans are volatile, changeable, and very different from each other in a lot of different ways – interests, culture, histories, positions, personalities. In all that diversity, agreement in real time at one moment is impossible.

So a society of humans can only be peaceful in a context where our variety is tolerated – everyone must be able to believe, do, and be whatever they want without any force trying to constrain them. Any force or movement that tries to make anyone agree to anything but tolerating disagreement is oppressive.

He counts among those oppressive forces the government. But Friedman also counts the bonds of community, family, and any kind of social solidarity for any purpose or ideal than leaving each other alone.

The existence of the state, says Friedman, is built on a false premise. That falsehood is the presumption that an institutional decree alone is all you need to produce harmony and peace in society. In reality, negotiation never finishes and will never finish.

In a sense, that’s true. That sense is at the heart of libertarianism’s and liberalism’s appeal to anyone who does value freedom. No matter how limited it might be.

Is Freedom Really Free? I: Walking Away, Research Time, 11/07/2017

I’m not going to continue with that last thread of ideas I was writing about Milton Friedman’s writing last week. Two reasons. One, after taking a few days off from writing about it, I realized it wasn’t the best way to start a longer train of thought. So I’m starting from a more fundamental and stimulating angle today.

The second reason? I hated that title I gave it.

Friedman’s insightful introductory remarks about the nature of contracts are a great way to begin. That conception of the freely entered contract between two equals is at the heart of so much new liberal and libertarian rhetoric today.

I’d hear it from my wacky libertarian trolls, my first long-running window into the world of the far-right internet. Reading this passage of Friedman, I remembered what C & G told me, because it seemed to come directly from the big man’s pages.

What people love about America is their freedom!

The fundamental bond of any economic relationship is the contract between two people doing business. It could be between a business owner and a worker, between two or more business owners, between a business and a client or customer. Whatever. All economic activity flows from these relationships.

Those relationships of contract formation are the core bonds of business itself. They come to be, says Friedman, as two private individuals reaching an agreement. Such an agreement is morally right if the contracting individuals are free.

Now, what do we mean by freedom? That’s not just a word you can appeal to without a fair idea of the concept itself.

Friedman uses freedom in the context of the conditions of contract formation. When two individuals are negotiating a contract, at any moment up to the signature that locks them both into their promises, they can walk away.

Freedom is the right to exit. That’s universalized over a lot of moral judgments new liberals and libertarians make about economic and business relationships.

Do you dislike your job? Do you feel that your boss mistreats you? Are you not paid what you think you should be? Do you find the conditions now more dangerous than when you agreed to work there? Then walk away from it.

The right to walk away – for the modern dogmatic libertarian, many new liberals, and quite a few traditional liberals – renders any of the protections that workers’ movements have gained people moot.

More details on the silliness of a frictionless, perfectly logical vision
of the world can be found at the link, on paragraph 107.

You want a minimum standard wage? Health insurance? Safety protections? Reasonable hours? Vacation time? Maternity or paternity leave? Then don’t force your current employer to give them to you if he doesn’t want to provide them. Leave, and try to negotiate it somewhere else. The right of exit trumps all else.

It seems perfectly reasonable when you’re only thinking about it in the abstract, through pure reason alone. But once the messy contingencies of the real world leak into this clean, frictionless vision, its logic begins to break down. This way of thinking faces problems that it actually can’t grapple with, so can only wave them away.

Think about some situations where you can’t really walk away from a job. Most of them amount to not being able to walk straight into an alternative job and risking destitution otherwise.

Maybe there’s a recession and there are far more job-seekers than positions. Maybe you’re in a low-paying sector and you don’t have the savings to support yourself while you look for a better opportunity. Maybe you can’t afford retraining and there are no free or loan-supported avenues for it.

In all those situations and any others along similar lines, the right of exit still exists, but it’s a terrible idea. The material conditions of a contract's writing smashes the balance between signatories for it to be a truly free agreement. If a person has the power to let another starve, then the one with power holds the other in his fist.

Even if you’re starving to death, my old libertarian friends used to tell me, you still have your freedom. But must you accept death as the price of freedom?

How to Be a Progressive Activist Without Having a Daily Nervous Breakdown, Jamming, 11/03/2017

That’s actually a pretty tough achievement these days. Right now, it’s easier to push for more progressive politics as a Canadian than, really, pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Charlie Angus, the MP for the eastern half of Northern Ontario, is
running. He's long been a strong advocate of a new national 
consensus and institution to restore – at long last – justice for
indigenous people in Canada.

For example, our social democratic party, the NDP, is having its first leadership debate this Sunday for our contest later this year. I’m the Vice-President of my electoral district’s riding association, so I’m helping promote the event on social media, and through personal posts like this.

But I’m in a very privileged position here in Canada. At least relatively speaking. This seems to be one of the few Western countries where the white nationalist alt-right isn’t taking hold of our politics.

Of course, I haven’t adopted some born-again complacency in the three weeks since I posted about my generation’s confrontation with reborn Nazism. Nothing about that has changed.

White nationalism is still a major political problem facing Canada – people wouldn’t be holding demonstrations against the existence of Muslim people in front of our largest city’s house of government if it wasn’t.

Our major conservative party has had its youth wing pretty much entirely compromised by white nationalists. One leading Conservative leadership candidate is openly courting them, declaring that people who don’t share white Christian values shouldn’t be welcome in Canada. Even the more traditional conservatives leading the race throw bones to the alt-right or channel Trumpism in their rhetoric.

Manitoba MP Niki Ashton has made one of her core initiatives the fight
for a more fair economy, often working with groups of young white
collar workers around Canada who are advocating for better working
conditions and more security in their often precarious jobs and careers.

I’m confident that Canadians and the Canadian government can resist and prevent a takeover by white nationalist leaders and activists. They’ll fight hard, and we’ll have to work considerably harder to fight them. But we have better material defences against them.

For one thing, significant portions of Canada already have majority-minority populations, or close enough to it that far fewer people in our cities have stereotypical or racist misconceptions of Asian and Latin American immigrant groups.

Too many white people in Canada’s cities already know Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to be turned against them with racist fearmongering. These people are our friends.

As well, our political parties have never had to marginalize social democratic multiculturalism to succeed. Here’s what I mean.

Right now in the USA, the Democratic Party and its activists are in a serious rebuilding mode. They’re leaders in the anti-Trump resistance, but the party itself is still figuring out how best to overcome Republicans electorally.

Guy Caron is the MP for Rimouski, so far the only leadership
contender representing the strong Quebecois base of the New Democrats.
He made universal basic income as a central point of his policy platform,
restoring to the front of Canadian politics an important idea that's been
blown away to the wind by the hurricane of Trumpist nationalism.

They have a tough road ahead, especially because they seem to be shooting themselves with infighting – typical of the American left over the years. You could see it in the way progressive activists continued to argue over Tom Perez or Keith Ellison taking over the DNC chair.

The Sanders wing saw Perez as continuing Clinton-style neoliberalism that ignored the real economic suffering of millions. The Clinton wing saw Ellison as continuing the blind populism that made what should have been Democratic votes peeling off for Trump in the name of some amorphous ‘change.’

That division among the American left is a hangover from the three biggest mistakes Sanders and his campaign made.

1) Vilifying Clinton so much that he provided Republicans almost as much ammunition as FOX and no take-backs could ever sound sincere. 2) Pushing a protectionist economic populism whose core principles hewed too close to Trump’s. 3) Completely failing to even bother considering black outreach seriously.

Meanwhile, many conservative Americans think Perez is a radical left-wing loon. And the spectre of Perez’s (or Ellison’s) advancement being purely a matter of identity politics continues to haunt American discourse.

Peter Julian is probably the most senior parliamentarian among the
leadership contenders, and a strong voice for social democratic policy
from the west of the country, thanks to his strong constituency in
Vancouver.

The truth is that American politics have been radicalized already along white anglophone ethnic lines. That was the substance of “Make America Great Again,” taking the country back from minorities, and painting the advancement of non-whites as theft from the rightful lot of white Americans.

The Democratic Party in the United States today has, as its core constituency, women of colour. It’s the party of multiculturalism and the fight against inequality along all vectors. Arguing over which inequality to emphasize – whether to, as Sanders did, divorce racializing inequities from inequities emerging from economic processes – ignores the real integration of all these inequities and oppressions.

Canada, in contrast to the United States, has had a mainstream social democratic party for decades. So these ideas have never truly had to fight against institutional opposition to the same intensity as in America, when the Democrats spent decades embracing Reaganism with hugs.

There again is the ultimately flaw with Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic standard-bearer – the formative decades of her modern political identity was in that era of conservative liberalism.

In Canada, we never had to make that compromise. Those who refused it could always find an institutional home in the New Democratic Party. The core reason why we lost the last federal election to Trudeau was because he doubled down on that language while our strategists got scared and pursued a triangulation campaign straight out of 1994.

That institutional home of the NDP unites all the intersectional politics of liberation – economics, gender, racialization, class – in one coalition. One box on a ballot.

The best defence against Canadian white nationalism is strengthening the voice and growing the platforms of the New Democratic Party. Our next leader has to stand for that total liberation – no one is free if a single person still wears their chains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Impotent Liberal VI: Friends and Enemies, Research Time, 04/01/2017

When the influential political figures of your time are sociopathic
provocateurs of political and racist extremism for fun and profit,
a dedication to tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints won't be
quite adequate to deal with this mess.

Continued from last post . . . Like I said when I started this series more than a week ago, liberal democracy has a dangerous vulnerability.

The philosophy’s dedication to total freedom of thought, speech, and expression for all creates a space of tolerance for those who are dedicated to erasing freedom of thought, speech, and expression.

That old question of toleration of the intolerant plagues modern liberalism. I remember it being an issue going back as far as John Stuart Mill. Though I want to revisit his argument itself this year, I remember it basically as being the conviction that self-contradictory stances like arguing for intolerance on an omni-tolerant platform would fail to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas.

About that, John . . .

The free market of ideas was one of the original guiding ideas behind, for example, the founders of Twitter making their platform completely unrestrained. Free speech was sacrosanct, and must be protected at all costs.

The result? Twitter has become a training ground for white nationalists. And the company culture remains completely unwilling, unable, and incompetent at getting rid of them.

The culture of free speech without the restraint of moral respect has made the simple act of telling an obnoxious prick to shut up and go away into a form of censorship and oppression.

Lindy West wrote a deserved lambast of Twitter for its refusal and
inability to curb the Nazis among its user base. But if your approach
to politics is fundamentally about conflict avoidance, someone who
advocates tolerance loudly will be lumped into the same category
as the Nazis – someone who stokes conflict.

The principle of totally free speech rests on a premise that everyone is redeemable by reason and discourse. Reality has convinced me that this premise is not true. We may be able to influence a society as a whole in a progressive, freer direction. But there are many (not a lot, but enough) individuals who are utterly broken beyond repair.

They are racist, sexist conspiracy theorists who believe that the expression of another’s rights and freedoms actually oppress them. For example, men who believe that it is an act of anti-democratic censorship to prevent him from screaming rape threats and ethnic slurs at his family members.

So we have to take a key lesson from Laclau and Mouffe to heart – antagonism is central to politics. Opposition and conflict – rooted in the concepts that define fundamentally our very identities – are the processes that bind our societies together.

Because our societies are constituted through struggles. Human society develops by diversifying – left to our own devices, we create new kinds of identity. We differentiate ourselves.

Sometimes, those struggles are constructive. They build relationships between communities in a society that help inform each other and their wider neighbours about their mutual humanity.

But all these struggles come with conflict. Conflict between systemically or historically disadvantaged groups and a mainstream dominant class – black civil rights activists and whites who don’t even notice that anything is wrong.

"We have got onto slippery ice where there is
no friction and so in a certain sense the
conditions are ideal, but also, just because
of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction."
Ludwig Wittgenstein as political philosopher?
Terribly out of context, but maybe needed.

Conflict between different demographics who each have seemingly intractable problems – Christian fundamentalists and reproductive choice activists.

Conflict between groups disadvantaged in different ways as their various members succeed and fail to understand each other – the countless, messy, tense alliances between black, Muslim, gay, women, and trans activists.

Liberalism has an admirable utopian vision because it’s of a world without conflict. Where every fight is settled with calm, friendly, rational reasoning. It’s a beautiful ideal but profoundly realistic.

There’s an intense fear of conflict underlying this vision – the notion that any open antagonism in society will tear our communities apart. It’s not that this can never happen. But conflicts that rip societies to bloody, radioactive messes are rare and especially intense.

Most of the time, we all exasperatedly yell at each other about our differences in how we should live. Most of the time, that’s how we form our different identities. It’s how we each figure out and become who we are. Conflict isn’t just a means of breakdown and collapse – it’s the primal productive force of human thought, society, and morality.

A philosophy that can’t grapple with the reality of conflict will – no matter how many real political parties it inspires – always remain in some fundamental way in an imagined ideal. When the rubber hits the road, those ideals alone can’t go anywhere.

A utopia that can’t honestly and authentically understand the power and necessity of conflict will be as useful as frictionless shoes on ice.

The Impotent Liberal V: A Society of Becoming, Composing, 03/01/2017

Continued from previous post . . . Liberalism’s public image has been twisted away from its best ideal. The politicians and intellectuals – journalists, activists, think tank researchers – believe today in a different liberalism than the philosophy that made democracy possible for a society of millions.

Liberalism was the first modern utopia without content.

I haven’t really gone into a lot of detail about what exactly that means. So here’s my first real pass.

Speaker of the USA's House of Representatives Paul Ryan is probably
the most powerful advocate today of libertarian ideas about how we
should structure society. He makes a better photo for it than Hayek
and Mises, because at least he's an attractive wealthy man, and not
a withered old dead man like them.

Contrast what a liberal in the era of Mt Pelerin would say is the core of the philosophy. Liberal thinking understands freedom as freedom from coercion, that a free society is where everyone is left alone to do whatever they wish short of coercing or harming others.

What does this mean when it’s turned into policy? Well, the principle can support a lot of different policy directions.

In our timeline,* that means striving for zero to few taxes, and a world where most if not all provisions of life – commerce for goods, services, income, and labour – organize themselves on market principles. Fair prices in a dynamic economy, governed only by its individuals, not a government planning power.

* The darkest timeline? Pretty dark, but I shouldn’t be presumptuous. At the least, it would be rude of me.

In real action, the growing concentration of wealth and power. When riches already give you a lot more material freedom than most people, you end up accumulating a lot more power to avoid coercion and push others around.

Being the strongest hand in any negotiation doesn’t make the other person less free, in this view, since bargaining is always man-to-man, not man-to-state.

Yet one of the core philosophers of libertarianism can see the utopianism that’s still in liberal thinking. Robert Nozick wrote that the utopia of liberal philosophy was a society where everyone could live according to the principles and values they believed in, as long as those moralities never tried to snuff out another’s existence.

Believing you're in the darkest timeline is
presumptuous, but useful. It's easy to shrug
off the injustices around you if you think to
yourself, "Well, it could always get worse."

He described it as a free market of societies – these societies could have had only a single person, but they were still societies. A market of moralities – values on which you could shape a society. That was the “Utopia” third of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Adopting or developing a morality often implies that you want to force that morality on others. We typically – in both popular thinking and academic philosophy – understand a moral principle to have universal scope. There’s no statute of limitations or jurisdiction on a moral ought.

But Nozick remembered that at the core of liberalism is that notion of moral freedom. Liberalism isn’t simply about the freedom to do whatever you want. That’s the simplified understanding of it that you find on FOX News, in a more refined form at the Mises or Fraser Institutes.

The moral freedom of liberalism is the real power of the individual in society to develop her values as a person, and test them out in the world. To experiment with values and see if they will really build a better society – one more prosperous, joyful, and caring – than our own situation.

That’s what it means for a utopia to have no content. Its content (so-called) is the space for creativity, development, and experimentation in values.

Yet such a society has a terrible vulnerability – its experimental perspective itself. It can all too easily imply that such a contentless utopia should be open to all comers. That there is literally no value too perverse or twisted or strange to be turned away from the testing grounds of moral evolution.

What does a liberal society do with those whose freely developed values lead them to reject the rights of others to freely develop their values?

If you ask Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, what you have to do is make an enemy of such people. They’ve already made an enemy of you . . . To be continued

And It Goes On Until It Doesn't, Composing, 31/12/2016

So that was another year of me blogging, writing, researching, publishing a little. Helping put together a film festival, building a new career. There are going to be some cool events and projects happening with my work in 2017, and some smaller plans are coming together.

At the end of this May, I’m taking part in a Common Ground Conference for the first time in five years. I'm presenting part of a long-running project I have gestating with my occasional collaborator Steve Fuller – reviews and reactions to the latest book by Ted Kaczynski.

Yeah, that Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber. Probably the only genuinely murderous ecoterrorist who’s ever lived. He’s put out a guidebook on how to build a Leninist vanguard organization for an anti-technology revolution.

Kaczynski’s book is a vibrant hybrid of sober analysis and ruthless extremism that, when you think about its content and the mind-set that could have produced it, is terrifying. Just what a prophet for a Leninist vanguard should be, really.

Rembrandt van Rijn's The Philosopher Contemplates. My apartment
is a bit more spacious than this guy's, though.

Research is continuing for Utopias, because that is a thing. And I’m looking into possible publishers beyond the strictly academic sector. As happy as I was to have released a book with Palgrave, it still disappoints me that Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity isn’t more widely read.

I didn’t write that book just to put a shiny bullet point on a CV, even when I was making my career in the academic sector. I wrote it so that people would read it, and I’d contribute a little to the enlightenment of humanity. The kind of thing we need a little of at the moment.

But I think my research for Utopias will revisit the classics a little. I want to go back to some books by Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and John Locke. Having researched the criticisms of modern reactionary liberalism, I want to return to the roots of liberal thinking. Searching for what the reactionaries see, as well as the value of the tradition to real freedom.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe make a solid observation about freedom. Freedom is about optimizing your abilities and becoming all that you can be. It isn’t just a matter of not being coerced by government or other members of your community. That idea exists in liberalism – it’s how John Stuart Mill twisted John Locke.

Before I get into the twistier ideas about how humanity engages with its own becoming in time, I’ll spend a little more of 2017 delving into this problem – What’s the virtue of a liberalism that’s become so corrupted by a justification of oligarchy and immature joy in wealth and privilege?

I also want to get You Were My Friend the film finally made, and I’m pretty sure I have a handle on getting a crew together. But I’m probably going to end up directing it myself. Hiring a skilled cinematographer, working with a co-producer who’s more familiar with the details of the industry than me, and directing it my damn self.

We’ll see how it all goes. Happy new year, everyone.