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.

The Universal Solvent of Money, Research Time, 18/12/2017

The irony is coming on thick today. I want to write a little about Gilles Deleuze’s comments on capitalism in What Is Philosophy?. Capitalism – the universal solvent of total freedom.

I move in pretty left-wing political circles, so that sounds pretty damn funny to me. Probably to a lot of my semi-regular readers.

The structures that conditioned every aspect of your lives are blown
apart – you now have total freedom of movement. Not even the
ground can restrict you. Of course, that means you can do nothing
but aimlessly and endlessly fall.

It's one of the ironic difficulties in understanding Deleuze's work and concepts. He lived and worked in a very left-wing context. His writing partner Félix Guattari was himself a marxist militant, who had materially supported anti-French guerrilla armies in Algeria. Their first book together, Anti-Œdipus was a philosophy for the anarchist revolutions of May 1968 Paris.

As well, Deleuze helped Italian militants escape prison to France and found them places to live in the city. This while they were wanted by a militant right-wing Italian government who reacted to the murder of Prime Minister Moro.

Deleuze was a profound critic of capitalism. So profound that he could, at the same time, point out its destructive flaws and celebrate it as a social and economic force of liberation.

Say it like that, and it looks like he contradicts himself. But actually look at what he says, and you realize how profound this idea is.

Look at history this way. Big urban centres, states, and military organizations develop. They expand their regional power as their population, wealth, trade networks, and military force grow. But eventually some sudden shift – military invasion, ecological disaster like several years of drought – throws off their productivity.

Now get to Europe, as the old monarchist states are falling. Modern industrial capitalism is kicking into gear. The new class of wealthy business leaders are growing more powerful than the land-owning gentry that consolidated around the kings, princes, armies, and administrations at the heart of the state.

Totally losing your grounding is losing your shape itself.

All those oppressive powers were being destabilized. That’s what capitalism does – the profit motive, acting on the scales of entire societies and planets, destabilizes existing structures and institutions of a whole region.

That was one key insight that sets Deleuze – and those who understand his lessons for contemporary politics – apart from the more typical anti-capitalist activists. Capitalism produces a powerful freedom – it really is a liberating force.

With old institutions and power structures destabilized and falling apart, it opens up a space for people to reorganize their societies. New institutions can be built that are more egalitarian and open.

The problem sets in when capitalism destabilizes those structures too. Not in the same way as the old despotic state models were overthrown, but differently. You can very easily see that capitalist profit motive activities are destabilizing the liberal democratic institutions that developed from the ashes of despotic institutions.

We now have a class of business leaders so wealthy that they’re able to remove billions of dollars in raw holdings – bank account assets – from their countries to rest in tax haven accounts. That’s billions of dollars that aren’t being invested in new businesses or institutions that provide people services and career opportunities.

There's another form of capitalism that Deleuze and Guattari describe in Anti-Œdipus, which is smacking our civilization – hedge fund piracy. A company with billions of dollars in assets and liquid holding accounts invests in another company, which has prospered by making and selling real things to people.

When we think about the destructive effects of capitalism, we think
of imagery of greed and consumption. But that doesn't really get to
the heart of what capitalism specifically is, how capitalism as an
economic and social system differs from others. All living systems
involve consumption and production – to understand capitalism,
you have to understand what its singular kind of production and
consumption involves.

Hedge funds regularly buy these productive companies and strip them for parts or find other ways to bleed them dry. Here are some examples. Dupont Chemicals was bought by Trian Fund Management. Then its research labs were sold to peak share prices and Dupont was merged with Dow Chemical to slam more billions from it.

Hedge fund guru Eddie Lampert bought Sears, merged it with K-Mart to create billions from redundancies, then things got diabolical. Sears owned almost all the real estate where its stores sat – paid off and owned outright. But Lampert sold that property to a real estate firm his hedge fund also owned, which began charging Sears enormous rent.

Then Lampert loaned Sears billions of dollars to pay its rent to the firm he owned himself. So Sears now had two massive debts – bleeding money to its owner twice over. No matter how much money it made, the retailer couldn’t manage all that debt.

That is capitalism – profit-seeking that sets money and wealth free from its current structures. It’s the universal destabilizer – great for overthrowing an oppressive system like feudalism or monarchism. Also great at overthrowing even the stuff you want to keep, like manufacturing companies, steady jobs, and democracy.

Each of Us Is Nothing If We’re Alone, Research Time, 26/09/2017

Now and then, I’ve wandered around Reddit having conversations about philosophical ideas. I had interesting conversations, but few of them were all that pretty. One that stuck with me – which I realized informs so much of radical far-right youth culture today – was about morality.

Someone told me in all seriousness that all forms of moral obligation were oppression. Because any means by which another person seeks to control my actions oppresses my individual liberty.

That’s really messed up. And I thought it was just the ravings of a messed up Reddit freak. But reading Robert Nozick’s radio show argument, I realized that this idea had real pedigree.

You can make an idol of Les Stroud the Survivor Man, but remember
this very simple fact. We'd never know about his incredible skills at
disappearing from civilization and living in the wilderness if he
didn't bring an Outdoor Life Network camera crew with him and
broadcast all his adventures on cable television to a nationwide
and global audience.

Now, Nozick was ostensibly writing about the free rider argument. He was arguing that it was morally acceptable to be a free rider on a system designed for the common good because a fundamental element of individual liberty is the freedom not to do something despite others pressuring you.

But look at what that argument actually says. The free rider problem is typically posed, literally, as taking a free ride – its typical example is hopping on a public bus without paying for it.

Nozick pumps a different example for the free rider problem and ends up in much more horrifying territory. Instead of a bus system, he describes a community entertainment program that you’ve already promised to contribute to. And he says you still have the right to back out, no questions asked.

He meant to talk about the free rider problem, but he’s argued that each of us has the right to break promises.

Having the right to break promises also means that you have the right to step away from your whole society. Because if you capitalize on your right to break all your promises, then you shout to the world that no one need ever trust you again. If you’re enthusiastic about doubling down on your freedom to break promises, no one ever will trust you again.

Your liberty is the freedom to turn your back. Let's admit that we all have this freedom. Now let’s also examine the consequences.

True isolation destroys your humanity. As an inherently social species,
we have to compromise our desires if we want to complete
ourselves as people.

Even though Hannah Arendt wrote The Human Condition 20 years before Nozick published Anarchy State and Utopia, she made one important point about the terror that results from Nozick’s idea. And I mean it when I say terror.

Turning your back on society literally means becoming a totally private person, a hermit. In the cartoon version of libertarianism, this is how the most extreme folks live. Move out to a cabin in the middle of the woods, disconnect from everything,* grow a vegetable garden, and hunt deer with your own increasingly massive weapons arsenal.

* Unless you keep the internet to stay on Reddit and 4Chan, catch up on Breitbart, follow your favourite youtubers, and watch @realDonaldTrump.

I’m being extremely sarcastic, but I’m also making a larger point about what disconnecting from society really means. You really do kind of have to become a cartoon radical libertarian to make a truly clean break – to live without the oppression of being bound by promises.

Being in Paris this week, where Arendt herself spent a good chunk of her philosophically fertile years, reminds me of the influence of old ideas, ancient concepts, on our contemporary thinking. She writes about the Polis Greek meaning of the word ‘private,’ to describe the private realm – the Greeks thought of it literally as the realm of privation.

Appearance is an essential aspect of reality, and to flee from
appearance is to fly into a shadow existence, to become a shade
instead of a person.

Someone whose entire life is relegated to the private realm is deprived. He’s a pathetic figure.** The libertarian desire for freedom – as the radio show problem and moral obligation as oppression expresses – creates a deprived human personality.

** And I feel safe saying that it’s often a he.

When someone defines their life according to such a desire, they fly away from society and human connection. All attempts at social relationships are rejected. The goal becomes isolation – isolation as the only space that can be truly free.

Arendt writes, “The private man does not appear, and therefore is as though he did not exist.” If you don’t enter society, then you don’t really exist as a person. At least, you aren’t a complete person. Your existence as a human is damaged, withered. You’ve purposely broken parts of yourself.

Those broken parts of the totally free person (on this libertarian model) are the means by which we compromise our will. I can’t just demand food for free from a restaurant, break all my promises to my friends, betray my wife, and abandon my children. All these are constraints on our freedom, when freedom is conceived as total escape from obligation.

But to cut yourself away from all those obligations makes you literally inhuman.

Hey! Cultural Marxism IV: Strange Loops, Research Time, 29/08/2017

Looking at the extremism of modern right-wing politics in the United States should demonstrate something that I think a lot of folks in my generation don’t quite get. Rabidly intense anti-communism never went away – its popularity was just waning for a while.

The years from the Great Depression to the end of the McCarthy era were the formative years of anti-communist extremism in the United States. I have a philosophical hypothesis that the sustained hysteria of Breitbart anti-communists was rooted in a very peculiar style of communication.

If I can be appropriately transparent for the average media literacy of
the 1930s: It's almost as if the ordinary social conservatives of
America who lost their minds in moral panics over drugs, sex, comics,
violence in movies, violence in video games, and all the rest had
the reefer madness. The rest of us who could smoke a little on Friday
nights out in our early 20s usually inoculated ourselves against this
kind of paranoia pretty well.

Remember Reefer Madness? That was just the most famous of a whole wave of moral panic movies. They had titles like Assassin of Youth, Sex Madness, and The Cocaine Fiends. They all had that same deranged, cartoonish depiction of how some critical impropriety will destroy your life.

Yet people believed them! An entire generation of Americans grew up in a culture that hadn’t developed the media literacy to understand how ridiculous these hysteria films really are. The same hysteria was adapted to the anti-communist messaging of the early Cold War.

That hysterically paranoid conservatism was the mainstream right wing of political thinking, which saw even the most congenial trade union activist as a devious Stalinist sleeper cell. The least hint of collectivist politics, especially in the name of helping poor people, was a sign that the billy clubs were needed.

Friedrich Hayek and his network of think tanks kept its ideas alive during the social revolutions of the 1950s through 1970s. The John Birch Society kept the flames of deranged hysteria burning.

Those social revolutions were liberation movements – feminism, environmentalism, Indigenous awakening, black liberation, LGBTQ openness. The moralities of those liberation movements were very communitarian – informed by the moral importance of supporting each other.

These communitarian values are incompatible with one of the fundamental freedoms of classical liberal thinking – the freedom to tell everyone around you to fuck off. Call it the freedom of solitude, the sanctity of private property. That’s what it is.

The reason Reefer Madness worked was that people's media literacy
was still pretty simple. If you were an adult in 1936, you'd think that
a movie saying it depicted the real world was honest with you. Then
Marlon Brando acted like a real person all the way through The Wild
One, and his naturalistic, psychological acting technique
demonstrated in 80 minutes that all these moral panic movies are
bullshit. His realism made everyone else look like the cartoons
they always were. In 1936, Reefer Madness was a serious film.

Follow to the most intense degree the conclusion of Robert Nozick’s “Radio Show argument.” It ends with Milo and every jerk who learned to speak in Reddit and 4Chan threads. My inviolable liberty includes the freedom to be a total jerk to everyone around me, breaking all my promises, and turning away from my community.

Moral obligation as oppression. This is a popular belief I have seen more and more in everyday behaviour. People even directly said this to me. r/libertarian. Yet the idea is obscene. Imagine how hysterical, how intense your paranoia would have to be, for you to believe a philosophy to hostile to simply living as neighbours. It would literally be the end of society.

Yet in the Breitbart set, the communitarian values that strengthen promises and friendships in society are the bedrock of communism. As philosophy, this makes no sense. It mistakes the most abstract similarity – building and strengthening community is important – for the acorn whose greatest oak was Josef Stalin!

Conspiracy thinking as popular ideology. This is how having been one of literally thousands of students passing through a classroom over the years is seen as a nefarious mentorship in radical communism. Millions having been made – in their everyday thinking about politics – as deranged as McCarthy.

That was Andrew Breitbart’s original vision. We think of it as crazily white supremacist because that’s what Steve Bannon turned it into. So now, it's even more crazy. This is a popular way to think about marxism today. And even though I'm no marxist, I at least want to give the tradition's best thinkers their credit where my work is due.

When There’s One More Thing to Clarify, Composing, 31/07/2017

I wasn’t on the blog much, but I actually had a really productive writing weekend. Since I’ve caught up on my marking at the college, I had some time this weekend to get back to that project for the Reply Collective that I was telling you about a while ago.

The blog is, once again, moving on from considerations of Mt Pelerin
Society philosophy, writing, and communications. But those Mt Pelerin
views are seriously unforgettable. This image came from some dude
who lives near there selling his duplex apartment.

So that draft is finished, and I’ll probably give it a polish later this week before sending it up to the editors in Virginia to go in the publishing queue. It’s not as openly experimental as some of my other articles, but I think that’s for the best.

I’ve had my period of playing around, and this is an essay where I wanted to get serious. It’s called “Beyond Socrates: The Philosopher as Creative Craftsperson,” so the topic has a pretty wide scope.

It rides on a few contemporary examples and responds to a half-recent essay by a fellow SERRC member to further develop my philosophical challenge to the philosophical community – Get your conversations out of musty overpriced journals and get them online and into the streets.

Most important to encouraging that profound worldly engagement for philosophy, is writing your conversations in language that’s more accessible to people. I’m not talking about anything so pedestrian (or loaded with the opposition’s meaning) as “dumbing down.” I mean write in the common styles of intelligent discussion that you see in high-quality feature journalism.

Except you’re writing about concepts. Ideas in action through life in society. You’ll find out in more detail soon enough. I’m excited about that one.
• • •

While searching for images to go along with this post, I also discovered
this one of Friedrich Hayek relaxing and having a laugh like an
ordinary human being, instead of staring seriously and portentously
into the camera.

Here’s something else I’m excited about – moving on from writing about Milton Friedman on the blog. I went to Capitalism and Freedom because I was thinking more about how I’ll discuss the dystopian utopia of Earth’s current political, economic, and ecological clusterfuck in Utopias.

I realized that I wanted to get more material on the ideas of Mt Pelerin libertarianism than I had from looking into Hayek. Friedman’s book – and the responses to my posts from other friends at SERRC – helped me wrap my head around an interesting angle about that libertarianism.

Here’s the short version. The original philosophical texts of Mt Pelerin libertarianism – key examples being Capitalism and Freedom and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom – were (most of the time) very nuanced, well-thought texts. But the modern politics of libertarian right-wing activists are brutal, dogmatic, and significantly meme-based.

Where’s the disconnection? You discover that through media analysis of the online social networking platform. Where’s the connection? It’s in the tells of those popular books, the spots where they reveal a blindness.

It also fits the theme of my last post about my Capaldi Years Doctor
Who book project, that my research recently is mostly about
returning to ideas that I studied a few years ago to update my
perspective.

All the time, it’s a blindness to the systematic and community-level processes that help constitute individual personalities. The individual and his liberty is, ontologically speaking, such a fundamental unit of moral and political analysis for the Mt Pelerin thinkers, that the interdependence of social and individual drifts out of their philosophical view. Same with systematic effects on individual liberty.

I still feel like I’m not quite saying it right. but I’ll get back to it eventually.

After reading Friedman, I switched tack in my research to fill in some more ideas that I wanted to revisit. That’s my uptake of Antonio Gramsci’s ideas. Thanks to some nerdy tweeting from Jeet Heer, I discovered a few Perry Anderson books, and it made for wonderfully pleasurable and productive reading.

I’ll talk more about my engagement with Anderson’s ideas and interpretations over the next couple of weeks. Here’s basically what he helped me clarify.

The integration of ideology and military power in international hegemony. The complexity of the marxist tradition, which absolutely contradicts all the popular discourse about marxism today. Most of that popular discourse is uninformed far-right smears of all progressive politics as “cultural marxism.”

I'm also closer now than I was three years ago to a really detailed
outline of what Utopias will actually cover, so I wanted to clarify
some of the outstanding questions about Gramsci's ideas about
the material possibilities of an activist's life before I put any more
flesh on that manuscript's skeleton.

Well, Anderson’s helped me get another good handle on why this idea is such an incredible misfire and mistake. If anything, I think a better understanding of real marxist traditions – and particularly, practice – can do some real good to shutting down the resurgent fascism of our era.

He also wrote a really good book about caste politics in India, but that’s for another post entirely.
• • •
So I’m going to throw a link to this post up on my Patreon a few hours after it goes live today. Since it works as a general update on my writing projects, and it’s posting on the same week as my patron payouts, I figure it’s a good place to throw it.

If you like hearing about any of these projects, think of pencilling in a couple of bucks each month to support more publications. I’m taking part this year in one really amazing artistic project that could seriously use some Patreon support.

I can’t say anything about it yet, because it’s too early in the production process. The people in charge aren’t me, so I can’t just start yammering on social media yet about its details. But it’s going to be pretty awesome.

That said, its commercial potentials aren’t that great. Which is why I’m blatantly asking for more Patreon support. So if you like sci-fi, and you like the kind of sci-fi I write, and you can spare maybe two dollars each month, hit my Patreon and throw some cash on there.

You'll be helping me produce more super-trippy writing projects. You know you want to do that.

Concepts Become Slogans Become Wriggling Globs of Pus, Composing, 27/07/2017

So I got some really good feedback on yesterday’s post from my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller. He identified a tension in my own approach to right-wing ideas.

I first became interested in learning more about right-wing philosophy when I reconnected with an old friend from middle and high school. Since that time, I’d gotten a PhD in philosophy and started working for an editing company.

Every photo I'm running with this post is a cheap shot. An
increasingly horrifying cheap shot. Here, we have a cheap shot
about the hypocrisy of affluent hipster libertarians that can also
function as a cautionary tale for how democracy sows the seeds
of its own destruction.

He'd become a radical libertarian. Collected guns, thought Barack Obama was a socialist, thought George Zimmerman was totally in the right to shoot that teenager. Every conversation we had carried this powerful, personal desire on his part to convert me to radical libertarianism.

They had swallowed the dogma, lived and breathed every witless aggressive meme like it was a hit of pure oxygen, swore they weren’t racist because black people had been bred into criminality and laziness from their generations-long dependence on government handouts.

So with the experience of this two years of online friendship with folks in this extremist society in mind, I sought out the classic popular outreach texts of the founders of modern libertarian philosophy.

I was also coming out of my first major research project, which became Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I was moving into a more explicitly political direction, thinking about the shape of a new book about the human drive for utopias.

When I consider how people think about and live their political ideals, I see this wrenching contrast, especially among the right wing, but it’s present in all political thinking. There really does seem to be a disconnect of the nuanced arguments in the core philosophical books of a tradition and the sloganeering bludgeons of too many popular activists.

Seriously, my libertarian friends G & C used to get so aggressive
arguing over George Zimmerman's legal right to shoot a teenager
in the chest, entirely talking about responsible gun ownership
and the right to self-defence. Yet you can't turn away from the
existence of jokes like this and what they imply. Don't think you
can write this off by saying, "It's just a joke."

Democracy is my ideal, but I want to figure out where the nuance of thought breaks down into a baseball bat. I’m looking at this most frequently at libertarianism and right-wing ideas because these are the ones that have been most successful in my generation, and are having the most destructive effects.

Here's what Steve had to say yesterday.

The problem with your argument comes at the final hurdle. Libertarians like Friedman aren't imagining the state playing any role in these decisions to sell -- or not -- to people of whatever race. So the totalizing conclusions you reach don't necessarily apply.
He's imagining that even if some sellers are racist, it will be to the advantage of others not to be racist because they'll get the discriminated people's custom. Yes, you might end up with a 'separate but equal' sort of society, which is 'racist' in the sense that not all vendors are available to all buyers. But there will be at least one vendor available to all buyers.
In fact, that one vendor could become quite rich, if the other vendors stick to their racist guns. The state simply observes all this stuff, but doesn't adopt an ideological position. I don't endorse this view, on either normative or practical grounds.
But it's more sophisticated than your cartoon version. Specifically, Friedman's point is that you would actually need the state to intervene in the market to bring about the sort of totalizing racism you're railing against. You should be thinking about arguing against a 'separate but equal' position, which is allowed by Friedman's thinking.

Yeah, because none of this is racist at all. Nope. Nothing to see here.

I have my own responses to some of these arguments.

One is about how a free market will prevent injustice from racial discrimination because some other business will serve the discriminated group. But that presumes that a totally free market is even possible. Frankly, I don’t think people’s self-interests are enlightened enough to provide the fully rational behaviour needed for a genuinely free market.

Even the free market solution of a ‘separate but equal’ economy isn’t a real solution to the problem of racism. The widespread social rejection that racializes a minority erodes any real equality that would have developed from that separate position. There’ll always be the sneers, the insults, the rocks thrown through windows, and the thickly humid atmosphere of popular disgust.

Despite those counter-arguments, there’s a lot of valuable ideas in these works that are so central to libertarian thinking. But there are also those passages that – like those context-free literally-understood passages from the Bible justifying a whole new regime of racializing discrimination – encourage an activist extremism that you can rightly call cartoonish.

Then they drop a piano on your head.

Freedom to Be a Villain, Research Time, 26/07/2017

Yesterday evening, the GF and I were talking about the widespread famine and food shortages throughout Africa and the Arabian peninsula right now. Caused by drought crisis and exacerbated by war and less official political violence, there are serious food shortages in Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and Yemen.

The Jewish community of eastern Uganda, the Abayudaya, is currently
at risk from drought and food shortages.

Those are only the countries suffering most from famine – millions across the continent are at risk. The famine doesn’t have much mainstream media attention – Donald Trump succumbing to dementia at a Boy Scout Jamboree seems more important to Jeff Zucker and his ilk than actually informing the public about life-or-death issues.

Now, I want to ask you, reader, a question. If someone asked you to donate some money to a famine relief activity for one of these areas – say, for a community in eastern Uganda – would you do it?

A follow-up. Say you give them a few dollars. Not much, but what you can spare. Would you consider it your free choice? I think so. Someone explains the famine and what their organization was working on to help people, follows it up with a request for a donation, and you give some money. You’ve considered it, and chosen to do so.

But what if you decide not to. Same scenario – explanation of the famine and the organization’s relief work – but you say no. That would also be your free choice.

Now, one last question. Is the person who would help a community in such distress a better person than the one who wouldn’t?

Peter Singer is one philosopher, quite popular in the circles where I did
my doctorate, who has advocated that we have a moral duty to give to
charity and overcome unjust inequalities.

It’s reasonable to say yes. Someone who wants to ease the suffering of others and help people in need where the opportunity presents itself is a decent person. Someone who turns away from others’ pain and cares only about his own desires is, at minimum, a bit of a douche.

Yes, you’re free to be a douche if you wish. But why would you wish it?

I bring up this example because I want to discuss this point from Milton Friedman in its context. Someone who makes even a small gesture to help others in need is a better person than someone who won’t. It makes you a good person to want to improve and heal the world.

Contributing to your society’s overcoming racism is one way to heal the world. Friedman considers free markets themselves to do this, because of the inherently anti-racist character of a totally open economy. This does make sense.

When you open your society and economy to people of all ethnicities, cultures, castes, and religions and refuse to racialize any of them into an underclass, you’ve made a better society and a better market. You don’t cut anyone out of the market for any reason other than incompetence. You’ll become a customer of any business that gives you a fair deal on what you want, regardless of identity. That’s great.

When I grew up, everyone in my education system – formal and
informal – spoke about segregation as a terrible crime against
human dignity. Now, mainstream conservative politicians across
the United States and in Canada want to enshrine the right to
discriminate and economically marginalize others as an
essential human freedom. Fuck you.

Unfortunately for Friedman, his argument about racism in a free society in Capitalism and Freedom doesn’t stop there. He follows up this very insightful point about how economically ridiculous racism is, by defending our right to be racist.

The right to be racist is an aspect of the human right to liberty. Here is Friedman doubling down on the paradox of liberty – if my freedom includes a liberty to reject others from my society, then my inviolable liberty includes the freedom to violate others’ liberty.

If the members of a community all freely choose to run their businesses without hiring or selling to a racialized group, then that is their free choice to do so. The freedom to be racist should be respected as an uncomfortable but necessary element of liberty.

Here’s a paradox that popular libertarians can’t seem to escape. If our freedom includes the liberty to be a racist jackass, then we can freely marginalize and suppress the freedom of others.

Any business owner can choose not to allow someone to be their customer for whatever reason they want. The liberty to force someone else into exile? Into penury? Into poverty? Into the destruction of their dignity? Can liberty without obligation stand?

I don’t think so.

Hunting for Hypocrisy in Right-Wing History, Research Time, 21/07/2017

Don't worry. I’m going to narrow down the scope. There’s plenty of possible topics I could cover about the hypocrisy of the last century or so of North American conservatism. Good Lord, almost all the history of North American conservatism is riddled with hypocrisy.

Gold! Always believe in your soul. You've got the power to know
you're indestructible. Always believe because you are gold.

I’m just talking about one little argument Milton Friedman makes about the Great Depression and the role of the Federal Reserve in it. There are plenty of extreme things said about the United States Federal Reserve on the 21st century far right.

There’s some seriously horrible shit. I’m going to be talking about something funny. Ironically funny.

Friedman uses a Federal Reserve decision that badly worsened the American economy during the Great Depression to argue that the Fed should lose much of its power. Sounds like it fits in with conservative orthodoxy. It would, coming from one of the men whose ideas pretty much invented America’s conservative orthodoxy today.

Wait for it.

One of the major causes of the spiralling death fire of the Great Depression was banks collapsing. They didn’t have enough liquidity to deal with a bank run – too many people were panicking and withdrawing their money, and the banks didn’t have enough cash on hand to give it all out and keep running.

The Federal Reserve at the time held to a very strict principle that the government should interfere in the economy as little as possible. So central bank leaders gave no assistance to the banking sector.

Yeah, I'm just going to walk into the bank with a car-sized rock of gold.

Those bank leaders were also largely trained on the gold standard. All major national economies on Earth, from the 1870s to the Great Depression, backed their currencies with gold. A citizen could go to a bank whenever they wanted and trade a constantly fixed amount of their currency for gold.

In 1933, England left the gold standard because bank runs were dangerously depleting the country’s gold reserves. In 1934, the United States did the same.

But before 1934, the United States was still on the gold standard. If the government were to give private banks liquidity assistance, they’d literally have to fork over huge amounts of gold from their own reserves to the banks.

Under the gold standard, it’s impossible to revalue currency by printing more. Because currency is linked to gold, only the shifting value of gold can change the value of currency. A central bank can’t change interest rates either, because the value of gold is stable no matter what an interest rate would be. So gold replaces currency in borrowing.

Since American currency’s value was pegged to gold, there was no way to introduce liquidity into the country’s financial system to prevent catastrophic bank collapses.

Because bank collapse was a central cause of the Great Depression, Friedman argues that the refusal of the Federal Reserve to inject liquidity into the banking system was a key cause of that collapse.

Yes, Milton Friedman argued for the actions Barack Obama would
eventually do fifty years later. Conservatives called him a
communist, but Obama was following – probably without knowing
it – the advice of a paradigm new liberal.

When I read this, I laughed out loud. This is the kind of liquidity that Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner injected into the American banking system in 2009 to prevent wide scale financial collapse. Milton Friedman is arguing in the 1960s for a decision that Barack Obama made 50 years later.

It’s an extra level of irony that Friedman makes this argument to show that the Federal Reserve needs less power. Central bankers, with their loyalty to the gold standard, should never have had the power to prevent the government from keeping the economy afloat in a dangerous time.

It’s an even more brain-busting intensity of irony that Friedman’s popular heirs in the 21st century, radical economic libertarians, want to return to the gold standard because they believe that it stabilizes an otherwise too-dynamic economy.

Getting painful to think about yet?

The Abject Humanism of It All I: Parks and Recreation, Research Time, 19/07/2017

So here’s something I came across reading Milton Friedman that I found really interesting. In the light of some contemporary politics and prosecutions around who has the right to do what on government-owned land in the United States, it’s worth thinking on.

He talks about the national park system in the United States, and how he thinks it should be privatized to individual businesspeople. So far, so doctrinaire. But think about the reasons why.

Friedman doesn’t position himself in any way like the activism of the Bundy family. He’s much more sedate, as benefits a professor rather than a cattle rancher.

He thinks national parks and federal nature reserves should be privatized because of general libertarian principle against government ownership of all that much. But he also thinks that private companies could achieve the same purpose much better.

Come on, son! You and your dad are goin' fishin'! Hyuk!

So what purpose does he consider national parks to have?

Camping. Hiking. Fishing. The enjoyment of the great outdoors. All that good old Outdoor Life Network stuff.

While outdoorsmanship may have been the original purpose of the national parks in Teddy Roosevelt’s mind, national park and reserve systems do a lot more than that now.

Friedman thinks about none of the ecological achievements of government or public trust in stewardship of the land. Setting aside at least some land from the reach of exploitation, if you do it with enough ecological knowledge and care, can mean the difference between a resilient ecosystem and total collapse.

Now, I don’t expect Friedman or that many other people writing in the early 1960s to have thought of this aspect of the problem. Rachel Carson was a lonely voice for a long time.

Even if you leave that critique to the side, there’s a blindness in Friedman’s thinking. It’s the blindness that anything in the world is only as good as its customer service value. No public service besides customer satisfaction.

That’s a world of incredible poverty. Maybe not poverty in terms of wealth and riches. But I mean poverty as a drab, trivial world. There’s too much of the human view in that way of thinking. Too much reduction. Too much humanity.

I think I’ll talk more about the problem of humanity tomorrow. It’s not like humanity doesn’t have plenty of problems.

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? II: Exodus, Research Time, 13/07/2017

Is it really freedom if your only choices are between a cruel, abusive, barely-subsistence, dangerous job and starving to death?

The doctrinaire libertarian perspective states that this is freedom. When I say doctrinaire, I’m talking about the libertarian shock troops – the ordinary folks who provide the street and online activist core of the libertarian right wing as a political movement.

Demand better. One of a series of old posters from when we
thought the fight would be easier than it is now.

If a free market is only offering you barely-subsistence wages under terrible conditions or poverty and starvation, then that’s the choice you can freely make. Freedom is the right of exit from any negotiation before the promise is made.*

* Yes, I know there are many other dimensions of freedom as a concept in libertarian thinking, but I’m just sticking to this one for now! It’s a blog – I’m not going more than 800 or so words at a shot with this.

But is there an additional path to follow? Jokingly, in my reviews and posts about that show, I’ve described this ethical argument against the libertarian decision between two bad choices as Doctor Who ethics. When the system you live in offers you two unbearable choices, you break the system.

This is where I see the anarchist-leaning left providing a corrective to the libertarian right. Think of it as a helping hand. The libertarian, as I’ve described them, sticks with the choices you’re given. But you can also upend the table.

Milton Friedman called the right to walk away from a bad deal the right of exit. As he unfolded the concept, it was left with that vulnerability – You could walk away from any shit deal, even if your only alternative was an even more shit deal. You were still free.

The problem of following Friedman is that you may always be stuck with some kind of shit deal. Antonio Negri takes the right of exit farther than the libertarian model – literally an exodus.

One most brutal and blatant commodification of humanity was the institution of black slavery in the Americas. Labour was literally bought and sold, and there was a continual urge in the black population to escape. Negri makes this a starting point for the human drive to liberation.

Friedman stays at the level of the bad job offer – walk away and find something better. Negri carries this principle farther, as far as it can go and where the concept itself would actually lead you if you follow its logic to the end. The human drive for freedom is expressed in the act of walking away to find or create something better.

You keep moving until you can't go any farther. But you still have to.

You’re walking away from any form of exploitation, brutality, or generally horrible conditions of life. You could be walking into a much worse deal. One example. Ask any of the South Asian or African immigrants who come to work in the Saudi Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates.

Thousands once sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Millions now move across Asia. And that’s just counting the economic migrants – the job seekers. The war refugees throughout the world are millions more.

But there’s also the people who leave their home countries – overpopulated, crushed by climate disaster, autocratic, or still stricken with grotesque inequality – and come to places like Toronto. People like some of my students who come to Canada in search of a better deal.

The best of them are coming here not just to ask for a better deal, but to build one for themselves. That’s the human desire for freedom – don’t just choose the lesser of two evils, but walk away and make the good.

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?

When Federal Government Was Built to Protect the People, Research Time, 04/07/2017

Here's the thing that seriously bugs me when I read The Federalist Papers in the 21st century. Those who most loudly claim fealty to the founders of the United States are in fact the ones who betray most blatantly their vision for how the country’s government should work.

I’m talking about the founders’ philosophical vision for the country in the second constitution, the one they’re still running the US government on.

Happy July 4 to any readers in America. It'll always be a land of
possibility and hope.

Knowing what I’ve learned over the last few years about the libertarian right over the last few years, I think I can make a few general statements. At least I can make some general statements about the intensely anti-Obama, pro-Republican libertarian right.

One. They genuinely believe that the federal government has very few politically and ethically legitimate rights against them, that most laws, taxes, and domestic government departments are immoral because they impinge on individual people’s freedom.

Its most philosophically consistent form is the writing of Robert Nozick. Its most extreme political form is the anti-government militias of people like Amon Bundy, who carry out semi-competent occupations of federal nature reserve. Its most deranged extreme political form is the sovereign citizen movement.

Two. Most also fall in line with the ‘states’ rights’ message from right-wing organizations. This seems to be an incidental detail, but reading Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, you see how important it is.

Hamilton’s argument for having a strong federal government was to protect each individual American.* The main sources of tyranny was in the governments of individual states.

They all know the helicopters are looking at them. He's doing it to
flaunt his power. He knows that in today's America, he can do this,
be roasted in social media, and get away with it.

* Yes, he’s only talking about white people. Bracket this for now, just as we do with every other Western political theorist who was only ever talking about white people. Say citizen just as far as understanding the concept goes. Racial justice would bring Hamilton’s country in line with Hamilton’s ideas.

Governors would use their powers to seek corrupt privileges while denying their citizens even a functioning government. State legislatures would deny huge swaths of their citizens the ability to vote or even get basic services. Among other everyday injustices.

A strong federal government was required to defend the rights of citizens from these abuses, and maintain the political and social equality of all citizens across all the states.

Today, so many think of centralizing power in a large federal government as dangerous to individual liberty and freedom. And certainly quite a few federal powers can do a lot to take away people’s liberty and freedom.

But the most dangerous abusers of government power were the local governments, the petty tinpots.

To Be Incorruptible III: Our Best Wishes in One Voice, Research Time, 20/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Before you can know if an institution’s structure and rules will lead people to make the best decisions, you have to know what kinds of decisions would be the best.

It sounds like I’m moving in circles. I’m not. I’m looking for presuppositions. The questions that need an answer if you’re going to develop a clear answer to the question you asked in the first place. So what makes a decision good for a community?

This is a question of the common good of a community. Well, what constitutes that common good depends on how we understand good. Are we thinking like a typical utilitarian? Not when we read Machiavelli. Nowhere in the Discourses on Livy does he perform the callous mathematics of a too-simple utilitarian.

His examples of noble behaviour discuss plenty of sacrifices. He praises, in multiple places, the decision of a Roman republican ruler executing his own sons when their actions and personal ambitions put the republic at risk of invasion or tyranny. Machiavelli is no stranger to cruelty to save the common good.

But this isn’t an everyday cruelty. The libertarian right is today’s most popularly powerful philosophy of freedom thanks to modern think tank networks. Think of how they and their founder philosophers think of cruelty in the name of the common good.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

For a libertarian, cruelty in the name of the common good is described with images of a Stalinist omnipresent communist state. Bureaucratic arms control whole industries, billions and trillions of dollars worth of people’s property is expropriated and collectivized. Even on a less grandiose scale, the act of collecting taxes is akin to theft.

This isn’t the kind of common good Machiavelli talks about when he describes the cruelty of necessary sacrifices. The sacrifices of Roman and Italian republicans are rare – they occur only at times of domestic instability, coups, wars, invasions from imperial war machines.

The common or public good, as Machiavelli describes it throughout the Discourses, is for everyone in society to stand before each other in equal dignity. Now, this does require some financial levelling. He describes the corrosive effect on society of too large a class of the idle rich.

These are people whose riches are so great that they encourage laziness and self-absorption. The super-rich are isolated from any association with anyone other than those they employ to serve them. Their money even isolates them from the need to be kind to others. Even the smallest altruism required for minimal participation in civic life disgusts them.

Such people are socially cancerous – their personalities degrade and insult the dignity of everyone around them. The only goods that matter to the idle rich are private goods, that which makes the rich richer. “It is not the private good but the common good that makes cities great.” That’s in Book Two, Chapter 2.

Contrast the private, egomaniacal goods that the idle rich seek with the public goods that democratic citizens seek – You see more clearly what the public good is.

Whatever the situation of your community, whatever problems you face in your economy, society, infrastructure, whatever – If you think with altruism and work together with your neighbours and compatriots, you’ll understand the public good and work toward it.

That altruism is the expression of the best patriotism. As long as altruism is at the heart of community action, you’ll fend off corruption and corrosion.

If you think only of your own personal good and see others only as means to your advancement, enrichment, prestige, and pleasure . . . The word you’re looking for is ‘tyrant.’

Now, this is fine for a clearly defined community. But at the borders, who is and isn't your compatriot gets slippery.