Each Together IV: A Family of Millions, Research Time, 21/09/2017

I’m not going to answer that question about our mortal desire for immortality right away. I don’t really have one right now. When I do, it’ll probably involve some complex examination of the relationship between memory, personality, culture, history, and knowledge of the past.

Instead, I want to riff on a few more ideas I encountered about community, social unity, and nationhood in the early chapters of The Human Condition. I’ll lay it out with a bold, blanket statement that I feel isn’t getting through to enough of popular culture as it should.

Humanity in servitude is a mass of indistinguishable organs.

My blanket statement:

There are a ton of people who hate all forms of socialism and even just basic caring for your community because they think it’s all creeping communism. And I’m sick of that ignorant shit.

I mean, there are clear sources for this. Ever since Friedrich Hayek helped launch the Mt Pelerin Society and the network of think tanks it inspired, that notion has flooded our popular culture through pretty much all channels of media.

It’s been in the right wing ever since The Road to Serfdom blew up – that any form of collective action or identity contains the conceptual seeds of totalitarian communism. Whether it’s a trade union, a single-payer state-funded health care system, or even simple community organizing to lobby a government or a private company.

For Hayek, solidarity is the same as communism. So it’s gone for a growing chunk of conservative North America. The idea began in the populist work of a Nobel Prize winning economist, and is now in the mouths of dim-witted pundits with terrible moustaches.

At least when Hayek was talking about this, his ideas had some bite. They were wrong, but they bit.

Here’s how the most brutal communism conceives of humanity. Each person has no real meaning in their lives as individuals. Our authentic roles are as members of a class, so our individual personalities express only our general class interests. Because class interests are fundamentally shared, each of our lives are indistinguishable from each other.

Friedrich Hayek gets his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.

For Hayek and the modern North American right wing that followed him, this is the ideology of any political philosophy which accepts any kind of collective action or identity. They see this in the labour movement and marxism.

But Karl Marx didn’t invent this concept. Hannah Arendt identifies the root of how comradeship becomes collectivization in nationalist movements and the modern concept of nation itself.

The heritage is pretty straightforward. European society was dominated by feudal relationships through the medieval period. The ethics of these feudal societies were based on paternal responsibility expressed on the scale of entire towns.

The local lord or royal is the father, and the only political relationship of which anyone is capable is subjection. The community consists of one paterfamilias and all others are bowed heads. The lord has the unquestioned authority of a household head, and all members of the community are one family.

As lords disappeared, says Arendt, the morality of subjection and the community as family persisted. That morality became a force of peer pressure to conformity in your identity and political beliefs.

A political morality of subjection, without a monarch to which we’re subject, becomes subjection to the popular morality itself. Dissent of any kind is considered immoral. It would be dissent from the only body that makes your existence legitimate – the nation.

A community of millions who subject themselves to the will of all, as popular morality expresses it. That’s the vision of the dedicated nationalist. Human dignity is only realized in the achievements of the nation itself. This is the ideology that brought us racialization, colonialism, and the two Great Wars of the 20th century.

The nationalism that consumes the modern Western right wing makes them more like their boogeyman communists than the social democrats they hate.

When a Legendary Fear Is True, Doctor Who: Extremis, Reviews, 22/05/2017

As a story, “Extremis” is kind of old hat for Steven Moffat, as my senior colleague in Doctor Who criticism Phil Sandifer has said. Yes, there’s metafiction piled on deep in this episode. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

I want to talk about a demon. I want to talk about the most famous demon in the history of Western philosophy. That demon inspired “Extremis.” So

The Doctor decides that he will not give up in the face of his unreality,
his existence as a simulation of whatever the real thing would be. The
most accurate simulation would never give up anyway. That's what
"extremis" means in this story. That your virtue only shows itself in
moments of genuine extremity, in times of great risk and danger.
The refusal to meet your illusory nature with despair is, from an
existential perspective, the bravest thing you can do.

SPOILERS!!

naturally. The most philosophically intriguing part of this story is its central conceit. The evil demon is true. It’s usually one of the first problems that incoming university philosophy students learn. It consumes you when you first hear it – its imagery and implications are so powerful.

The power of that question – What if our entire reality is unreal? An illusion? – is immense. It can be a cornerstone of madness.

The moments of doubt that your existence matters at all can manifest as a dissociation, an all-too-common feeling of emptiness. What does it even mean to say that your existence is unreal?

Live the Revolution

In pop-cultural terms, it’s about living in a simulation. The Matrix is the obvious touchstone. Even when I was first studying René Descartes’ Meditations in my first ever philosophy class, my teacher Jim Bradley compared his evil demon problem to The Matrix. The two scenarios aren’t quite the same, though. But “Extremis” blends them both with a powerful ethical lesson.

The Matrix is a simulation of reality. So is the projected world we uncover in “Extremis.” The difference is that the world of The Matrix is a simulation for the people in it, but the people are real. The people of The Matrix are real people – organisms trapped in a simulated reality.

To realize this prompts revolution. You break out of the machine, build yourself a new life in this messy reality, and prepare to dive back in. Though there’s really no reason why you should dive back in, especially given how poorly the sequels went.

But this isn’t what “Extremis” presents us. Keanu still has one thing to fall back on – his physical body. That remains real, even if its nature is hidden from him in the simulated world. No, Steven Moffat is presenting us with something very different here.

A Prestigious Heritage

“Extremis” is based around the meditation on the evil demon. When you read Descartes, this is probably the most affecting thing he ever wrote. It goes something like this.

Philosophy, as a discipline and as a tradition, tends to make a fetish of
the truth. It's unfortunate, because truth is too important a matter to
demand fidelity to it or its apparent implications. Veritas in this story
is supposed to be the proof that your life is meaningless.

Descartes structures his Meditations on First Philosophy as an attempt to isolate some certain truth about existence. His first two (of six) chapters aim to break down our supposed certainties about reality, what we take for granted.

So he brings up the possibility that what we experience may be an illusion. All our perceptions could be based on mistakes or falsify the real nature of the world. So far, so Matrix. But Descartes goes further.

He goes for a world-shattering image. He asks you to imagine that your entire physical body – everything you know even through your proprioception, your material selfhood itself – is an illusion.

As well, imagine that the fundamental rules of your entire universe are illusions too. I’m not just asking you to imagine that 2 + 2 = 5 or 763. I mean, imagine that even number itself makes no actual sense in the true nature of reality.

So if you can imagine it, then it’s possible. It may not be true, and in fact, it probably isn’t true. But it’s possible.

Cleaving Reality

Possible, but not true. We’re still in a realm of imagination here. It’s a powerful imagination that can revolutionize your way of thinking. Yet that’s always what the meditative tradition was for.

I didn’t always know about Descartes’ influences as a writer and a thinker. I had always been taught a story of Descartes that saw him as a transitional figure between medieval and modern ways of thinking. But that transition was in the form of a radical break.

Descartes was most remarkable for uniting mysticism and the new
discipline of scientific investigation, as it was developing in its
infancy. Mystic science didn't really take, unless that's what you
want to call philosophy.

I learned about Descartes as the inventor of modernity, as much as modernity can be said to have been invented by one man. His thought experiment in The Meditations was, according to the philosophy curriculum I experienced as a young man, the beginning of a distinctly modern idea – the separation of human rationality from nature.

We could call the reality of nature into doubt – even to the fundamental level of mathematical truths. But what we’re never able to doubt is the ongoing action of our own self-conscious minds. Whenever we’re thinking about ourselves, our own act of thinking, we know that this thinking is real.

So reality becomes separate from our minds. Our minds are always certain, are able to justify their own existence. Nature and material reality, on the other hand, is always subject to doubt. Potentially so, anyway. So human thought becomes more real than the world that produces it. At least, that’s how you understand it. Humanity develops one more sophisticated reason to tear our planet indiscriminately to pieces.

How you think that reality is unreal depends on a chilling proposition. What if some omnipowerful evil demon is creating the entire field of reality in which you exist as an illusion, including your body and history?

When Thought Meets Mysticism

But reality’s unreality, and the evil demon that causes it, isn’t supposed to be a terrifying proposition. It was originally, and in Descartes’ hands, supposed to be a foundation for justifying the existence of the divine.

You see, Descartes wasn’t the first one to develop the thought experiment of the evil demon and the unreality of reality. Descartes was the first to develop it in a scientific context, since he was a scientists first and foremost – a mathematician, geometer, and theorist of optics, as well as a philosopher.

In many ways, the monks are an embodiment of living death, the
emptiness of simulated existence. Even their appearance is as the
living dead.

In that sense, Descartes is the beginning of Western modernity. When you’re taught Descartes, he’s presented as the progenitor of modern philosophy. That’s a bit of a stretch when you know the real history. Medieval history.

Descartes didn’t exist in a vacuum. He grew up in a medieval cultural milieu. It’s a world that, in many ways, is very different from our own, obviously. Foremost among medieval European thought was the primacy of religion.

Investigating the world was seen as reading God’s writing and nature in reality itself. The early scientific innovators like Roger Bacon thought they were up to the same thing, developing experimental methods to find different ways of investigating reality, because to know nature is to know the mind of God.

Meditation was one technique to bring a person closer to God as well, to bring them into contact with divinity. The solution to Descartes’ problem was that God – the only source of our concepts of infinity and divinity themselves – guaranteed the reality of reality.

Because we could conceive of God, we couldn’t do it under our own power. Descartes argues this by relying on a medieval rule of metaphysical logic that nothing more perfect – like the concepts of perfection in divinity – could be developed by a less-than-perfect being. They had to come from God, because human being isn’t adequate to generating them.

The thought experiment of the evil demon leading to a communion with God in thought didn’t come from Descartes, though. It was developed by Teresa of Avila, a Jesuit nun who wrote meditative texts.

Because as far as even obvious simulations like Super Mario are
concerned, from their own perspectives, they're as real as Bob Hoskins.

Meditations were popular guides for ordinary people to explore mystical elements of their worlds, and their own minds, through inward contemplation. Being such a heavily Christian culture, the meditative text was a guide to uncovering God in your own thoughts and existence.

Descartes unified that mysticism with a scientific mind-set. That’s why we call him a modern thinker. But we could also call him a medieval man equally accurately.

The Demons Are Real

But I’m not thinking only about Descartes, Teresa, and the Wachowski Sisters. I’m talking about Doctor Who. Particularly the chilling scenario of “Extremis.” Literally, it’s the most extreme place you could take the evil demon problem.

It’s simple, really. The demon is real. He does control your entire reality, having created it as a simulation. Not only are your surroundings illusory, a program running in a massively powerful computer – you are too.

Teresa and Descartes could always rely on the act of meditation itself as the place from which the existence of reality could be justified as a mystic experience. Whether through communion or argument, it didn’t matter. The point was that the evil demon’s trickery could be overcome.

Not so for the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole in this episode. They themselves are also simulations. The horror of their existence is in realizing it. For them, the revolution against the terror of their situations seems to justify the mass suicides we see throughout the episode.

As the Doctor says, if Super Mario realized that he was a character in a video game, he’d delete himself from the whole program so he wouldn’t have to die anymore.

I suppose I should say something about the Master, seeing as "Extremis"
finally reveals that she really is the mysterious creature in the vault.
In a way, this is a return to one of the most sentimental lines in
Russell T Davies' Doctor Who, when the Doctor offers to keep the
Master a prisoner and take care of him, raise him to be a better
person. Faced with this imposition on his life, John Simm's
Master apparently shot himself to escape. Here, Michelle Gomez
answers that quandary: She embraces the possibility of that
change in character as a chance to save her life. The Doctor doesn't
impose that choice, as Tennant's did. He asks, and she says yes.

The Doctor’s solution is brilliant, in its way. Because there is still a material reality that exists. The reality of the actual Earth that the evil alien monks are simulating to aid their invasion. The Doctor of “Extremis” may not be real. But he has a better idea for revolution than simply opting out of the program.

It’s an act of outreach to himself. To speak to himself not by turning inward, as in a meditation, but by turning outward. He communicates to the material Doctor on Earth, as the simulated Doctor from inside the monks’ simulators. A mysticism of materiality.

The Doctor's conclusion about the illusory nature of his own existence in "Extremis" is different than pretty much everyone else in the story. Everyone who reads the Veritas dies by their own hand, having understood that their existence is merely simulated. The Doctor sees the crime and the terror of this idea and fights against that resignation.

To resign is to admit your powerlessness. To admit powerlessness is to forgo power. Not only is his existence illusory, but even the illusion is based on a crime – a simulation as an intelligence exercise before conquest and destruction. The Doctor knows that the response to evil is never to give in to it, but to fight in whatever way you can.

In the battle for justice and good, life is justified. Even a life that was never real.
• • •
My reviews so far of Peter Capaldi's last full season of Doctor Who.
Oxygen
Knock Knock
Thin Ice
Smile
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye

Unity & Freedom I: Democracy Corrupt at Birth, Research Time, 16/08/2016

I sometimes think that states on the European model were built for empire, right from the start. That’s not just because Antonio Negri explained in Empire how imperialism is basically the same governance structures of the nation-state on a global scale. 

I mean, my uptake of Negri’s arguments are a big part of that. I first read Empire in 2007, so these ideas have been part of my political thinking for nearly a decade. But they were gestating through my academy years. Only recently did I decide to act on them, getting involved with critical activist voices.

We can't ignore it any longer.

Maybe the times decided for me, even if I was a little late.

Contrasting what I've read of Negri with what I've been reading of Etienne Balibar is interesting, though. I remember reading about how Balibar is considered a liberal counterweight to Negri’s ideas in this broad field of left-wing European academic political thinkers. 

Yet I find their premises and traditions quite similar. At least philosophically. Balibar just seems to have a little more faith in institutions like the European Union to revolutionize how people think of themselves ethically. That is, as communities, nations, ethnicities, identities.

I think the EU had that potential, even though by now it’s been thoroughly squandered. I’d rather we keep a strong memory of what was lost than believe that wrecked potential never existed in the first place. Otherwise, we’d lose all hope that we can do better.

If you read the link above, Yascha Mounk writes that the most powerful political movement in Western society right now is about stripping the liberal values from democracy. 

What he calls illiberal democracy keeps the institutional levers of democracy like elections while enforcing internal racial and class hierarchies, excluding immigrants, and stifling critical speech and political activism. I’d call it nationalism by ballot box.

There's a deeper structural problem that Mounk’s insightful and terrifying analysis doesn’t dig for, though. He takes for granted that the state is the natural home for liberal democracy. He doesn’t hit on Negri’s point: that the state relies on unquestioned authority to function, and so is structurally anti-democratic. 

Being a good citizen of a state means following orders, doing what you're told. The fundamental gesture of democracy – democracy’s birth in every such moment, really – is “Fuck you.”

They should never have let us listen to this in ninth
grade. Now we'll never do what they tell us. Except for
the ones who always do anyway.

One aspect of Balibar’s analysis in his essays on the (philosophical) nature of the EU focusses on the state as an exclusionary body. I discussed this a little bit yesterday. But the details are important. 

The European model of nation-state has a peculiar history, which only appeared like the universal model for government because European nation-states has powerful militaries that literally conquered the Earth a couple of hundred years ago. 

And that history makes European culture terrible at handling any kind of immigration – even in countries like Italy where immigration can only help the society and economy, thanks to their low birth rates.

Modern Europe's precursor actually was a unified identity: Christendom. Much of its identity forged through military conflicts with Muslim empires and ongoing persecution of Jewish and Roma minorities. As Christendom fractured among internal conflict, the nation-state emerged as the new institution of peace and unity.

However, this did nothing to bring peace to the region, since the nation-states had even narrower identities than the religious definition of European society. Nation-states had clearly defined borders, and those borders were for people with shared ethnic-linguistic identities. All others were excluded.

As long as states define themselves as nations, there will always be those left behind. Exclusion is necessary. And total. Just how total? . . . Hoo, boy. . . . To Be Continued

One and All Flow Together I: History Lessons, Research Time, 30/12/2015

Most of my life, I’ve learned about the history of our culture in a particular way. It seems that this way of learning history is pretty common, at least across the West. We learn about the modern world as if it one day just switched on.

The apple hits Newton’s head – the light bulb flicks on in the cartoon – and bam! There’s science and democracy.

There's much more to the medieval peasants than our
stereotypes suggest.

Not quite how it really went down, though. 

The people we think of as exclusively modern grew up in the world that today we call medieval. Popularly, this is the Dark Ages. A time of alchemy instead of chemistry, the Church instead of the state. An uncivilized time.

I sometimes think that our education system makes the medieval West into barbarians to encourage youth to accept uncritically dogmas about our institutions, knowledge traditions, and authorities. But you can’t just critique the mainstream you were spoon fed without a critical eye about where you’ll go. 

That way lies lizard people and the camp-style politics that made left wing democrats love Bashar Assad. So let’s not go there.

But let’s take seriously that medieval Europe is continuous with our own time. In fact, we can understand the real transitions of from medieval to modernity better when we take medieval European culture on its own terms. 

Antonio Negri does that, and finds remarkable things in medieval society, whose disappearance was one of the qualitative transitions that created modernity. 

Peter Kropotkin found such a remarkable thing in the cultures and governance styles of the free towns of Germany. These were crushed by national armies as kings unified territory into large, bureaucratically managed, centralized states.

Negri was probably the first – and only – writer who
showed me how concepts that looked like they had only
to do with abstract matters of the nature of existence had
deep political meanings. For that reason, Ecology,
Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is fundamentally
indebted to Negri, even if he doesn't even show up in
the references.

Negri finds something philosophical. An end of the reliance on a transcendent, eternal, absolute like God as a source of morality and meaning in existence. That’s a weird thing to say was part of the essence of the medieval period. We typically think of medieval Europe as dominated by the Catholic Church and Christianity.

Definitely, those institutions dominated the large-scale politics of the continent. You can make a solid case that the Crusades were the major political event of the medieval period.* But there was an undercurrent of critical thought inside the Church from the beginning of the so-called Dark Ages.

* And the plagues that decimated Europe’s populations were the major biopolitical events of the era. Too soon?

Negri points to the work of Duns Scotus. Scotus was a monk who lived in the 800s and wrote ridiculously complicated books. Well, they weren’t that bad. 

They were just in a professional environment that required a lot of complex technical language that made the ideas very inaccessible to someone who wasn’t already steeped in the culture and discourse of the institution.**

** This sounds familiar to me for some reason . . . 

And Scotus developed a very radical idea. He wrote that a being’s identity depends only on its own nature. For me to be a human didn’t rely on my own existence instantiating some universal that pre-exists and exists on a higher plane than my existence. 

I don’t need an idea of the human in the eternal or in the mind of God*** to be a human. I define what the human is by my own existence, contributing to the real material history of humanity.

*** Same thing. Well, maybe more . . . Same thing? Depends on your own allegiances.

My existence doesn’t just instantiate some universal. My existence really adds something to the world. Same with everything else. Everything adds to the totality of the universe’s actualities and possibilities and potentialities. 

It turned the traditional way of understanding the role of humanity and God in the universe on its head. And it’s a very democratic idea. To be continued. . . .

21st Century Kropotkin III: A Challenge to the Libertarians, Research Time, 09/07/2014

A little personal history. When I was in middle and high school, I had a friend who I lost contact with when university started. I met up with G again years later on Facebook, and he was a radical libertarian. We had several stimulating conversations over the following year, which was a worthwhile critical voice for my own political beliefs. My own thinking on several important matters became more nuanced because of G’s critiques and those of some of the folks he introduced me to. 

There are some awful stereotypes
about libertarianism that should be
combatted. Nonetheless, I'm not a
libertarian, nor do I wish to be.

But I never became a libertarian. I think that’s why G eventually defriended me on Facebook, and we hardly talked again, except once when he taunted me in a comment thread. I welcomed a voice that offered a set of political beliefs that were different than mine, precisely because it kept me out of groupthink habits and the resulting dogmatism. Yet when it became clear to him that I wouldn’t accept the dogma of his own libertarianism, G seemed to disconnect himself from me, even though we had spoken regularly for over a year.

I tell this story because there’s a point in Peter Kropotkin’s relation of the political history of Europe’s transition from the Medieval to the Modern period when he almost sounds like a libertarian. And I think this glimmer of resemblance constitutes a fundamental challenge to the essential premise of libertarian philosophy: the political primacy of the individual and the free market of independent individuals.

Kropotkin gives us a narrative of Europe’s transition from medieval society to the modern as the destruction of freedom by oppressive military forces. Communities and craftsmen’s guilds fostered cities of people working together for the common good and achieving remarkable prosperity. Medieval Europe held their cultural pinnacles in city-states, whose central organizing philosophy was an update of the Greek polis: each community was different, but all were equal, and confederated together for mutual defence, aid, and development. With slavery out of the question, their societies were free of most forms of hard hierarchy.

The development of the medieval city-states amped up in the 11th century, and climaxed in the 13th. The period of decadence began in the 15th and 16th centuries, as the grand old families of many city-states became oligarchs and despots, and the guilds grew alienated from their agricultural base in the peasantry. But the true death blow to this self-organized prosperity came with the assaults of the military state. The Catholic Church, as an institution, had taught for centuries that society should be unified and authoritarian. They combined with the growing military force of Europe’s kings to create the modern state.

When the military state crushed the free city-states of medieval Europe over the 17th to 18th centuries, the major thrust of the political movement over the following hundred years until Kropotkin’s time, the 1890s, was that all social and community bonds would be mediated by the functions of the state. My enthusiastic Hegelian friends should note another reason for my opposition to Hegel’s philosophy here: central to the German’s political metaphysics is the notion that the progress of society is the subsumption of all individual and community activities and identifications in the mediating institution of the state. Kropotkin’s philosophy lets you call this out as political authoritarianism.*

The French Revolution's outcome,
which was clearly a victory for the
freedom of working people.

* Kropotkin even argues that Hegel's treasured French revolution was just another form of authoritarianism. Far from freeing the people, it simply traded stewardship of the levers of state violence from the landed gentry and royals to the bourgeoisie and new capitalist class. He never mentions Hegel by name, however, but to anyone familiar with the philosophical tradition, the association is clear.

Here’s where Kropotkin’s narrative can become a critique of contemporary libertarianism. The essential focus of libertarian political philosophy is to make the individual, his needs, desires, and personal freedoms the paramount political principle. But, says Kropotkin, this concept of the totally free individual, unconnected from institutional or communal obligations is itself a creation of the militarized state. 

The modern state was created through the military force of Europe’s royalty and landed gentry (having become overpoweringly rich on colonial exploitation) unleashing a centuries-long wave of mass violence to break the bonds of social obligation and non-hierarchical organizations that were the backbone of the free city-states’ prosperity. Tradesmen’s guilds were suppressed because “there shall be no State within the State.” 

As the state and its functionaries mediated all social ties and obligations, the radically separate individual was the only way that adults could express themselves. The concept of the radically free individual needed the state to create it in the first place. Before this period of violence, the individual was free through the shared benefits of his social obligations, and his identity was a function of these relationships which enabled his prosperity in times of plenty and his survival, through the obligations of his fellows to care for him, in times of poverty. 

Libertarianism conceives of individuals as inherently radically free, any obligation being either totally voluntary or else a function of state repression. But it was only the repression of the state that destroyed the ability to conceive of how social obligation could free you. The freedom of libertarianism is entirely negative, freedom of the individual to disconnect himself from all obligation. The freedom of Kropotkin’s anarchism, inspired by the example of the mutual aid institutions that defined the medieval city-states, is an even greater freedom because it connects you in networks of social relations, mutual obligations, that empower you and all your compatriots.

I know which one I prefer.