Hopeless Helpless I: Power to Poor People, Research Time, 21/04/2016

It's been a pretty busy time for me lately, which is why I haven’t been able to go through Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth as thoroughly as I’d like to have done yet. The first of the book’s six chapters is about understanding the material powers of poor people. It’s something that actually needs a little work to get done.

Understanding that poor people have real, material power in the world is a tough proposition. We seem, as a society, accustomed to thinking of poor people as inherently passive and powerless. 

Does a boy like this, working in a Pakistani brick
foundry, deserve only our pity? Or can we learn from him?

They’re recipients of welfare benefits or charity, the passive role of waiting for handouts or aid. Their passivity could be used to encourage sympathy for them, like calls for charity or for poverty alleviation policies from government. Or their passivity could be a reason to despise them, like the (often racialized) accusations that the poor are lazy, contemptuous, or criminal. But they remain passive.

Negri discusses two of the most profound ways to dismiss and obscure the power of poor people. One of these was Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical God Is Charity. This was the Pope’s official dismissal of all calls for social justice as unrealistic for people to strive for in the modern world. All that we could achieve for the poor is to pity them and give them our charity.

When Negri and Michael Hardt wrote Commonwealth, Benedict XVI was still the Pope. Given Francis I’s election shortly after his predecessor retired for health reasons, it makes me wonder if there weren’t many in the College of Cardinals who thought true social justice needed restoration in the Catholic Church’s mission.

Benedict’s dismissal of poor people’s power and dignity rains with a common theme of contemporary life – hopelessness. It’s really only in the past few generations that the idea that humanity will likely drive itself to extinction has really become mainstream. To the point where it’s a casually accepted discussion point.

This is a radical idea compared to human history – the idea that the entire human race would be gone within a few generations. Not raptured or elevated, or any other religious apocalyptic visions. There have always been those as long as there’s been religions that imagined the end of the world at all. 

In many ways, Francis I is the Pope of hope.

I just mean sad, final, plodding extinction. The base indignity of cold, simple, stupid death. We will drown in our own shit. This is the endpoint of our global ecological crisis – we will either dig ourselves out of it or we won’t. 

This hopelessness began before the ecological crisis, if we’re talking about the general feeling of cultural dread that comes with the first shocks of the most thorough atheism. I mean this in the sense that we now realize that we live in a world that has no absolute meaning or transcendent justification beyond the brute fact of its existence.

That feeling of hopelessness about the aloneness of humanity and the indifference of the universe to us kicked into gear in the West in the late 19th century. But that was only for an elite of intellectuals and philosophers – the foundational existentialists and their fellow travellers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,* or the young Max Weber.

* If you make sure you take his devout Orthodox Christianity not as a dogmatic religious experience, but as a mystical gesture of gratitude to the Czar who spared him from a firing squad.

The true popular shocker about the irredeemable, hopeless nature of humanity was the terror of the First World War. I keep returning to this epoch because I’m trying to find the best way to deal with the heritage of this influential period in human thought. 

It’s vital for Utopias because the hope of utopian thinking meets its opposite in the profound pessimism that dominated the last century of thought. This is the fight that hope needs to survive in politics and in human society. The book Utopias itself will be a dramatization of that fight in philosophical writing. 

Understanding the power of the poor could be a major element of hope’s victory in this battle. Because if the abjectly poor can generate this hope from their own horrid condition, then we can all dream of a better world for us all.

But I have to understand the most profound conception of that horror, dread, profane, abject, hopeless pessimism. There are many ways you could go. The immediately intuitive path to the profound would, I suppose be Martin Heidegger. Well, let’s have another look . . . To be continued.

And Write in the New Style, Composing, 05/10/2015

You know, I never really liked Jacques Derrida’s stuff for the longest time. I still have a lot of issues with his presumptions, his starting points, and definitely his writing style. But I think my biggest issue with him was the way people talked about him and his ideas.

Imagine you’re a writer whose job it is to come up with new ideas and explain them relatively sensibly. That's writing philosophy. It’s a style of writing that requires you to push a little bit at the limits of what your language can do. That's why philosophy is sometimes written in such weird, inaccessible ways.

I hope what I do in my books, my philosophy essays, and on this blog is explain some very strange ideas in increasingly accessible ways. I’m not sure that I always succeed. 

But the best part about having a writing blog like this is that you can be experimental, try new things, some folks will enjoy it or not, and there’ll be another set of ideas in a day or two. The lead time on trying out new things is shorter than it's ever been before. 

So as long as you get the proper style of a blog down (casual, if slightly nerdy conversation), you can spin around as many trippy ideas as you want. It ends up making your language more accessible, less needlessly technical, a little more seductive, and more clear. 

I tried to do this in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. And I aim for Utopias to be even better at this style of philosophy. I’d like to write philosophy in a style about as accessible as a nerdy listicle, but with the conceptual rigour of the classics of the tradition.

Sometimes, I think people find
Derrida's writing so difficult to
understand, because they first
approach it presuming that it's
going to be difficult and
confusing. Because I always
have the ego when I'm reading
that, of course, I'll understand
this book decently, I can
overcome difficult parts better.
At least, I think I can.

Sometimes, like this weekend on an inter-city train, I’m reading a book by Derrida. And I think about this eventual goal of mine for writing philosophy. It gets frustrating.

When I was a student, I knew a few professors who studied the books Derrida wrote in his Spectres of Marx period, from the 1980s until his death. One of the ideas he explored was a conception of the messianic – thinking about the world as though it were leading up to a profound transformation into a new framework that would be paradise compared to the way things are now.

The idea’s pretty common. Derrida took the term from the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religions where profound transformations of reality are central to the belief system. The appearances of God to humans in Judaism, the incarnation of God as human in Christianity, and the revelation of God’s final word in Islam. 

And from a secular perspective, you can hear it from transhumanist discussion and any cyberpunkish talk of The Singularity, following Ray Kurzweil. 

Derrida talks about experiencing time in your life as if existence were moving toward a time-to-come. And I heard a lot of people use this phrase without really being able to explain it to me. They’d just say that it wasn’t the future, but a time-to-come. 

I remember being 22 years old and completely turned off Derrida because people would talk about his ideas this way, unable to explain even in a simple sense what was actually going on. 

Now that I’ve started reading some of the books where he uses this term, I can say that I actually found it pretty simple to understand. Maybe I'm deluding myself, thinking that I can easily understand a writer famous for being difficult and obscure out of a bizarre fit of egomania. 

Maybe, because I haven’t had access to university library paywalls in years, I haven’t had my reading confidence broken by contending with a deluge of poorly written academic journal articles on the same subject. But it seems pretty clear to me.

Time to come. It means you don’t really think of a clear distinction between present and future as such. Ironic for a perspective that expects a radical transformation of reality in the future.

But not really. Because you live your life in constant anticipation of the messianic moment when the world is transformed. So the present becomes this rush toward a magic point. Call it a singularity if you want. The real distinction in time isn't between then, now, and later. It’s between the time leading up to the transformation, and after it.

When you live and understand your life in terms of anticipating that transformation, that's time-to-come. I don’t think anyone ever explained this to me, but that's what I read in the book this afternoon.