Freedom From Thought, Research Time, 11/01/2018

I was reading an interesting article yesterday morning on the way to work. Joan Scott’s “How the Right Weaponized Free Speech” didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But it reminded me of those things, which made for a downbeat start to my day.

It discussed the victory of revanchist politics on most college campuses in North America today. The most vile, aggressive racist, sexist, and anti-trans expression is now considered protected speech. Meanwhile, attempts by the victims of racist, sexist, and anti-trans bullying and verbal assault are declared fragile snowflakes and fascists for wanting to have their places of education protected from such bullying.

You'll be free because I'll tell you exactly what to think!

You might read this and think, ‘Surely, it’s the opposite! Surely free speech is under siege on campus, thanks to those protestors!’ If you think that, it’s a sign of revanchism’s victory – the presumption that racist speech needs protection because it’s someone’s opinion.

Right there is the false equivalence that won the white supremacist wing their victory on campuses – that freedom to speak and discuss issues is the same as freedom to hold your opinion in the face of any and all criticism. Opinion has become sacred.

Gilles Deleuze wrote about this, in very abstract terms of course, in the final pages of What Is Philosophy?. Opinion was never supposed to be sacred, according to the values of free speech and free discussion.

Don't even say opinion is the battlefield, that free speech is about conflict over people’s opinions, and who shares which opinions. Opinion, says Deleuze, has the most potential of any other form of human thinking to destroy knowledge itself.

Opinion destroys knowledge because an opinion is an attitude that transforms an idea or a perspective into an aggressive posture. An opinion is the product of a dogma, a set of principles that can easily appear to be legitimate knowledge, but that’s a false appearance.

How can we make this distinction? Well, there are questions of falsifiability, of course. This is the old recourse to fidelity to truth, opposed to fidelity to a given opinion. If you hold a belief, but are willing to drop or change it in the face of contradictory of contrary* evidence, then you ultimately care more about truth than your particular opinion.

* Respectively.

That’s one distinction, but I think it doesn’t quite make the distinction I think is best. It doesn’t identify the toxic elements of any thinking in terms of opinion. Fidelity to the truth foregrounds correspondence – it distinguishes good from bad opinion. Good opinion is humbly held, falsifiable opinion. Bad opinion is dogma.

The political heart of Gilles Deleuze's work is a guide to fight
fascism where it lives and thrives – inside your own fearful soul,
when you're scared of taking responsibility for your own
thinking and knowledge.

Deleuze’s distinction is between opinion and creative thinking, between holding an opinion and seeking to become a genuine expert. See, when you hold an opinion with humility, that’s nice, but you still rely on some authority to sanctify that opinion. You still aren’t in charge of your knowledge – you’re following orders.

No one can ever be in charge of their knowledge at the intensity or comprehensiveness of becoming an expert in every subject. There’s too much to know. I’m instead talking about an attitude toward knowledge – learning enough about how knowledge itself works to know how to take charge of your own knowledge without skepticism becoming a universal acid.

When you think only in terms of your opinions, you think algorithmically. The opinion becomes a template that stamps out each new thought of your own according to its pattern. It’s cookie-cutter thinking, mechanistic thinking according to a plan.

Deleuze calls it the thought that ends thinking, because you become an echo, a copy. Your thoughts follow dogmas. As an artist, your product becomes entirely cliché. As a follower of science, you think all knowledge will ultimately reduce to some formula that can fit on a tshirt. As a thinker, you think only in talking points.

Such thinking is comfortable because you take no risks. You just pump out whatever is expected of you when you join a community that gives you your thoughts to think. Such a life may not be empty – you may have a lot of friends in that lazy community, and they may comfort you when you’re confused.

A life of opinion means never being confused again – you always know what to think and say. Because you’re not thinking, you’re repeating. Because you’re not speaking, you’re parroting.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Kinds of Freedom Do We Deserve? Research Time, 07/02/2017

Another stop on my trip through the classics of political philosophy. I wanted to skip ahead to the early and mid 1800s to revisit some John Stuart Mill. I felt like it was a proper response to a political climate where riots break out at events that preach hatred as a sacred expression of free speech.

When I was working at McMaster, I worked multiple times on an introductory course on moral and political philosophy. Rowdy used a textbook with excerpts and essays that covered classics like Mill, Hobbes, and Plato alongside contemporary lights like Dworkin, and more ordinary issues-based articles.

The fight against fascism and racism gets deservedly ugly.

One of those issues that we covered were campus speech codes, an odd form of college law that doesn’t really exist in Canada. It’s most prominent at colleges in the United States, where whole forms of expression have been identified to be banned from discourse on grounds of racializing insensitivity.

Most of these codes are products of the politics of the 1980s and early 90s, and aren’t in use anymore. As you can probably tell today.

I hope Rowdy isn’t using those articles anymore, because they’re explicitly rooted in a Reagan-era context. The modern context is very different – now that white nationalism has become the dominant mode of reactionary politics in America.

I find it incredulous that all kinds of op/ed perspectives in mainstream American newspapers are so shocked – Shocked! – by the violent reactions to Milo Yiannopolous’ speaking tour.* Click that link above and read through some of the insulting, abusive rabble-rousing in the typical Milo performance.

* And remember that he’s only the most prominent of the right-wing speaking tours criss-crossing the United States, stirring up reactionary resentment and inspiring violence. Video sting journalist James O’Keefe recently egged on his audience as they brutally beat two protestors at his speech.

So I’m revisiting one of the central figures of modern liberalism, one of the most fundamental philosophers of free speech. It will inform my engagement with these toxic politics of our time as a writer, an activist, and as a person.

There’s the prologue to my Mill period. What’s the point of my doing it?

Millions of people listen to what this man has to say. So one problem with
turning back to the classic source of contemporary values is that their
noble arguments won't be prepared for the perversions modern contexts
have brought to their great ideals.

If I can say there’s a general theme to my exploring the great thinkers of liberalism and libertarianism, it’s to see the complexity that’s forgotten about in alt-right messaging.

If you look at the rhetoric that our generation of conservative provocateurs throw around about free speech, it’s a very simple idea. I mean that in the sense that it sees a straightforward imperative that in real life has many more complexities and qualifications than they acknowledge.

Here are two examples of this oversimplifying understanding that alt-right folks use to make space for their abusive, violent behaviour. Let’s start with the social media lynch mob.

From its beginning, Twitter has made a core value for its platform that it was a space for total free speech. The problem is that – having organized in other forums like Reddit, 4Chan, 9gag, Imgur – alt-right troll armies and their bots leap onto their Twitter accounts and spam a target with so much verbal abuse as to smack them in the jaw psychologically.

R U triggered, bro?

If you go back to the classical texts and try to see the original context where this free speech idea developed, you don’t read anything about this phenomenon. It didn’t exist in 1859, for God’s sake.

You get in “On Liberty” a few platitudes about yelling “Fire” in a crowded theatre that I heard so often in six years of teaching academic philosophy that the phrase lost all meaning for me. But the point is that your right to freedom of expression and opinion can’t imply a similar freedom of social speech act when the context of your action does harm.

Here’s my second example: protests so intense as to cancel a Milo performance. It’s a simple refutation. The alt-right conflates having a platform in front of an audience of hundreds in the room and millions on the internet with basic free expression entitlements.

We have a right to free opinions, but not to a massive platform to promote those opinions. If Milo has it, then we all have it, and there aren’t too many who are financially and otherwise capable of mounting a cross-country speaking tour.

Here’s the problem. Try actually changing any red-pilled mind with these calm, rational arguments.