Humanity's Duty of Care, Research Time, 01/02/2017

I want to dive a little into Moses Mendelssohn’s account of the theoretical social contract here. Because even though most undergraduate educations in philosophy and political theory seem to ignore him, he offers a unique and remarkable take on the concept of the social contract.

And his vision is rooted in the fundamentals of Jewish ethical education. Those principles include:

Mendelssohn's conception of humanity as an inherently benevolent
creature can seem laughably ridiculous today, but only because we've
been so long accustomed to thinking that the corrupt and destructive
is normal and natural. Or natural because we've made it normal.

1) Humans are inherently social creatures.

2) Because society can only function in an atmosphere of general benevolence, humans are basically good creatures.

3) Our anger, hatred, and drives to violence and destruction are corruptions.

So where does that leave the state? How does it come to exist if it isn’t fulfilling that Hobbesian function of the monopoly on legitimate violence to protect us from our naturally violent and paranoid selves?

States emerge from societies when those societies become too complicated to organize without authorities and regulations. Mendelssohn doesn’t start from the traditional chaos and paranoia of social contract theory’s state of nature – his state of nature is a place of chaos and confusion, but not violence or fear.

Humanity’s state of nature is a society where no person or institution has any legitimacy to tell me how I’m to help my neighbours. Where no one has any right to tell me how to spend my surplus wealth and power to aid my friends and my society.

Which is fine for small group of a few tens, or even a couple of hundred. But when society becomes any more complicated than this, it can be genuinely confusing to find the best way to help the wider world.

We've let ourselves be suckered in by popular visions of humanity as
cruel, vindictive creatures.

We can never be sure if we’re giving what we’re able. Or maybe we can’t be sure if we’ve arranged our own situation to be able to give all that we’re able – if I were more ingenious about how I lived, maybe I could give more.

Most insidious, it’s difficult to know whether my acts that, from my perspective, help someone don’t actually cause indirect and systemic affects that end up harming many other people. As my social world globalizes – if only to the next neighbourhood over – I can no longer be sure of the effects of what I do.

And so government becomes the institution through which we give over our autonomy in this regard. We don’t give over all our freedoms – that model of trading freedom for security has no place in Mendelssohn’s vision.*

* Or, of course, the Jewish vision of social ethics.

Government is the institution that can mobilize the resources required to study and understand all the processes and relationships – economic, ecological, social, institutional – that constitute our complexifying society. So it’s the only institution that can mobilize the knowledge required to provide most efficiently and fairly for the common good.

Mendelssohn provides a radical vision. Especially given the mainstream political presumptions of the modern West, where government is anything but efficient. Where government is an impediment on the real source of efficiency – the market of self-interested businessmen.

We can no longer live with the cynical presumption that humanity is
inherently cruel and violent. The prospect of real violence dominating
our society is too terrifying to accept it anymore.

Mendelssohn’s thinking is a rebuke to those presumptions that a chaotic system of greedy, self-interested, short-sighted people will actually produce the most efficient, beneficial results for society.

On his premises, self-interest and greed are corruptions of the fundamental benevolence required for society to exist at all. So expecting the optimal good and benefit to come from the competitive jockeying of greedy people is a ridiculous paradox.

And Mendelssohn’s own place as a Jewish German thinker of the 1700s don’t prevent him from informing contemporary political thinking. No more than Thomas Hobbes’ place in 1600s England prevents him from being a centrepiece of introductory political theory classes today.

Mendelssohn’s concepts can fit well with some of the political theories of governance I’ve discovered over the last year. Partha Chatterjee, for example, provides an analysis of the many benefits in economic, ecological, and liberatory development government can provide when all people seek to use such institutions for overall good.

What we need today are vibrant traditions of political and moral thinking that provide a place for the productive role of governance as a means to enrich and benefit us all. Moses Mendelssohn – and the Jewish traditions of morality underlying his thinking – can be such an inspiration.

The Injustices of the Moment Are Our Eternal, Research Time, 31/01/2017

Here's a deeper theme of my in-progress Utopias, my published Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, and a lot of my current philosophical and journalism work – justice, understanding what justice is, and what it can be in my world.

It’s a bit of an old problem in the tradition of philosophy. And as I look through the different corners of the history of Western philosophy, I see different approaches to that problem which will be useful to my own work.

Elements from the Jewish philosophical traditions will appear in Utopias both explicitly and implicitly. I found in Jerusalem a little while ago a wonderful example of how a work of philosophy engages the concept of justice itself and the practical workings of justice in our own world.

Chava and Fyedka from Fiddler on the Roof: A Jew marries outside the
faith – a gloss on the dangerous practice of eroding a community,
when there's no sign that the minority religion will ever be respected
in that household.

It’s a moment where Moses Mendelssohn appears, from our perspective, literally hundreds of years ahead of his kind. It’s a footnote that runs nearly two pages long, arguing for a woman’s right to divorce her husband.

Let's remind ourselves that Jerusalem was published in 1767. Kind of a conservative setting. And a woman’s right to divorce is based in her basic right to live her life as she chooses.

If her husband radically changes or breaks the terms under which they agreed to marry, that gives her the right to leave the marriage free of penalty. Because her husband has broken his promises to her.

An argument that cuts at the heart of the era’s immense cultural and political conservatism. An argument for divorce on a woman’s initiative on the ground of universal moral principles – fidelity to the terms of a promise, the fundamental autonomy of a person to live as she wishes.

Now consider the example he uses to illustrate this. It’s an example with a deep and chilling political relevance to mid-1700s German society. Even more chilling when you read Mendelssohn today.

Rahel Vernhagen, the Jewish-to-Christian
convert at the heart of Hannah Arendt's first
major book.

When a man converts from Judaism to Christianity, his wife has the right to divorce him for those universal reasons. A key part of the marriage contract is the manner in which they will raise their children. So if a woman gets married with the implication that their children will be raised in her religion, she expects that to result.

Moses Mendelssohn’s life was defined by the constant attempts fellow German intellectuals made to convert him to Christianity. If his life is any indication – and there’s plenty of historical evidence beyond that implication – then German Jews were under constant pressure from neighbours and authorities to convert.

And in the patriarchal laws and culture of 1700s Germany, if a man converted to Christianity, he was obligated to have his wife and their children all baptized and remove them permanently from the Jewish community. It was a form of hostile conversion – the work of converting only one Jew brought a full family to the Church.

Mendelssohn’s argument for the right to divorce was more than a recognition of one important aspect of justice and freedom. It was also a direct response, calling upon values of justice and freedom, to the real political problem of the social pressures grinding away at the Jewish communities of Germany.

The real injustices that you see in front of you in your own life call you to seek after the fundamental ideal of justice and freedom.

Confronting the Need for Laws, Research Time, 27/01/2017

Here's a less intense – but still nicely humming – problem of modern politics. Dealing with libertarians. When I write Utopias, this will be a tough problem I tackle. Because libertarians and radical democrats should be perfect allies, despite their differences.

But the radical divergence comes over the question of governance. The libertarian ideal is to have literally no government – a society of autonomous individuals binding themselves as people through voluntary contracts.

The only true positive content to any utopia that wouldn't directly
collapse into terror: an imperative, "Be excellent to each other!"

Which is quite appealing, but doesn’t work out all that well when actually applied to real economies where there are massive inequalities.

Yet there is one common point that every democrat (radical or not) shares with every libertarian – A deep distrust of government as a constant danger to ordinary people, through oppression or corruption. Libertarians focus on the oppression. Democrats focus on the corruption.

Libertarian thinking presumes that government is inherently coercive, and so a vector for oppression. The historical fact that many governments have and do oppress people in different ways lends them some credibility.

But democracy is founded on the notion that government can be perfected – If the problem of real governments is their corruption, then you’re presumed that there can be a non-corrupt government. You know that it’s at least possible to imagine a functional, entirely benevolent government.

And if you can imagine it, you can at least work your hardest to inch progressively closer to that ideal.

Dig back a couple of centuries, and an overlooked Moses Mendelssohn offers an ideal for governance and political leadership that can overcome libertarian distrust of the state. A moral value at the heart of good governance.

No, Helen, there will be no Happiness Patrol.

Benevolence.

The most excellent form of government is the most benevolent – a government that provides the perfect conditions of social harmony, happiness, and peace. But this doesn’t come from the coercion of law. This isn’t the Happiness Patrol.

Mendelssohn describes a population so perfectly educated and enlightened that we’re simply kind and peaceful to each other. All of this would come from the proper education.

In the 1780s, this kind of naïveté was more than a century away from dying out. So you could imagine that a government could provide universal moral education alongside universal science and humanities education.

But consider the ideal of what education is supposed to be – It’s any process of human maturity. Growing up as a person, you’re supposed to become a better person.

Mendelssohn sincerely postulates, at the heart of his political thinking, the notion that humanity can become perfect. That we’ll all constitute a society where each of us will do the best for each other. The job of a good – no, an excellent – government is to encourage each of us to approach that moral and ethical virtue.

How we should lead out lives as people – to make the world a better place than when you found it – is how we should lead our governments. In such a world of angels, the police and law enforcement would be unnecessary. Even law itself wouldn’t be needed. People would naturally be good to each other.

If we can imagine that, and push ourselves in that direction as we grow older. Maybe be good enough parents and elders in your community that the young people around you are on the whole more virtuous than the old folks.

Belief in humanity’s perfectibility is the foundation of a positive utopia. As long as that vision of perfection is a society where we’re all excellent to each other.

Making a Tradition of Yourself, Composing, 26/01/2017

There’s plenty I find really fruitful for political and moral philosophy in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. I’m not even really sure where to start.

Most obvious at the moment are the political principles. Right now, in my research for Utopias, I’m looking in classical eras for theoretical resources. Drawing an inheritance of concepts for my own work that sits a little to the side of the typical mainstream.

The history of human ideas is a tangled, living library. The artist has
some very nice sci-fi landscapes.

A typical approach that a lot of philosophers have when they tackle current political problems, is to draw on the concepts of figures from farther back in history.

For instance, you want to understand the roiling, chaotic, frightening political turmoil of contemporary America under the Trump Presidency. Excellent – You’re not the only one. So you go to the source that may inspire your own thinking, or which has an immense influence in the field you work most in.

One of the first go-to figures is Immanuel Kant – alongside Aristotle, probably the most fundamental fulcrum in Western philosophy’s development. Also known for a substantial, and equally influential approach to moral and political thought. Why not start there? It’s obvious, isn’t it?

So you try to understand this intense problem in contemporary politics through the conceptual machinery in this noteworthy philosopher. Excellent – I hope we can learn a lot.

But I have my suspicions. The problem with returning to mainstream texts in the tradition is precisely that they’re mainstream. Now, I’m not about to become some kind of hipster of the history of philosophy.* But a suspicion about the relation between the widely-known ideas of a widely-known text, and the currents of wider culture.

* Not to say that I’ve never been one myself. Even a little.

A philosophical concept doesn’t become massively influential without having touched on some important aspect of its time – culturally and politically. It’s in dialogue with the world around it, influencing that world, and being influenced by it. So a concept that hits it big expresses a cultural theme that many disparate events seem to express as well.

For example, when I went back to Kant, I didn’t necessarily go back to his most typical ideas for moral and ethical thinking – the categorical imperative, what’s broadly called deontology.

For one thing, it might end up being bad history – Kant himself wouldn’t necessarily have been a Kantian, and might not even have considered himself a deontologist about morality.

But as far as I’m concerned, I wanted to find a few different ideas because I wanted to find a counterweight to the mainstream. The problem with concepts that connect sharply with mainstream thinking is this – What if the mainstream is the problem?

If you're wondering whether it's ethically right to punch Nazis, the
answer is a resounding yes. 1) Because alt-right goons threaten and
harass people continually themselves, and 2) Those who want to
destroy democracy must not be given a democratic platform if
that democracy is to survive their assault on it.

What if you’re trying to work out some concepts, ideas, and strategies for critiquing the mainstream? If your point is to find alternatives to a mainstream that isn’t going in good directions. That might be heading for violence on very large scales.

Violence for which concepts of nationhood, belonging, and ethnic-cultural conformity provide very explicit motives. So when I find a lot of the groundwork for this thinking in the presumptions and framework principles of how Kant writes about politics, I’m going to find my inspirations in different places.

The historical aspects of Utopias – at least its explicitly political sections – will go through two parallel routes. On the one hand, there’s sketching the origin of dangerous conceptions of race, ethnicity, state power, and the hierarchy of peoples, which lie at the heart of the terrifying disasters of Western history.

On the other hand, there’s the more important history that I’ll be making. Plucking concepts and thinkers that have offered alternatives to these mainstream ideas. They might not have been picked up at the time, but maybe they can provide some ideas and lessons for the concepts needed for our era.

I’m not making a point that this counter-tradition is an explicit project unfolding throughout history. I don’t know if Antonios Negri or Gramsci drew on Mendelssohn’s thought or Jerusalem in particular. And for how I’m approaching history, I don’t have to care. I’m not doing a scholarly history here. I’m using history to help me through a contemporary problem.

When Utopias gets into history, I won’t be commenting on an already-existing tradition. I’ll be weaving a tradition out of my own inheritance of ideas.

Visiting Jerusalem, A History Boy, 24/01/2017

I’ve been reading Jerusalem by Moses Mendelssohn over the last week or so. It’s one of those books that I read and think, “I wish I had read this years earlier!” There are quite a few reasons behind that.

One lies in my immediate reaction to the book’s ideas. For instance, he takes a refreshing view on the old social contract concept. Writing in the 1780s, Mendelssohn describes the “state of nature” as a society where all people are free and no one has authority over anyone.

Hobbes described this as a state of perpetual paranoia and war – violence is humanity’s primary social essence. Rousseau as an eden of sensual delights – the violence is gone, but the ego remains. Mendelssohn: It’s a society where no one has the right to tell me how I can help my neighbours and fellows – the natural drive of humanity is benevolence.

One of many, many Jerusalems that exist.

How utterly refreshing.

Also, how utterly Jewish. As I’ve learned more about many of that religious tradition’s ethical and moral ideas, what I love most is that a fundamental Jewish value is benevolence.

Actually, it’s more than a value – it’s an ontological principle about humanity. Right from the primal, most basic level of understanding what humanity is, the Jewish principle is that we are benevolent creatures. And we only become evil through bad education and bad role models.

As Mendelssohn puts it, because we fundamentally desire that others be benevolent to us, we ourselves are naturally benevolent.

And as I reflected on this idea, I thought to myself – “Why didn’t I read any Mendelssohn when I was studying this philosophy?”

I did my undergrad philosophy degree at Memorial, and I worked with a lot of folks who specialized in 1700-1800s German thought. Mendelssohn was a contemporary of Immanuel Kant, and a famous public intellectual of the period.

Yet he was never part of the course materials, never part of the official chronologies.

In all fairness, if we’re talking about historical influence on the major themes of the period’s German philosophy, it’s reasonable to put Mendelssohn to the side. Mendelssohn’s political philosophy in Jerusalem – his most famous book – is unabashedly Jewish.

Jewish influence was simply not considered as legitimate a form of
thinking in 1700s Germany. Mendelssohn had to deal all his life
with the constant obnoxious pestering of other famous intellectuals
trying to convert him to Christianity. It makes me think that public
opposition to Judaism – in all corners of Christian Germany – was
a major reason why Mendelssohn's thought constitutes an alternate
history of philosophy. Concepts that we have to dig for.

Its ontology is quite secular – deist at best about the question of God’s existence. But the book’s ethics and moral investigations are blatantly and inescapably Jewish. With Jerusalem, you can see Mendelssohn bringing the Jewish tradition of morality and political thinking into the deist context of late 1700s Germany.

In that mission, it was a failure. Kant’s own thinking remained supremely influential on subsequent philosophy in the German countries. Johann Fichte brought to Kant’s models of how knowledge worked a new grounding in experience that overcame a lot of “thing-in-itself” issues, and anticipated a lot of ideas in phenomenology.*

* I wrote my undergraduate honours thesis on this, and I’m still quite proud of what I did.

Then he became a rabid German nationalist. Hegel made the core concepts of Christianity into a framework that functioned as the scaffolding of highest human reason.

A Jew bringing Jewish ideas into the context of metaphysics was not welcome. No matter the real quality of his ideas.

As I plan out the structure and historical influences of Utopias, there are two interesting strains where I’ll draw for its core concepts. Regarding the explicitly political stuff, it will be a continuation of what I call – for lack of an academic consensus term – radical democracy.

That’s a materialist approach to politics that picks up from the rejection of marxism found in the work of Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Antonio Negri – screw the dialectical historicism to embrace the contingency of politics and people power from the smallest possible scales on up.

They and the more ontologically-focussed writers of the tradition like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari draw deep inspiration from Spinoza. Spinoza, parallel to Mendelssohn, was bringing many ideas from the Jewish tradition into the philosophical mainstream of his own time.

Radical democracy – its snaking path of conceptual development through those French and Italian writer-activists, Althusser, Gramsci, Marx, Machiavelli, Spinoza – is an alternate tradition that wriggles underneath the mainstream schools that dominate the history students typically learn.

That history isn’t only pragmatist, materialist, focussed on people power and the dignity of the poor. It’s also Jewish.