It's Toughest of All to Accept, Research Time, 18/05/2018

A brief few paragraphs to have a go at a quick classification. Following on from what I talked about yesterday, here are some substantive ways that the animating concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy set them apart from what’s still the mainstream.

I mean, I do consider the academic ghettoization of the many different philosophies smacked with the “Continental” label to be shameful territorial pissing. One of those paths of thought so smacked is Deleuze and Guattari’s. That annoys me, because their ideas include solutions for a lot of the conceptual problems that are roadblocks for mainstream North American university philosophy.

If you follow their ideas all the way to their natural conclusions, they tend to take out the whole road along with the barricades. But aside from a little rubble, the way forward is clear.

You know she won't live. But then again – Who does?

So what are those ideas?

One. Evaluation is always context-dependent. That goes for moral, mathematical, scientific, empirical. Anytime you examine a process, try to make sense of it, identify a value – that assessment is always specific to a contingency, a particular way the world is.

It’s never necessary and universal, because even the existence of the universe it contingent. It need never have been. Period.

Think about this example. You might think that a context-independent, universal, necessary truth is that chattel slavery of humans is wrong. But if there never were humans at all, would this truth have come to exist?

If the Cambrian extinction had never happened and the Earth’s biosphere developed in totally different directions, any question to do with humans wouldn’t make any sense because there’s be no humans. Ever. Not in future, present, or past. They’re inconceivable. Vague fictions at best – certainly not the sort of things you’d expect to find any truth more solid than the canon of a tv franchise.

Two. Nothing has an endpoint that sums up its existence. Processes stop. Death doesn’t bring anything about a life into a neat little bow. Death just ends it. Authors do that, but they do it by stitching events into narratives. That’s not a life – it’s a story.

Three. Anything that can change can blow to pieces and destroy itself. So everything can destroy itself.

It’s not a comforting world, if you need certainties to comfort you. I recommend cultivating strength of character. Not a perfect process, never really complete, always more work to be done. But then that's true of everything.

What Can Become a Tradition? Research Time, 01/03/2018

The term ‘resurrection’ is loaded, especially to someone who grew up in a historically Christian culture like me. It’s ironic today, because I want to talk about the resurrection of pagan religion in the West.

It was an illuminating example in a densely brilliant essay by Isabelle Stengers in The Guattari Effect. It extends a dialogue she and Guattari had when he was alive, about what it means to continue a tradition.

Question – Does a tradition need unbroken transmission across all generations from origin to now, if it’s going to be a genuine tradition?

The last several decades have seen a revival of Pagan rituals,
festivals, and genuine devotional religious ceremonies in the West.
Not only in Europe, but among settler cultures in North America
as well. But is it an authentic paganism if the tradition of the
religion was broken, and broken so long ago?

It started with an exchange between Stengers and Guattari about the nature of progress in anything’s development. The first context was how to understand the implications of evolution. If you take Darwinism seriously, you actually have to throw out any talk of higher and lower organisms.

The Medieval way of thinking ordered the world into hierarchies. The classification system in the Great Chain of Being may have been getting more complicated, and all the talk of God never needed to be said anymore. But until Darwin, you still ranked them.

And we kept ranking them after Charles Darwin the person wrote. But you now had this thoroughly materialist way of thinking about life. What does that imply for the reality of rank? Of a scale of “higher to lower” organisms by phylum or species? A chain that you moved up as you developed?

It's gone. Start from this fact – All the species that exist today are genuinely contemporary. This includes the bacteria. Folks typically think of bacteria as the lowest form of life, because one-celled organisms were the first to develop and bacteria are one-celled organisms.

But the bacteria that exist today are bacteria that have gone through nearly four billion years of contingent evolution. They’ve had just as much time as us. So if passage through time means advancement up the great chain of evolution, why are they still bacteria?

Because Earth is not the current place in an evolutionary process of creatures growing more advanced. Earth is a highly entropic system of hydrocarbons that’s had energy pumped into it for four billion years. We are the current era in a roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity.

Bryozoans have existed for nearly 500 million years. They are
literally bags of microorganisms that live as a fist-sized single
organism. It moves, perceives, eats, excretes, and reproduces
asexually. The Bryozoans of today are utterly different from
the ones that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, except
that they are still bryozoans.

What the hell does this have to do with neo-paganism?

That conception of existence – roiling chaos of highly complex contingent activity – is an incredibly abstract description. Words heavy with very precise meanings expressed generally enough that many other contexts express it too.

Cultures change over time – contingent development in a chaotic world. The competing, older concept is the chain of being from lower to higher forms – progress as advancement in rank. A tradition consists in a common task developing over time. So you continue a tradition by relaying that task – passing it along.

Pagan religions in Europe – Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse, and Germanic – flourished two thousand years ago. Christianity wiped out all the theology and absorbed pagan customs into its own practice, now seamlessly. New Pagans build their new tradition from archaeological and anthropological research on those ancient religions. They build their own practices from these fragments.

If you think of tradition as a chain, any temporal break ends the tradition. The reconstructed version developed in the late 20th century isn’t authentic to the organic Pagan religions of ancient Europe because of that break. There were no Pagan Yoda figures in hiding until Christianity let its institutional guard down.

But if you understand development as contingent chaos, then temporal continuity doesn't matter. Recurrence without continuity can happen, if conditions develop that make a tradition’s resurrection possible. So authenticity is a matter only of engagement, care, and a spirit of fidelity. You’re no receptacle. You can learn.

Subtle Doctors for Subtle Differences, Research Time, 29/01/2018

Pretty much everyone who writes on Gilles Deleuze as a scholar ends up engaging somehow with the ideas of Hegel. Not because Deleuze was a Hegelian in any way,* but because his work was threaded with profound and cutting critiques of the whole Hegelian way of thinking.

When I set out to write Utopias, it was early 2014. I put the outline
together, in a very rough form. That gave me my research guide. I
knew and I know that I'd never have been able to be comprehensive
enough to satisfy everyone – that no one would be able to ask a
question like, "What about what X has to say?" An inescapable
question. I gave myself eight years – I'm now at the halfway
mark, and I have this blog. Manuscript drafted by 2022.

* But if I were ever to come across an academician’s argument that Deleuze actually was a Hegelian, I’d be impressed by its daring and desperation. Daring because it stands against so many of Deleuze’s most explicit motives and goals. Desperate because the scholarship must be overflowing with so many disparate takes that only derangement can distinguish you. Unless it’s character assassination.

I want to see if I can get a very quick but accurate assessment of the Deleuze–Hegel relationship in the next few hundred words of this blog. It’ll be an exercise in the kind of fast yet insightful writing required when philosophy’s history is a tool for a more creative purpose.

When Deleuze’s work was first blowing up in French intellectual circles – the mid-late-1960s – damn near everyone had some element of Hegelian thinking in their philosophy. What does that mean?

A typical mainstream philosophical thinker in France – whether linguist, psychiatrist, social scientist, or socialist – considered the most critical dynamic in any situation the contradiction. Real developments hinged on contradictions – perfectly opposed conflicts, as intractable as A + not-A.

In the marxist politics of the era, for example, contradictions were seen as the engine of revolutions – all the constituents of an industrial society came together in the contradiction of the owner-capitalists and the worker-labourers. The conflict between those two classes determined every other aspect of a society – all other relationships and dynamics depended on how that opposition played out.

Sometimes, I feel constrained by that timeline. As though I could never
squeeze enough work into that time period to achieve a book with the
creative potential I think Utopias can have. The blog has kept my
research on track, and kept it organized. This was unexpected, but a
great benefit – it's helped keep me in step with the times too. Even
the most prestigious professors can't devote all their time to
research and writing – they have teaching, administration, and
promotional work to do. At least my own years conceiving of
Utopias were spent in the chaos of today's contingent labour.
I didn't have to work too hard at keeping my feet in the real world.

All the subtle differences in a society are functions of that contradiction. So if you understand the contradiction’s own dynamics, you’ll be able to understand all the subtler differences in your society. You just deduce the subtle and complex from the simple contradiction.

How do you find the contradiction? Two steps. First, identify the dominant trend in society – its most ascendant feature, if you can follow the analogy. Then, work out what a precisely opposing force would be. If you’re thinking sociologically, it might be a very small, underdeveloped phenomenon.

An example. Think back to marxism. The Shropshire farm boys first coming to the city for the freedom of making good money on those factory floors had no idea they – or at least their class of people – would be so historically pivotal. But those underpaid, spat-upon factory workers were the other half of the dynamic whose back-and-forth would determine how all of English society would develop.

The story itself is inspiring. But that’s not actually how society develops. Same goes for any process – the differences that make a difference aren’t contradictions. They could be contradictions – but contradictions are just one among a vast number of kinds of difference. No by their nature more important than any other.

There might not even be a society whose conflicts have any common theme at all – no less a society for all that messiness.

That said, I knew one thing from the beginning – I was not a
marxist. And I'm still not. Because so much of the marxist
tradition was dominated by the rigidity of Hegelian
thinking that marxist politics became disastrous. Antonio
Gramsci's critiques of his own radical movement haven't
been heard by people today on the front lines. Union
leaders today think solidarity will come naturally from
every group in society outside the masters. But some
interests matter more than others, and what might look
like a glaring, powerful contradiction is really a play of
ineffective surfaces.

Go back to that example of England, where Karl Marx did his first sociological and economic research – that dedicated scientific Hegelian. He found a society whose values were dominated by class superiority – the alliance of landed aristocrats and industry millionaires whose political compromise was to keep the poor in their place.

Not only did the rich dominate the lives of the poor, but popular moral dogma – in informal culture and formal education – taught that such an order was right. Marx saw that same dynamic inspiring absolutist racism in the colonial economy.

The rich have right over the poor – so the poor Englishman would always feel rich compared to the colonized and enslaved African. So racial dynamism is determined by the structure of the fundamental contradiction.

The society perpetuated the very division that would tear it down. The conflict between rich and poor becomes irreconcilable, sparking a revolution that would be humanity’s aufheben. The contradictions are preserved, but transformed so that they reconcile.

The procedure makes perfect sense in conventional logic. And Hegel’s book Logic too. But it isn’t actually how real differences in the world work.

That was Deleuze’s contribution – Hegel put simplification first, because formal logic proceeded in simple functions. But logic is a tool, which we invented. What’s primary is the material mess from which we emerged. That a tool helps you understand the world better in the best places to use it, doesn’t mean that tool is how you see the world’s essence.

Our universe is one of contingency, complexity, feedback loops, interference, chaotic collisions where small, innocuous events can explode in their significance through nothing in their own makeup.

Look at imperialist England. Yes, you can reduce the racist culture of white supremacy to a symptom of the rich-owner/poor-worker dynamic – and our current culture of white supremacy was an ideology designed to make the poor European worker accept his own slavery by making him master of another kind of slave.

But once assembled, the cultural process of white supremacy can develop through the dynamics of its own components and affects. Its relationship to the economic dynamic of centre-periphery is no longer as its function, but as a participant in feedback.

Whether an event or a dynamic ends up having world-shattering significance isn’t a matter of logic, but luck. That’s Deleuze’s rebuttal to the Hegelian way of thinking. Embrace our contingency, our fragility. Build an ethic for fragility.

Where Does Morality Come From Anyway? Research Time, 19/01/2018

That’s one hell of a question to start with, and I’m not going to say the few hundred words I write here will be definitive. Too many people in the world and human history speak definitively about morality. So I’m just going to riff.

What am I riffing on? An essay in that collection of Deleuze scholars discussing his influences. This one is about the ideas of David Hume that made it into his thinking.

David Hume once described matter as moving with the necessity of
balls across a table when they're smacked with a cue. Yet he also
said that we could never know if an event was truly necessary, no
matter how often we saw it repeat. And it's just as likely that no
one even started playing snooker in the first place.

The influence of Hume on Deleuze is an interesting little avenue, first of all. Deleuze’s first book was Empiricism and Subjectivity, a small book about Hume’s philosophical ideas. But Deleuze didn’t publish another work that size until his book on Nietzsche, which moved in some very different directions.

Deleuze referred to the eight years between those books as lost, of a sort. He was teaching high school and college down in Lyon. A lifelong Parisian, with all the attitudes that implies, Deleuze was bored as shit down south. In terms of his thinking, he ended up moving in totally different directions after that near-decade of research and reconsideration.

His first source of concepts to build a revolutionized empiricism was Hume, the modern-period philosopher best-identified with the term ‘empiricism.’ But it turned out to be a bit of a dead end. Deleuze’s future would lie in much stranger territory.

That wasn’t to say that Deleuze’s engagement with Hume wouldn’t produce some interesting ideas on its own. One example is a really valuable distinction to defend thorough materialist thinking from charges of moral relativism. It’s a distinction between the ground of a principle and its scope.

Here’s how the charge typically goes.
• • •
Start from the presumption that anything that arises contingently in history – it could have not happened after all – can’t be universal. The universal has to be rooted in the necessary. So if moral principles are universal, they must be necessary.

There need never have been a human species. There need never have
been galaxies, stars, planets, or anything other than distant, isolated
fields and minute fluxes of energy. That's okay. We are actually
all here now.

The ground of that necessity can’t be human thought, because human thought – just like human existence – is contingent. We could have never existed at all, had it not been for quadrillions upon quadrillions of events over billions of years. So humans can’t generate principles whose ground is universal. At most, we can discover them.

So universal moral principles would be like mathematical principles and relationships – necessary aspects of the universe itself.

If you’re going to push materialist, empiricist thinking as far as their principles go, you end up with a moral constructivism. We create moral systems as a function of our social life. Any set of moral principles would be able to avoid self-destructing as long as they could keep a society in some minimal degree of solidarity.

There’s a lot of flexibility in those minimal conditions. Can't exactly stand on any universal ground. Morality’s existence and character becomes entirely contingent. Humans are of such a nature as organisms that their society’s survival has these particular conditions.

There’s nothing necessary about that, so it can’t produce universal morality.
• • •
That whole argument confuses ground and scope. It doesn’t make moral truths any less important than they are already if you take them to emerge from contingent activity.

There need never have been humans or moralities. But can there be
other kinds of creatures that need moralities to live? Meeting
them will be the biggest challenge to what moral principles we
consider the genuine universals.

If there were no organisms that were able to develop moral principles, then there would be no moral truths in that world. Same goes for a world that never developed stars – there would be no truths about stars in a universe not dense enough to develop them.

If the universe never developed moral creatures, there would be no truths about morality. But that contingency doesn’t affect the scope of those principles when they actually exist.

A moral truth – at its most profound level – is a moral principle that’s true for all systems of morality worthy of the name. They’d be the truths that apply – somehow – across all the variations that fall within those minimal conditions of moralities that won’t self-destruct.*

* Eventually. I say self-destruct because their principles literally contain their own potential destruction – vicious contraries, explosively direct contradictions.

Moral principles of that sort would have a scope of application that is genuinely universal. For all systems of morality, these conditions and principles apply.

Truths don’t need to be built into the fabric of the universe itself to be universal. They need only apply without exception throughout their scope of application. Bloody difficult enough to figure out what those are.

Kill Your Idols II: Power to Which People? Research Time, 08/08/2017

Does the world run like a clockwork, with simple, easily predictable events and processes? Reality is really much more complicated than that.

We may be able to understand the underlying mathematics behind how the world changes, but the relationships of all those actual, ongoing processes cause so many dynamic effects that it becomes computationally impossible to account for them all.

Predictions only occur in laboratory conditions – pristine environments where all relevant processes are controlled. The world is no laboratory. Too much is beyond our control once all the world’s ongoing processes start interacting with each other.

A representation of Ananke, the Greek Pagan name for the necessity
of reality itself, the determination of fate.

Okay, now let’s scale back a bit from the abstract. Step down from this web of time analysis and look at some real historical situations here. That way, we can see how tripped-out abstract thinking is directly and practically relevant to material matters of politics and life.

Let’s go back to Italy in the 1920s. My grandparents are children growing up on farms in the middle of nowhere in Calabria. They know nothing of this, even though this political instability will lead to the wars that determined their coming of age.

Antonio Gramsci is arrested by Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, as one of the leaders of the Italian Communist Party. He’d eventually die in fascist custody, thanks to the failure of his health in their wretched prison conditions. While dying slowly over ten years, he writes a masterpiece of political philosophy.

He’s wondering where he went wrong. If the time of successful revolutions to build communist societies had begun, why were all the ones in western Europe shut down?

Marxist orthodoxy in early 20th century Europe was that the factory-based proletarian labourer class would gain consciousness of themselves as a class, including their raw deal under capitalism, and that the Communist Party vanguard would lead them into a whole new economic system.

The first I ever learned about the Russian revolution was the story
of Doctor Zhivago, which was one of this movie nerd's favourite
films, even when I was a young kid. The film had an intense hold
on me, sucking me into every scene even though it was nearly
three hours long and I saw it for the first time when I was nine.

That sounds awesome! It never happened. Not even in Russia, where you had an actual Communist Party’s revolution actually being successful.* There was no factory-based economy there to speak of. Most of the country was agrarian and pretty much feudal.

* Sort of. Heavily crippled by a massive civil war in which every major western European power sent armed battalions to help put down Lenin’s government. Causing Lenin so much stress that he died of a stroke shortly after the civil war, and was never able to build institutions around community workers’ councils. Josef Stalin just built a huge secret police state with a bunch of massive collectivized farms. Fuck.

The Russian Revolution itself broke from the doctrinaire marxist script, the script that said human economics and society had a life cycle as natural as an oak tree.

The end of capitalism would come from the industrialization of society and its breakup into a 1% of oligarchs and a 99% of slave-wage factory labourers. The labourers realize their raw deal and the force of their numbers, overthrow the oligarchs, and govern society equally through workers’ councils. The ever-more abundant production of industry would lift everyone out of poverty and we’d live as equals.

Yet the first successful revolution was in a feudal economy, because Czarist Russia had a social division of oligarchs and slaves even more stark than the England whose industry was Marx’s own model for Capital.

To understand time, you mustn't think of it as a necessity, as clockwork,
but as the collision of processes, where even the smallest change
alters the entire system.

European industrialization had taken a turn away from the extremes of the 19th century. Their societies stayed complex, or developed new complexities as the old loyalties and identities fell away. Politics never reduced all the way to economic classes anyway.

Gramsci was stuck in prison trying to figure out why the world wouldn’t go according to the script. Why the conditions of a successful revolution were so different from what he encountered.

Gramsci wrote the template to reintroduce contingency into the marxist tradition of thought. He did more than just do that, though. Because you couldn’t just deny necessity. That becomes a shouting match.

No, Gramsci had to reveal to everyone who philosophized about politics and society the source of contingency in the human realm. That source was the mind of humanity itself, when we all think and talk together. That source is our ethics, values, and morality. It was philosophy in action in the thoughts of every member of a community.

So yeah, no big thing to figure out there. . . . To Be Continued

How to Fake Being a Lord of Time, Jamming, 30/05/2017

So I said last time that I wasn't quite done with my thoughts on The Pyramid at the End of the World. That's true. I spent the first entry talking about the story’s narrative structure, Peter Harness’ recurring template for his Doctor Who stories.

But there were philosophically fascinating ideas throughout the episode, all surrounding the Monks. Look at what their central power is. They can simulate a world’s entire timeline so profoundly that the simulations can discover their true nature.

After you read this post, you may think to yourself that the Monks'
violence to time's creativity make them a profound villain for the
Doctor. They're literally fearsome mirror images of the Time Lords.

The simulation is so comprehensive that they can identify the precise minor accident – breaking a pair of reading glasses in a door – that’s the vital condition for a potentially world-ending mistake. They can use their simulation to affect the real world in that pivotal, almost-imperceptible way.

The imagery of their simulation machine is thousands of threads in a massive, loose rope formation – orderly tangles. The Monks interact with the threads by stroking and caressing them, manipulating where they appear in the bundle.

This way, the Monks appear designed as fearsome mirror-images of the Greek Fates, the Moirai gods, depicted as the daughters of necessity. The Monks understand the infinitesimally granular details of every timeline, every possibility.

Monks take the form of walking corpses because they see humanity themselves as corpses. As a mortal, caught in the processes of time, humans are always already corpses.

Mortals are bodies, moving according to a web of possibilities so dense that no one can move without shifting the entire pattern. This is a vision of time and process that preserves freedom and necessity at once.

The Monks don’t manipulate the universe as block time. Block time, the vision of time that Einstein thought relativity mathematics implied, is the universe as a single four-dimensional block of necessary movement. It’s a popular image, and it often appears in time travel fiction. But nothing in Doctor Who can consistently hold this view of time.

Here's a limitation of the Monks' power. They seem to depend, somehow,
on the consent of those they're manipulating. When they're going to
change the world radically, in a way that people will see, they need
permission. Somehow. But they have the ability to make minor changes
that people won't necessarily see at the time, which means they can
still destroy whole worlds, thanks to the fundamental interconnectedness
of all things. But I'd like to see how other writers play with these
villains in the future, how much they can do.

The Monks operate as gods of freedom in necessity. They understand that we each have real, material power to act in the world, that we aren’t moving entirely to a determinate path through our history. That power belongs to all objects in the world that change and move at all, like a pair of reading glasses.

Problem is, just as we have the power to create new states of affairs in the world, each of those changes has a tremendous gravity. One movement affects all the other relationships in the whole. One thread moves, and all the threads must move in kind.

Most of the time, a change makes little perceptible difference. As for a change at a critical point to cause increasingly high-magnitude affects? Like a pair of reading glasses getting smashed on the same day Erica’s co-worker shows up to work too hung over to see straight.

Chaos. That’s the time of the Monks. They’re beings that can manipulate chaos.

Yet to do so, they have to bring a external, alien determinism to chaos. The chaos of our profoundly interconnected and interdependent world is that all actions affect each other, whether directly, indirectly, conditionally, or systematically. But those actions themselves are free – the product of active movement.

The changes that a particular action causes don’t pre-exist the action. An action is a change in one body’s movement that affects all the surrounding processes, creating an all-encompassing chain of change. An action is the creative power of material.

But when the Monks measure and simulate all the different chaotic possibilities of a world, they manifest each of those changes in their strings – all at once, altogether. They turn chaos’ dynamic necessity of mutual affectivity into the ordinary block time where no active change is truly possible.

The Monks have robbed time and material themselves of agency. They’ve turned reality into a distinct and always-existing set of possibilities, chosen like a thread in a massive rope. Chaos, in contrast, is the free creation of futures through affectivity and change.

The villainy of the Monks lies in their destruction of the universe’s chaos.

Recognize People’s Real Power, Research Time, 15/12/2016

You know, back when I started this blog, I knew a lot of its posts would follow the research I was doing for Utopias. And one of the first declarations I made in my historical research was that, even though I knew I’d engage with some works in the marxist tradition, I was no marxist.

Reading Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the landmark 1980s work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I’m even more convinced of my non-marxism.

Here's an idea that was really prominent in the history of marxism. Not just the academic marxist scholarship – I’m talking about the early 20th century, when the biggest demographic of marxism was political activists and revolutionary radicals.

People's demands can change their whole society. It's called politics.

This is the idea they criticize pretty robustly: That capital totally dominates labour conditions. In other words, the people, organizations, and broader social forces that own, control, and express a society’s sources of wealth controls its labour conditions too.

The concept is connected with traditional marxism’s social, political, and economic determinism. The macro-level structure of society entirely determines all the conditions and movements that are part of it. Society’s superstructure is its only agency.

Labour, meanwhile, isn’t an activity. That would imply that it has agency. Work, according to the tradition, is a commodity – labour-power. You can negotiate the value of your work as a wage, but work’s only feature is its applications, what a boss sends you to do.

Laclau and Mouffe rip this concept apart, and they do it as part of a sustained attack on the entire marxist tradition – both in the theory and in the activism, which until only the last few decades were two sides of the same movement. That attack is uncovering and tearing down a recurring error in marxist thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the world.

The tradition ignores the contingency of history – sees only the logical necessity of theoretical argument and is blind to the messy dynamism of life.

In this context, the tradition ignores how it wasn’t just capitalist society’s superstructure changing according to abstract internal laws of motion that determines labour conditions. Labour conditions are the product of dynamic struggle between working people and the large conglomerates and elite business leaders who employ them.

In 19th century Europe, the children’s rights movement took kids out of dangerous, dehumanizing factory work. In the early 20th century, the union movement won restrictions on the working day’s and week’s length.

Ernesto Laclau and his partner Chantal Mouffe were two figures in the
group that brought ecological ways of thinking to the philosophical
tradition in complex, multidimensional ways. Their academic roots in
marxist studies made them two of the most explicitly political in that
movement.

Today, workers are changing the conditions of labour through activism again. Business leaders aim to casualize and destabilize all employment through models like the gig economy and the sharing economy. So workers are building organizations that network among each other to pool financial and knowledge resources – essentially a union of contractors.

Organizations like the Urban Worker Project in Ontario, which is developing to look a bit more like a medieval guild than a modern labour union.

Where business leaders want to drive their labour costs lower and lower, workers are organizing to keep their wages fair. And that fairness is in reference to the actual cost of living in their cities. The continent-wide Fight For $15 movement is the spearhead organization here.

These are political movements that have the power to condition and entirely remake economic relationships in society. Recognizing their real power in the world is a fatal critique of traditionally orthodox marxist thinking.

These arguments are all so simple when you think about them that I find it weird that there are orthodox marxists left anymore.

One and All Flow Together IV: The People as State, Research Time, 04/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . I meant to get to this idea yesterday, but my preamble ended up taking damn near the whole post. But here's Negri's basic argument against the core of Hegel’s philosophy and the essence of modernity it expresses.

The core concept of modernity, as far as the purpose of Empire goes, is mediation. As I wrote this weekend. Politically speaking, for our rights to exist, they need a mediating body to recognize those rights, administer them, and protect them.

In recent years, I think Canada has made great progress in
building a conception of the national identity that
genuinely embraces difference. Modern Canada, as a
state and a culture, seems to have (for the most part)
successfully broken ethnicity, nationality, and
cultural continuity from the legitimacy of your
citizenship. All you need to do is accept a particular
democratic morality and political approach.

In other words, we can only be complete individuals acting in the full freedom of our fundamental rights as citizens of a state that recognizes, notarizes, and administers those rights. Our individual freedom requires that we subsume our individuality to the bureaucracy of the state. 

Only in leaving your individuality behind can you be free. 

Now here’s Negri. He interprets the political meaning of Hegel’s entire system of metaphysics. The state of living in absolute knowledge resolves the human sense of alienation from perfection. 

Hegel builds a complex structure of relations among concepts. Reasoning properly leads you from being dumbfounded at the contradictions of the world, to understanding how all of these contradictions perfectly reconcile in the fullness of reason. 

The path to absolute knowledge and its structure has the firm necessity of a logical proof. Because it is one. That's Hegel’s Logic, working through the fundamental structure of universal reason as a logical proof.

And what does this total reconciliation look like in a political context? It's such a deep submission to authority that you subsume your own will into the actions of the nation, the collective ethnic-cultural-linguistic entity of which you've always been a member. 

You just weren't yet rational enough to realize that you were more than a disconnected, alienated individual. 

But this submission of will and subsumption of being is only possible once the nation follows the necessity of reason’s structure to achieve its own absolute knowledge. It's become the administrative engine through which our individual rights can be realized, notarized, and guaranteed.

The state. The nation achieves the culmination of its essence as the state. The individual achieves the culmination of its essence as a citizen. 

You’re subsumed into the collective, but retain your individual rights. They’re guaranteed in all the forms that legitimate your existence as a citizen, whether they’re a birth certificate or a citizenship oath.

Donald Trump at a rally in Mobile, Alabama. Trump's
politics embody most openly the ethnic nationalism of
the United States of America, the vision of that nation
as the culmination and sole legitimate state of a
white European cultural history and people.

Liberation is finished with the citizen in the liberal state that guarantees individual rights.

Sounds fine in the abstract, but look what the state is composed from in the Hegelian picture. It’s the culmination of the logic of nationhood. And all that nationhood implies: historical continuity, cultural continuity, territorial continuity. 

A territory is for one nation alone, throughout its history. Otherwise, you break continuity and you prevent the nation from realizing its highest form (and humanity's highest form) as national unities subsumed into the nation-state.

This is not the foundation of freedom, but of nationalist violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. If you refuse to accept difference into your community, then variation will always be your enemy. This is true in all contexts of human thought and action.

Value unity and conformity over rebellion and difference, and you’ll never have a new idea in your life. You'll stop innovating, stop growing, stagnate into a pool of racist, discoloured, screaming, acid-melted flesh of human toxicity.

Progress comes from rebellion against the rules, restlessness in the face of “how things have always been.” Freaks, visionaries, and immigrants are the fuel of progress and its engine too. 

Freedom is never perfectly realized. The demand for freedom isn’t striving for a perfected state of humanity. Believing that you're perfect is the worst thing anyone can do, because you’ll never change yourself anymore.

Freedom the demand for freedom. It's the struggle against the weight of how things are.

A Science of Humanity II: Living Without Purpose, Research Time, 26/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So there’s something weird about this idea that all natural motion is a strict mechanism. Yes, it’s wrong. But it was still pervasive in the culture, since mechanism – A causes B always and forever – was the dominant way of thinking about scientific law in the 19th century.

Probability was an innovative concept, and really weird to people. Normally, we only see one event at a time, so we think of the bat hitting the ball in a particular way that the ball has this arc. Only when that event repeats itself a few hundred times can its variations become visible. Our perception doesn’t really work that way.*

Leo Strauss and a lot of others who distrust modern
science never understood the revolution in scientific
thinking where we realized that probability and
variation weren't failures of knowledge, but the way
the world really works. Every pitch is unique.

* A note on my sci-fi ideas. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were some creature that did see every motion unfolding in its actuality and its possibility at once? That would be a weird kind of creature to describe. Very difficult to imagine their thoughts.

Mechanism had an incredibly easy metaphor that anyone could easily turn to. Clocks. Each part of the universe fits together as if it were the gear of a clock, and we each move with complete necessity and rigidity.

Leo Strauss clearly thought about science this way. Because he describes the social sciences as describing humanity in a totally unfree way. The sociologist’s guiding presumption was that every aspect of human society and thought could be explained with mathematical laws of the same necessity as a clock’s gears.

If you want to read more on how the 19th century prominence of the clockwork metaphor messed with people’s attitudes about knowledge, go read The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking. I don’t really have much more to say that isn’t just a riff on that.

What he pulls out of that image of man as pure mechanism more interesting. The idea that the social sciences all presume that Man is not free.** A science of humanity means complete mechanistic knowledge of humanity. 

** I hate these old-fashioned, patriarcho-normative turns of speech. But it’s good to remind ourselves that they were common currency in intellectual circles not too long ago. It’s also a good marker for a perspective I find obsolete.

Plenty about humanity is mechanistic. But our knowledge
of our mechanisms is power over them.

So if all of reality – even human existence and thought – runs according to a mechanism, then we have no responsibility for our actions. This is true whether we’re individuals or the whole cosmos. 

In philosophy, the individual scale of this idea is the moral argument against determinism. Because a totally mechanistic humanity would make morality nonsense, it can’t be true. 

But Strauss is looking at this conclusion from the cosmos, and seeing more cosmic meaning in it. If everything in the universe is a mechanism, then the universe – humans included – has no purpose. It’s simply a mechanism that runs as it does because there’s no other way to move. 

The universe, being entirely a mechanism, has no inherent purpose. Nothing in it has any inherent purpose either, including humanity. We’re all just mechanisms, after all. So there’s no true right or wrong – no natural human rights, no should, must, or ought. Only mechanistic machinery moving as it must.

Must and is become the same thing.

This is what Strauss believes science does. He’s not the only one. He’s the tail end of a long tradition of people who think scientific knowledge narrows the sphere of morality until it winks out of existence. Again, read The Taming of Chance. But follow his false belief to get to the heart of this argument against the benefit or truth of social science.

Human reason needs some minimal amount of purpose to the universe, something that escapes blind mechanism deceiving itself with delusions of grandeur. Human reason’s moral investigations are about discovering natural human rights, the universal and necessary political rights for human societies. 

If no such rights exist, then all moral thinking is absurd, meaningless, nonsense. Strauss thinks that a science(s) of humanity would narrow the field of human thinking to nothing by making all human thought and action a product of mechanism. Without choice and agency, there can be no rights, no good, and no justice. Only stuff that happens.

But that’s not the only reason why Strauss hates the social sciences. And so it’s not the only reason floating around modern conservative politics why sociology has become something you commit like a crime.

There’s also the matter of history. . . . To Be Continued.

Knowing Knowledge IX: Knowing Necessary Possibilities, Dialogues, 30/04/2015

This is the first part of the last instalment of my exchange with University of Warwick’s Steve Fuller about his latest book Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. I went on for a bit longer than I usually do, so we’ve split my initial critique in two halves. Steve responds to the first half of what I wrote him last week here. He responds to the second half of what I wrote him last week, in a day or so. As usual, I write cheeky responses in my photo captions.

You know, I've never actually used a picture of myself
to begin these posts, as I've used a photo of Steve.

Dear Steve;

Although I loved our explicitly political discussion of the last couple of dialogues, I want to dive into the final instalment of our exchange with some headier philosophy. I particularly want to discuss the power of counter-factual reasoning. Even though you consider this a foundational method for a progressive philosophy of science, I think it eclipses even your own vision. Counter-factual knowledge, I'd go so far as to say, makes a lot of your own vision obsolete.

The conclusion of Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History returns to the vision on which your early chapters focussed, the unity of science in humanity's conception of ourselves in the image of God. Your advocacy of this idea remains a point on which you and I will, I think, always disagree. But once I reached the end of your book, I had many more reasons for my disagreement.

The first such reason I want to discuss is the pragmatics of consilience. Scientific research, discoveries, institutions, and knowledge range over, as you describe in Chapter 6, all things for all people. Science is about the investigation of the world, of the systems, relationships, and bodies that constitute the world all together. Its mode of knowing the world is through investigating what must happen and what can change. 

Counter-factual knowledge, in other words. This model of knowledge and reasoning achieves, on our own power alone, the “middle knowledge” that you say in your conclusion is the foundation of modern science as it arose in the West, in the Medieval cultural milieu. 

The highest level of necessity in human reasoning is the strict necessity of syllogistic reasoning. A is B; B is C; therefore A is also C. There is another mode of knowledge that is far more contingent, counting as knowledge, but without any necessity at all. When I first met you in real life at the University of Toronto, I made note of many facts: your height, that (unlike many of the photos I had previously seen) you were now clean-shaven, and the tone of your speaking voice. 

The essence of the divine is also that all existence is
divine, and there's no hierarchy of being separating
me from this bear. None of us are superior or
inferior. We just do different things.

Between logical necessity and contingent fact is what you call Middle Knowledge, the knowledge of physical necessity, the knowledge of the laws of nature. Emerging from the Medieval milieu, Christian self-conceptions were required to ground our claim to genuine knowledge of physical necessity. 

If humanity were entirely profane, then we would never be able to grasp any necessity in the universe at all. We’d be mere animals, drifting and distracted from moment to moment and event to event. Yet we aren’t so entirely divine as to have perfect knowledge of all the facts, changes, and relationships that constitute the universe. This would be the knowledge of the divine plan of being, where every fact is understood in its necessity. 

I think of this along Spinozist lines, partially to needle you a little, given your previous comments to me that you could never be a Spinozist. But it also makes sense to me that the existence of the divine is necessity. It’s the space where I see some of our deeply held conceptions of divinity converging, one of the few spaces where they really do. As we understand the relations among all the bodies and processes of the universe, we become more divine ourselves.

But here’s where you and I differ. I don’t see why we need to be partially divine already to develop knowledge of physical necessities. Or rather, humanity’s status as the divine animal isn’t necessary to ground our capacity to know physical necessities. The reasoning structure of counter-factual knowledge, which you describe in delightful detail in Chapter 6, is a guide to such development. And we don’t need any underlying divine nature (at least no more divine than the rest of material existence) to have such a power. We figured it out ourselves.

A question related to the concept of humanity’s nature as the image of God still nags at me, and I think it always will. Why must the fact that the universe is intelligible imply that there is an intelligent designer? There is nothing about the existence of order which implies that such order is the product of design. Existence alone constitutes order through the dynamic relations of processes. Order figures itself out through time.

This is what I ultimately find so frustrating about your book and your larger philosophical projects as a public intellectual right now. I simply don’t understand why a simple notion like the logic of counter-factual knowledge can’t be a unifying principle for science, and why you think only the strong, deep concept of humanity being made in the image of God can do the job.

Groundbreaking, both in theoretical
physics and the ethical progress of
humanity, India's first great physicist
of the modern era, Satyendra Nath Bose.

It isn’t just my own non-Christian sensibility that remains skeptical of whether this concept can hack it, but it would likely meet resistance from the non-Christian sensibilities of many practicing scientists around the world. I’m not just referring to the atheist or agnostic scientists who were still raised in a broadly Christian culture. I’m referring to scientists in Africa, Asia, and the Arab World who were raised in a Muslim religious tradition, or the large number of scientists throughout the West who come from long-standing Orthodox Jewish communities. The same goes for scientists whose cultural theologies are Hindu, Buddhist, or the a-religious cultural philosophies of China.

All these people throughout the world would be hesitant to throw in on a unifying concept for science that is rooted so firmly in a Western, European, and Christian theologico-cultural milieu and tradition. What comes naturally to you with your Jesuit education would be culturally alien to someone with an upbringing in Hindu or Confucian institutions. 

What may have been the unifying principle of science at its origin is now a concept that will only sow division. In the words of a wise man, who I think was either Thomas Wolfe or B. A. Baracus, you can’t go home again.

• • •

Dear Adam,

I’m glad that you picked up on the importance I place on what the later Scholastics called ‘middle knowledge’, namely, our capacity to reason to counterfactual states of the world based on our empirical knowledge. In this way, we might be able to bootstrap our way up to God’s universal knowledge. 

Put in more modest and secular terms, we might come to know the laws of nature without having to experience every moment that is subsumed under those laws. Thus, experiments allow us to vary the conditions of the world – in our minds, in the lab and, increasingly, on the computer – so that we can simulate the requisite universality. Of course, experimental outcomes are notoriously fallible, and I want to say something about the significance of our fallibility later. But first I want to address the need for an intelligent designer who sets the gold standard against which to judge our efforts in this direction.

Steve Fuller, my formidable opponent.

The first point to observe is that unless you believe that there is a being who could know all things in all space and time, it doesn’t even make sense to attempt to get at ‘laws of nature’ in the modern scientific sense – unless, of course, you were writing fiction. But the quest for laws of nature requires more than simply belief in such a being. It also requires that we are already sufficiently like that being that it is reasonable to think that the quest might just succeed. This link between us and the intelligent designer is especially important because the search for laws of nature, while building on ordinary empirical knowledge, quickly takes us away from it. 

This is why I just suggested that the default human attitude to this project is to regard it as a genre of fiction. But experiments are not big video games or theatrical sets. They are models of physical reality. Without the theological scaffolding, such a conclusion would seem sheer lunacy – and this is how, I imagine, Aristotle (but not Plato) would have understood today’s science.

I believe that people fail to see this point because they haven’t considered what other rational grounds they might have to search for laws of nature prior to knowing any of the consequences that have made the project so empirically worthwhile over, say, the last four hundred years.* 

* ‘Curiosity,’ the snake oil of naturalized epistemologies, doesn’t explain the intergenerational persistence of science in the face of its own long-standing unsolved problems and collateral damage to the world. 

The answer would probably be none. And that was precisely the state of mind in which the original Scientific Revolutionaries found themselves. For them, the metaphysics of Christianity (especially the imago dei doctrine) led them to conclude that only specific Christian institutions – especially the Church – held them back from realizing something that their religion already told them was in principle within their reach, namely, absolution of Original Sin and reunion with God. 

But this conclusion was ultimately a leap of faith on their part – and perhaps it is no accident that Pascal’s Wager as an argument for the existence of God emerges at this time. Albert Hirschmann tells a similar story in The Passions and the Interests about the early acceptance of capitalism as an economic ideology before it had proven itself as a reliable wealth producing engine.

You ask why Christian theology needs to be dragged into the logic of counterfactuals, and the answer is that there is no obvious ‘logic of counterfactuals’ independent of specific metaphysical assumptions. You’re wrong to think that Christians are alone in possessing the relevant basic metaphysics, though Christians have done the most to develop it. 

The image of David Lewis, metaphysician of necessity.

As Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam also grant pride of place to humanity in divine creation based on the Garden of Eden episode and God’s uniquely direct address to humans. True, Christians have honed this point into a strong imago dei doctrine, which Judaism and Islam regard as controversial if not outright heretical, especially when it hints at the apotheosis of humanity, the point at which Christianity potentially slides into transhumanism.

This is light-years away from the metaphysical starting point of the great non-Abrahamic religions, which do not grant any cosmological privilege to the human condition whatsoever. Of course, there have been great scientists from India and China who have stuck to their native beliefs and not been converted to something more Abrahamic. 

However, I would argue that these scientists got the relevant metaphysics through their ‘Western’ scientific training, which in turn has modified how their non-Western religiosity functions in their overall world-view. Sometimes anthropologists speak of this phenomenon in terms of ‘compartmentalization’ but it may be more subtle.

A thoroughly secular debate over the exact metaphysics that underwrites counterfactuals stole much of the limelight in analytic philosophy in the 1970s, courtesy of Saul Kripke and David Lewis, two sharp-shooting Princeton logicians who overshadowed colleague Richard Rorty as he was putting the finishing touches on Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. This debate left a strong impression on me, especially as it was presented in one of Jon Elster’s early books, the brilliant Logic and Society. In terms of how we’ve been discussing matters, the sense of ‘necessity’ that concerned Lewis was ‘logical,’ whereas Kripke’s was ‘physical.’

Basically Lewis saw counterfactuals as self-consistent non-actualized states of the world, full stop. He wasn’t particularly concerned with how to get to such states of the world from the actual one. In fact, whenever Lewis discussed the ‘closeness’ of some possible world to the actual one, he would be simply referring to the number of properties that they shared. 

His theory was not attuned to what economists call ‘the theory of the second best,’ whereby the second best policy may be radically different from the first best because what makes the first policy the best is how all its parts hang together. And if you’re missing some of the parts (or they’re not in the right proportion), then something completely different is better. This point, alien to Lewis’ purely logical analysis of counterfactuals, explains why the middle in politics is so often squeezed by the extremes.

The image of Saul Kripke, the 20th century's other
great metaphysician of necessity.

Kripke was more interesting. His theory of possible worlds fits Bismarck’s famous definition of politics as ‘the art of the possible’. Kripke insisted that unrealized possible worlds had to be based in the actual world. This means that an explanatory narrative of some sort needs to be spun. In particular, we might recount how a possibility had been prevented but perhaps could be reactivated in the future. 

All of this would involve looking at the resources available at various times for making things other than as they turned out to be. On that basis one could say how ‘far’ or ‘near,’ say, a desirable world was from the actual world at a given point in history – and this distance may vary, not necessarily always getting closer or farther away. We may well reach a point in the future where we can effectively recover a lost opportunity in the past.

To be sure, Kripke didn’t concern himself with any of the above details. He was simply interested in defining the sense in which it is reasonable to talk about ‘possible worlds’ as something other than pure fiction. And for him the bottom line was that a possible world is a possible version of the actual world, and hence a ‘counterfactual’ bears a stronger relationship to the ‘factual’ than the word ‘fictional’ normally implies. 

But for me Kripke made only the first moves. Navigating between possible worlds has been central to my own thinking over the past quarter-century or more, and it is developed in some detail in Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History.

However, to take this line of thought seriously is to commit to the idea that it makes sense to imagine an intellect who can scope out all the various contingencies, based on trying to realize some ideal plan within the budgetary constraints that matter imposes, i.e. variable but limited resources. In other words, the intellect is an optimizer, who prioritizes goals, identifies appropriate trade-offs and adjusts to vicissitudes. God would have all these possibilities programmed into his intelligent design algorithm, but we humans normally experience it as history, in which case the point of philosophy and science is to discover the algorithm and, in the process, realize our own divinity.

Even a dastardly old autocrat like
Otto von Bismarck could say
something reasonable sometimes.
I still prefer the more recent one.

This is a very brutally theological way of justifying our relationship with God – even by 17th century standards! But I think in secular form, it is also what Bismarck had in the back of his mind when he declared politics to be ‘the art of the possible’. He got it from Hegel, and Hegel reached back through Leibniz to Plato’s original conception of the philosopher-king, a member of a class of handpicked individuals who are trained to think like gods in case the day comes when they must function in that capacity.

To foreshadow my response to your final salvo on what you regard as my ‘political naïveté,’** consider two senses in which politicians may be said to ‘respond to events’. One reading of this phrase makes it appear that politicians simply adapt to circumstances, one after the other, without any sense of principle whatsoever. When we say that politicians are just in the business of staying in office, that’s what we mean. They just do what it takes to get the right number of votes. 

** Editor’s note. That critique is coming in the second half of the finale.

However, an alternative reading suggests that, when responding to events, politicians have already anticipated the possibility of those events and hence are already prepared to do the appropriate thing to keep the forward momentum going on the ideals which they ultimately wish to promote. And this may involve what, on the surface, looks like a change in course of action.

Now, politicians may do all this more or less successfully because, in the end, they’re just politicians and not gods. But this is the aspiration. It also gets us back to a point I raised earlier, namely, that the Machiavellian maxim ‘the end justifies the means’, often used to damn politicians’ lack of principle, is in fact the modus operandi of how political principle is implemented in the world. In this respect, we might wish to give politicians a bit more credit for intelligence when they say that their plans are working even though it looks like they’ve made a U-turn at a crucial juncture.

One person who I think understood all this very well was the great US theorist of journalistic ‘objectivity,’ Walter Lippmann. He saw the journalist as someone whose presentation of the news should reassure the public, in order to allow politicians the private space to race through various hypothetical scenarios as they decide what to do next: a calm exterior masking a dynamic interior. 

This was the process that at the height of the Cold War Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove immortalized in satire and Erving Goffman generalized into a sociology of the ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions of everyday life. In public relations, it’s called ‘impression management’ and when done properly it is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

This is not a man who you trust when he's calm. It
means he isn't afraid.

Lippmann’s divided self for political conduct may be seen as the mirror image of God’s dual self-presentation through nature: Instead of a calm exterior, nature inspires authority through its surface volatility as something ‘beyond our control’. However, beneath that volatility is a set of laws which science is in the business of discovering – perhaps in a less frantic and more rigorous way, yet nevertheless along the same experimental lines as the juggling of contingencies that transpire behind the political scenes so jealously guarded by Lippmann.

Put it this way. Both the politician’s appearance of calm and nature’s appearance of volatility are deceptions of a sort. The politician is really less placid than he appears, while nature is really less unruly than it seems. The frantic activity behind the appearances in the first case is in search of the secret to the underlying order in the second case. 

It may be that the various controversies surrounding ‘climate change’ are in the process of unravelling this delicate balance of knowledge and ignorance that has enabled something like Goffman’s front/back stage distinction to manage our understanding of both politics and nature in the modern era.

However, I don’t wish to dwell on this point here, but turn instead to something that drives the prominence of counterfactual thinking in my work. It’s what I take to be Hegel’s great counter-intuitive point about history. To have a rational account of history, you need to assume the arbitrariness of the decision points after which someone has won or lost – and as a result history goes in a one direction rather than another. Your rationality lies in how you cope with the arbitrariness, either as winner or loser. 

After all, the winners aren’t guaranteed indefinite success simply by repeating their winning actions, and the losers might have eventually won, given a different moment of decision, different resources, different evidence, different institutional arrangements, etc. Indeed, descendants of the losers might well overturn the winners in the future.  But it all depends on how these parties learn from their world-historic success or failure.

I can't help but think that we're only made in the image
of God because we looked in the mirror when we saw
the image. Count the fingers, Ludwig.

And Popper would agree with all this too. After all, Popper never said that losers had to roll over and play dead! Rather, they had to re-organize themselves so as to overcome the original criticism and do things of value that their opponents cannot. This is not as hard as it might first sound, if you consider the arbitrariness of the original moment of decision.

Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding that people have about Hegel – and here I’m thinking of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘pop Hegelian’ view of the ‘hero’ in history – is that there is some luminous relationship between a world-historic agent and the ends of history itself.  To be sure, the young Hegel regarded Napoleon as ‘the man of the hour’. But from the standpoint of world-history, Napoleon was simply a signal, a marker, a way station, not necessarily an exemplar of things to come. 

This point is especially controversial in a Christian context, where Christians have tended to think that Jesus wanted his followers to live as he did, with his overriding sense of social justice on the basis of which he placed his own life at risk, which eventuated in his Crucifixion. Thus, church history and dogmatic theology largely consist of stylisations – and, dare I say, dilutions – of the life of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, designed for easy mass consumption.

Given this rather flat-footed but institutionally effective strategy for ‘following in Jesus’ footsteps,’ it is easy to see why Hegel’s theological followers – the ‘Young Hegelians’ of Marx and Engels’ German Ideology fame – were considered so politically subversive in the 1830s and 1840s, when they proposed ‘naturalistic,’ ‘symbolic,’ and otherwise ‘demystified’ readings of the life of the Jesus.

However, my point is somewhat different from theirs. I am not so worried about what it would mean for the legitimacy of Christianity if the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life turn out to be substantially false, thereby undermining the epistemic foundation of, say, the Petrine papacy. Rather, I am more concerned with the meta-level question of what exactly about Jesus’ life (even granting our accurate knowledge of it) might be worth carrying forward as ‘exemplary.’ 

You don't have to be Christian to learn from the life of
Jesus. I've learned from it, for example.

This was a question that the Franciscan order has struggled with throughout its history. As a result, it has often found itself on the heretical side of things. After all, everyone’s life is a product of its time, and as time goes on it becomes intuitively harder to draw clear lessons from what Jesus did in his day to what we should do in ours. Call it the ‘problem of existential induction.’

Finally, let me close this round on something you and I may agree on: Academic training normally blinds one to the problem of existential induction, as it effectively gives one a vested interest in the future imitating the past. This leads academics to overestimate their own powers of judgement, which encourages them to dismiss empirical anomalies and other disruptions to the status quo as simply ignorable local disturbances, perhaps to be blamed on idiosyncratic personalities.

Here academics confuse being well-informed (i.e. knowing the trends and having the right views) with understanding the full potential of the fields that they're in. To understand the full potential, one needs to think more 'counterfactually' about how earlier initiatives managed to fail. Normal academics presume that it was because they were shown to be conclusively false. 

But they may have failed simply because the proponents did not try to mount a 2.0 in light of the first wave of criticism. And by 2.0, I don't just mean ad hoc hypotheses, but a reasonably substantial reconfiguration that enables the supposedly defeated theory to say something new that the opponents cannot. This is why I believe that the only way to rationally mount a future-oriented programme is by learning from the past.