Renewed? Yes You Could Say We Need to Be Renewed, Research Time, 05/05/2017

Because sometimes, I want to start a more meditative post about
strange and troubling political philosophy with a Doctor Who
reference. "Renewed? Have I? That's it, I've been renewed."

Enough confessionals. I’m back to cracking sidelong jokes about Doctor Who while I talk about extremely weird political philosophy.

These days, most political philosophy is about principles, right, and law. It all exists along this one plane of moral ideas about how society should be. All well and good, and some fantastic ideas come out of that way of talking about political existence.

But what could we learn from another approach? Political philosophy from an ontological approach. Machiavelli does that. I mean, he’s writing an analysis of a historical text, drawing pragmatic and idealistic political principles and guides from ancient Roman and contemporary Italian examples.

That's what it says on the tin. But the concepts he develops in doing so aren’t so much about principles and reasons for actions. The most innovative concepts in Machiavelli’s political guidebooks are of social solidarity and patriotism not as a principles, but as a force.

It’s easy to slip into what sounds like fascist territory. Machiavelli slips like that occasionally. That’s what separates a good reader from a sloppy one – a sloppy one will see the slip as the truth. A good reader keeps in mind the scope of the whole book, so knows a truth from a slip.

He writes that a good leader for a community will be “devoted to antiquity.”* It definitely sounds a lot like a seductive Golden Age that only ever existed in xenophobic fever dreams of a pure and potent society.

* Chapter 2.39, page 239 of my beaten up second-hand Oxford paperback.

But remember what Machiavelli spends the entire Discourses on Livy doing. He recalls and analyzes antiquity – it’s his own devotion to it. In antiquity, he finds the principles of a sustainable, empowering, democratic solidarity, which inspires his devotion.

He describes that solidarity as a force – the physical power of personalities dedicating themselves to the health and happiness of their entire community. The patriotism that unites a community in real and constant acts of mutual devotion to each other’s good and the public good.

But that force’s power wanes over time, for a huge variety of causes. Turmoil from war, factionalism growing bitter in the community, growing inequality that divides a society between oligarchs and those without dignity. A society like that is decadent.

Appropriate to read Machiavelli while that paragraph basically describes most of human civilization. So a pretty pertinent question is how we get ourselves out of this mess. It won’t be easy. The environmentalist slogan applies just as well to planetwide decadence.

The original Founding Father James Madison (far left).

The answer is, broadly speaking, renewal. That’s what Machiavelli means by devotion to antiquity. It’s what the lawyers of our time should properly mean by “originalism.” Not that grotesquely pious over-literalism about a country’s constitution. I mean the time when the forces of constructive patriotism that first brought your society together.

What James Madison called the one time Americans** from all over the country actually managed to agree on something tremendously important.

** Yeah, I know. Just the white ones. But you can’t even get all the white people in a society to come together anymore. Thank God.

How exactly do you go about renewing that energy of free, spontaneous, active solidarity? Machiavelli doesn’t have much of an idea, as far as I can tell. Neither do I, of course.

But part of what I want to do through writing, publishing, and promoting Utopias over the next few years is crawling close to a few answers.

The Best Mistakes to Learn From Are Those of Others, Jamming, 23/07/2013

There’ll be more fights with Hegel in the future. Today, I’m working on a proposal for a post-doctoral grant that I discovered this week, adapting some aspects of my ecophilosophy project to a perspective more purely of philosophy of biology. Writing about it here isn’t going to get into the details of the project, but I do want to explain how I became interested in this issue and why I think it’s important.

Last year, Thomas Nagel wrote what was probably the shittiest book of his career, Mind and Cosmos. It’s a critique of orthodox evolutionary theory on the grounds that the slow, gradual pace of evolution by natural selection couldn’t have accounted for all the radical changes of species in the relatively short amount of time animal, plant, and fungoid life has existed on Earth. Taking this at face value, he has a point. Natural selection is such a slow and dicey process that it can’t work for major changes. Not only that, but species change is often the result of environmental changes, which can happen remarkably quickly. But natural selection is a slow process of incremental change over many generations. If an ecological niche disappears or radically changes in a generation or two, the pace of natural selection can’t keep up with that kind of change. Instead of a species transforming through the pressure of ecological niche changes, it becomes extinct. So there has to be another method of evolutionary development.

While I don't always admire Nagel's work, I
do admire his hair.

Fine and dandy. Then Nagel screws everything up, including what chance he might have had for a successful career in his old age. Because he says the only alternative to the orthodox Darwinian point of view is a creationist perspective, or at least a weird kind of teleology where mind or some mind-like force directs the evolution of life. This man is a living legend in philosophy, and this is where he ends up? A lot of the, shall we say, informally written reviews of the book I read online in the months after its release dismissed and insulted Nagel: I’ve read words like senile, ridiculous, moronic, wasteful, and downright dangerous. He writes in a country, the United States of America, where a significant number of politicians are actively working to destroy all science education in the name of their dogmatic and oppressive religion, the Biblical literalism of aggressive evangelical Christianity. Frankly, it’s impossible to write anything publicly about evolution in the United States and avoid politics. Closed-minded evangelical Christians are setting up conditions where, in a generation or two, there will be no more young scientists coming from huge swaths of the United States, simply because there will be millions of people for whom their only science textbook was the Bible.

One idea this research project would involve is giving Nagel the benefit of the doubt, while at least acknowledging the disastrous effects of a philosopher of his stature giving his weight to the political programs of Christian authoritarians who want to create an American population of dutiful sheep who submit themselves completely to their control and their religious dogma. Because there’s a growing literature of evolutionary scientists who critique orthodox Darwinism and the principle of gradualism in species development from within the science itself. Christian de Duve, Harold Morowitz, Robert Hazen, and Simon Conway Morris all write scientifically rigorous work that provides a detailed theoretical framework for there being some kind of directionality or converging set of tendencies in biological evolution, while keeping anti-scientific creationists in the backwoods where they belong. And a lot of this work was anticipated by Stephen Jay Gould. A great review of Mind and Cosmos is here, and the author calls out Nagel better than I can for now.

That’s how I became interested in the subject: wondering how someone like Nagel, whose work from the 1970s I admire so much,* could have fallen so far from the pinnacle of his thought. There would be two pillars to this project: examining the actual alternatives to orthodox Darwinism within respectable evolutionary biology, and examining why Nagel (and quite possibly a substantial mainstream in evolutionary biology itself) ignores this alternative work, and acts as if one either accepts a too-rigid dogma of evolution by gradual natural selection or escapes science altogether. It would combine my skills in philosophy of science with what I’ve learned from social science about examining intellectual influences, heritages, and citation networks.

* Sometimes, I think everything but the computer technology was better in the 1970s. This was the prime of American cinema, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, gay culture exploding into the open, punk, funk, disco, and the very first house music coming out of Detroit. Then I remember this was the decade of Derrida’s worst books, and I realize that nothing is ever perfect. Also, it’s just more of the too-easy romanticism of the past: I was born in 1983, so I don’t have to remember the shitty parts of the 1970s if I don’t feel like it.

The goal is using Nagel as a case of a larger tendency to polarize debates about evolution, diagnosing why this polarization exists, how it creates its most destructive effects on the disciplines of evolutionary biology and the philosophy thereof, and figuring out solutions and paths out of the morass.

Origin Is Another Word for Only Survivor, Research Time, 11/07/2013

Nimrod the Neanderthal butler
in Ghost Light also bears more
than a superficial resemblance
to Phil Sandifer, author of
TARDIS Eruditorum, and the
man who first told me about
Jean-Louis Dessalles.

Another book I’m reading at the moment is Why We Talk by Jean-Louis Dessalles. First, some acknowledgements. I’m halfway through this book, and I’m incredibly thankful to Phil Sandifer for telling me about Dessalles through his essay on the 1989 Doctor Who serial Ghost Light at TARDIS Eruditorum. The actual essay on Ghost Light is kind of insane, with its paragraphs wildly arranged in the essay according to a ridiculously erudite formula. I think it’s a satire on Ghost Light’s reputation in the Doctor Who community as being far too dense, disordered, and packed full of ideas for its plot to unfold sensibly in 75 minutes. It didn’t help that the music volume on the transmitted and VHS versions was louder than the spoken dialogue. But it’s clear to follow if you pay attention. And maybe watch twice. You don’t like your TV to be challenging sometimes?

Anyway, back to Dessalles. His book is an exploration, in the terms of evolutionary biology and history, of how language developed. I can’t yet tell you how well he achieves this goal because I haven’t yet finished the book and I’m not about to search the internet for spoilers. But one element of Why We Talk, which Phil pointed out in the Ghost Light essay, was its account of what an origin is. Frankly, Dessalles’ conception of origin (or rather his destruction of the traditional conception of origin) is a foundation point for the utopias project.

Our usual concept of origin has been around about as long as the Myth of The Fall, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the state of nature let the concept survive into an atheist context. Origin = Eden. Our origin is the state of perfection from which our development has been a corruption from this pure state. What twaddle.

Instead, we have a wonderful demystification of all our myths and legends about origins. We often think of origins as a Tower of Babel moment (more religious imagery sneaking into our supposedly atheist scientific philosophy!) where the phenomenon in question was birthed in its single, unified, and authentic form. Diversification occurs with time, and the authenticity of the origin’s unity is lost. Instead, the origin of all that exists today is the common ancestor of the diverse yet related bodies that exist today. To take Dessalles’ example, all languages that exist today can be understood as having evolved from a single common ancestor language. 

But this wouldn’t be the Ur-language, the first implying the only. Instead, that common ancestor used to exist in an atmosphere of similar linguistic (or biological) diversity as there is today. It’s just that the descendants of those other languages have since died out. So it will go in the future as well. Many languages that exist today will die out, and the survivor languages will diversify into a new variety. There's a paragraph-long quotation in the above-linked Ghost Light essay if you want to read it in Dessalles' own words. Or you can find a copy of the book; it's very good and worth reading the whole thing if you're into the intersection of evolutionary biology and culture in a manner that's intelligent, knowledgeable, and insightful.

However, you might still ask how the diverse collection came to exist in the first place. That’s a legitimate question to which I can’t come up with an answer in a space as limited as a daily blog entry. I’ll let you know what Jean-Louis says when I finish the book.

Not only would I recommend reading Why We Talk, you should also consider watching Ghost Light, one of the best stories in Doctor Who, with a mind-blowing script and stellar performances from all the actors, especially Sophie Aldred, who was pivotal in setting up the nature and role of the Doctor Who companion for the 21st century.