What Does It Mean to Be an Anarchist? Research Time, 19/04/2018

When I started the research for Utopias a few years ago, one of the first traditions of political thinking I looked into was anarchism.

I wanted to explore a tradition that I thought was a clear alternative to many of the political systems and concepts we take for granted. You ask what it means to live without a state. You investigate what relationships can constitute a strong community.

Thinking about anarchism also encourages you to rethink how many institutions you need in your society to hold it together. It encourages you to analyze the real powers of brotherhood in a community. You wonder how much we really need coercive authority to keep a community from becoming violent.

Anarchist thinking often works better as a guide for resistance to an
unjust and violent state apparatus than as a concrete political
program. There's just so much work we have to do on ourselves
as people before anarchism can become a viable framework for
organizing our lives as communities.

You wonder if we really need the police? The army? Any institution of the state that we typically think we have a duty to obey. You come to doubt the truth of our entire heritage of political thinking that has an ancestor in Thomas Hobbes.

So you come to doubt pretty much every principle taken for granted in Western political philosophy – the social contract, the authority of the state, the obligations of citizens to police and military authority. That’s the value of looking into thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Emma Goldman.

Yet I have my doubts about the power of a straight-ahead anarchism to provide actionable values for human society. Frankly, anarchist values like mutual aid and intuitive social solidarity are too difficult for most humans to live by.

Paul Patton makes this point in one of his books about Gilles Deleuze. He writes about how people often take Deleuze and Guattari to have been anarchists. It’s true that their political thinking was very critical of state authority. And they were involved as thought leaders and activists with real anarchist and communist political movements in Europe during their lives.

But Patton makes one very insightful point in the early stages of that book – anarchism requires an optimism about humanity’s inherent goodness and kindness to each other that Deleuze and Guattari didn’t really share.

Humans are too terrible to each other. We resent each other. We make aliens of each other. We hate each other for no real reason, both as individuals and as groups. We need a long period of education and moral training to be as kind to each other as the mutual aid principles of an anarchist society would require.

And it would be even more difficult to prevent the xenophobia that can so easily arise when we let communitarian values drive our us vs them cultural imagery. Humans are, for the most part, simply not good or kind enough creatures to live according to a thoroughly anarchist political morality.

Anarchism’s most important contribution to practical political thinking in the 21st century, I think, is its spirit. Rebellion against taking coercive authority, the power of the state over society’s development, for granted. Critiquing the institutions that we’ve been taught almost all our lives are beyond reproach.

That spirit – maybe you could call it punk philosophy – should inspire any approach to political thinking that takes seriously the possibility of change. Demands for political, social, moral, and ethical change requires conceiving of the radically different. Maybe it’s achievable. Or maybe we’ll always fall short of our ideal.

What matters is the image of a different path.

It Ain’t My Revolution, Research Time, 02/03/2016

When I got to that part in Multitude, I couldn’t quite understand why Antonio Negri kept talking about peasants. This is a major section in the fourth chapter where he furiously critiques the conceptions of peasantry and peasants that left-wing revolutionaries have developed over the last century.

People have a lot of misconceptions about peasants. For
one thing, they weren't all organized as anarcho-
syndicalist communes.

I mean this seriously – he reads with a tone of exasperated frustration. It’s as if he’s just so angry that writers and politicians who he clearly respects so much just won’t stop making the same mistake. Over and over again. 

That mistake is making the peasant into a kind of revolutionary. A universal revolutionary, one for the whole world. Or else, as an ideal for the perfect communal life. 

I remember reading Peter Kropotkin discussing the medieval peasant villages this way. They were places where people could work for the subsistence of the community, there needed to be no strong authorities when everyone looked out for each other. 

These harmonious communities were eventually overrun as state armies, loyal to dukes and kings, came to establish their administrations. Then came centralized bureaucracies. Government management. The department of statistics so they authorities and their militaries and police could manage the populations. Freedom disappeared.

The ideal of socialist revolution in the 20th century was, in the minds of the idealists anyway, about restoring that kind of society. The reality was an even more pervasive and oppressive state apparatus than had ever existed – the omnipresent police and constant violence of Stalin’s purges. Or the hurricane of chaos that was Mao’s China of continual revolution.

The ideal of the peasant is a dream. Not even a dream, but a half-memory. The wish that we could live in a world without scarcity, where a community could live in harmony together without having to worry seriously about sustaining your life or keeping safe. 

Western revolutionaries rarely
understood that you couldn't make
a universal type from a peculiar
European tradition. They didn't
even understand that peasants
were only European.

It’s the land of do-as-you-please. It wouldn’t be so bad.

But to keep the dream alive, the writers and theorists who wanted to liberate humanity saw ghosts of that dream everywhere. The peasant of that peculiarly European community of small-holding farmers in medieval times couldn’t be found outside. Even if these theorists of humanity saw it in all the rural poor of China, India, and the tribal village networks of the West African coast. 

Read Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s memorial to the rural Igbo culture of Nigeria, the style of pride that killed itself rather than buckle down to the colonizers and missionaries. There’s a dignity to that life, and a nobility. But it’s not the peasantry that the marxists saw everywhere. 

Yeah, that’s who I mean. And it’s the object of Negri’s scorn. The marxist revolutionaries and theorists who thought the spectre of the peasant would be the beacon liberating humanity. They mistook a European peculiarity for a universal.

Anthropological science did the same thing, according to Negri. Sort of, anyway. Early anthropologists examined the rural indigenous cultures of the world as if they were a pure Other, a total alien compared to Western man. More often, the word was ‘primitive,’ the utter alien to ‘civilization.’

At best, those early anthropologists treated indigenous cultures as the most retarded humans. I mean that in its offensive, derogatory sense. Human civilization was popularly conceived as a single path of progress. 

That’s where the expression referring to Western civilization as the most ‘advanced’ came from. The indigenous, according to such an ideology, were societies that had the farthest to go to become truly advanced. To be the same as the West.

There was something of that attitude in even the most radical revolutionary marxism, according to Negri. The idea that there was a universal, single path to paradise, and that it was a Western path. 

But the anthropologists didn’t really learn anything about these people’s cultures by treating them as an Other, a primitive, or backward. Just as the marxists never founded revolutions to build the perfect society in their imagined universal worldwide peasantry.

You learn about people and peoples by understanding their singularity – the uniqueness that makes every personality and culture peculiar to its place, situation, and history. You learn when you ask someone who and how they are, not how they can teach you about yourself.

State Power to Create a Nobility, Research Time, 23/02/2015

Friedrich Hayek has a lot of curious critiques of using state/government power to plan, manage, and control economic activity. One critique stood out to me as being, essentially, a product of the radical left. 

His argument goes something like this. Say a hardcore, old-fashioned socialist government takes over from a relatively liberal one. Its plan is just as the technocrats of Hayek’s own age presumed was the inevitable wave of the future, to run all the economic affairs of its country through a centrally planned state infrastructure, nationalizing all industry and making all people state employees. 

Such a socialist government will have to equalize people’s income and living situations. Because the current arrangement of society is economically unequal, this will require giving some people more state benefits than others. Essentially, it creates a favoured class of people, the beneficiaries of more state wealth, support, and services. It would also have to take wealth away from citizens who had an outsized share under the old regime, but concentrate on the people to whom the state gives most for this argument.

This phenomenon is the state itself creating a new most-favoured class within society. All societies have such classes, and one of the purposes of community-scale democratic organization is to give these classes the pokes required to keep them from lording their wealth over everyone else. But in Hayek’s hypothetical example, the institutional machinery of the state itself secures the new ruling class of uplifted poor and bureaucratic managers of the economy.

Such a movement is entirely anti-democratic. But the right-wing or conservative movements that helped promote Hayek's new liberalism weren't really interested in creating a society free of privilege. They didn't want to nationalize the economy under a bureaucratic state's management, but such classes of very wealthy people have seldom opened competition for their fortunes to all.

Two theorists in my research for the Utopias project have already made such critiques of state power to create and secure a ruling or nobility class in their own times: Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. 

Kropotkin discussed the politics of humanity with a longer frame of reference than a lot of the notable political theorists and writers of recent years. He didn’t talk in terms of decades or even centuries, but in reference to millions of years of human evolution. This perspective taught him that humans most naturally and for the longest time lived in small groups whose lives depended on constant interaction and mutual dependence and aid. 

The problem with modern society, from such a perspective, would be that rigid social hierarchies of authorities and noblemen with special privileges over many individuals is a radical shift away from this best practice. It discards a social practice that is easily seen to be evolutionarily superior, and quite a lot about rigid hierarchies show just how maladaptive they are. 

Bakunin spent some of his harshest words decrying the institutions and the economic practices that constituted and enshrined a class of nobles. He went beyond the macro-economic scale of state favouritism, though, and attacked the practice of inheritance of wealth itself. Inheritance is the foundation of nobility on the scale of the individual, allowing personally unearned wealth to jumpstart another person’s fortune unfairly.

I’m not sure what he offered as an alternative to dealing with the accumulated wealth of the dead, and I haven’t managed to think of any alternatives myself. So any direction in this regard would be much appreciated.

It’s another aspect of how libertarian politics seems to converge with anarchist philosophy. Despite this, libertarianism in our public world keeps turning to the right. I’m not sure of the exact cause, and there are probably many. A major practical factor, so I hypothesize right now, is that when Hayek and Milton Friedman formed the first new liberal think tanks, they had so much corporate financial support and influence that their fundamental ideas for the freest markets enabling liberty were corrupted by the new ruling class of our societies. 

I’m Pretty Sure I’ve Always Thought This Way, A History Boy, 11/09/2014

Or at least I have for a fairly long time. I think a lot of people who study philosophy intensely choose the focal areas they do because the subject speaks to them in a way that other sub-disciplines don’t. You might say that we’re drawn to study what we find intuitively true, but this isn’t really accurate at all.

Michel Foucault was one of the first philosophers I ever read.
After I discovered the discipline, I bought books because they
stood out to me. Madness and Civilization was one of those
early, exploratory purchases.

For one, saying that something is true tends to imply that what you find true is internally consistent. This isn’t true with philosophical sub-disciplines, in which the central figures may share some broad presumptions or styles of writing, but for the most part disagree about fundamental questions and concepts. 

Perhaps it’s better for me to say that there are particular underlying ideas in some sub-disciplines of philosophy that, if those ideas resonate with you, you’ll be drawn to focus on that sub-discipline. Or at least, you’ll find yourself reading that area more often than the others, choosing courses in it, reading and researching it independently, maybe even thinking about contributing to its evolution somehow, if that’s even possible.

I’ve known people who think this way about Marcus Aurelius and the ancient Greeks and Romans, Thomas Aquinas and the medieval Christians, René Descartes and the modern rationalists, and Bertrand Russell and the logicist philosophers of language. For some years, I’ve thought this way about the French post-structuralists, the neo-Nietzscheans, neo-Bergsonians and neo-Spinozists in disguise. I’ve studied the main authors in that tradition, largely on my own outside of any class guidance, and a lot of those ideas inform my approach to other areas of philosophy.

I say this, after a week of writing about the anarchist theory of 1970s Britain, because I think part of what underlay my attraction to the French thinkers was their own anarchism. It was rarely said, but there was a powerful critique of the state, the legitimacy of representative government to do all the metaphysical heavy lifting of politics that it said it could do, and the danger of putting your life in the hands of the materially more powerful. 

The French theorists whose work I loved
rarely acknowledged their debts to the
political philosophy of the old anarchists,
which might be why it took me so long to
find them myself.

I thought of the idea this morning when, on the train to my college in Oakville, I read about a speech Peter Kropotkin made in 1887 which, in many ways anticipated the insights and research of Michel Foucault into the links between insane asylums, prisons, and the morality of shutting deviant people away from public view, effectively disappearing them and rendering them practically non-existent. 

Kropotkin went on to focus on the practical critique, that the isolation and brutally authoritarian power structure of the asylum and prison actually worsened the mental and anti-social condition of the inmate. As a society, we are largely afraid of the insane and criminal, so prefer to lock them away to rot instead of deal with the problem directly. Despite the physical risks of this more ethically open and responsible approach, too many of us remain afraid, gripped more by anxiety than by our responsibilities to take a more reparative approach to the problems of our fellow people.

Ultimately, that’s what I think the only productive forms of anarchist politics are about: as a person, you take responsibility to repair your society, and you only repair your society one person at a time, doing the best you can.

To Develop a Singular Identity, Research Time, 11/07/2014

One of the centrepiece concepts of my broad philosophical work is singularity. In an absolute sense, this is the notion that every body and event in the universe is at least minimally unique from every other. In a relative or practical sense, it is the notion that there is a natural tendency for systems, especially when they interact, to become more complex over time, thereby increasing their degree of uniqueness. They become more singular.

We can see this functioning, for example, in human personalities. One of the most lamentable developments for a person to take is to become nothing more than a stereotype, a cookie-cutter person, a total conformist. The best people are remarkable, interesting, weird. 

This notion of singularity is at the centre of my Ecophilosophy manuscript, and it will be very important to the basis of the political philosophy in the Utopias project. Wonderfully, Peter Kropotkin has given me a foothold to use this idea in relation to the anarchist project. In a late essay, Kropotkin contends that the most important political and social priority is something called individualization, creating a social and economic structure that allows people to do what they are best suited and find most interesting. It would encourage them to develop their personality along entirely unique lines, creating a world of the remarkable. In such a society, we would never be bored, always meeting fascinating and weird people. This is a world of extremely intense human singularities. 

I only discovered the idea in a short article, in fact an encyclopedia article Kropotkin was asked to write about anarchism, so it doesn’t go into much detail. But he considers anarchism the political system best suited for achieving this singularization of the human race. The central argument for it in this essay is that coercion encourages conformity, the stifling of one’s individuality for the sake of survival. This is so whether it’s conformity to the rules of the state in fear of its military violence, or to the dictates of an oligarchical business clan in fear of its ability to trap you in poverty.

One of the nice things about encyclopedia articles written by brilliant theorists and writers is that it allows them to define a complex concept in as straightforward a manner as possible, and a political concept needs a straightforward articulation. Anarchism, says Kropotkin, is a political system of voluntary associations, obligations, and agreements to manage all social and economic functions which currently rest within the state. Instead of the state’s univocal laws that are so difficult to change as to be ossified, we govern ourselves in a complex network of dynamic covenants. We are each a node in the network, and in being so, have the power to help shape that network.

The theory isn’t perfect, after all. We know now that in dynamic, mutually self-constituted networks, not every node is created equal, as Kropotkin would suppose. Spontaneously developing networks are usually scale-free, with some nodes being much more important than average, and some nodes quite marginal and isolated. But the dynamism inherent to a networked relation would make an individual equally dynamic, encouraging their creativity not from fear of harm, but from the desire to connect and evolve. 

How to Ground a Social Order, Composing, 10/07/2014

The grand old Peter Kropotkin.

I finished Mutual Aid last night, and found it fascinating. Kropotkin ended the book with a discussion of the rural and urban mutual aid associations that were growing in his time, particularly voluntary associations for poverty relief, the resurrection of communal gardens, farming fields, and meadows, the use of industrial equipment for agriculture, and the nascent union movement among workers in the cities of contemporary Europe and North America. But the ideas that I found most interesting of all, I described mostly in previous posts, and can’t really think of any way to elaborate them further just now.

Instead, I thought about one rhetorical point that Kropotkin made throughout the book, his rebuke to the notion that any resource held in common among a community will be destroyed. This is the tragedy of the commons, originally described by John Locke and for us, recently described again by Garrett Hardin. The analysis goes that, because each individual will take the most immediate material benefit out of any resource (like a farming meadow, pasture, or fish stock), the actions of all of them without restraint of property right or police will exhaust and destroy the resource beyond renewal. Kropotkin says it’s bunk. So do I.

I spoke yesterday about the relatively recent birth of the concept of the radically individualized person, upon which the argument for private property by the inevitably tragic nature of the commons depends. It defines self-interest to be the same as greed, and that the only person whose welfare any of us would ever really care about is ourselves. Such a social order is defined by the war of each against all, and the coercive and violent institutions that keep the peace against the inevitable dissolution of our society.

The entire argument is flawed because it is an expression of dogma. It appeals to a notion of the individual that we have all become too accustomed to thinking is true without actually testing it against the actual behaviour of people. After all, most of our associations with people around us in our everyday lives have nothing to do with accumulating personal wealth and power at their expense. We do our jobs and associate with our friends and neighbours, and are generally quite kind to each other.

Those who do act in such a way as to ruin common goods and profit at the expense and suffering of others are rare enough that we can identify them for what they are and act accordingly. Hobbes and Locke describe radically free individuals as, essentially, assholes. The vision of humanity that Kropotkin and I hold focusses more on human kindness and altruism than egoistic, self-aggrandizing behaviour.

So how do you ground an institutional social order in this circumstance? The entire Utopias project is ultimately about visions for real social orders, and eventually aims to offer explicitly what I think is the best such kind of order, as many political philosophers have done over the years. The question of law is paramount, but I’m not quite sure of how to engage with it.

Kropotkin himself has some writings on the nature of law which I briefly revisited, and some ideas in Alexandre Lefebvre’s The Image of Law go some way into a Spinozist conception of law which I think could be quite interesting. But there’s an enormous field of legal theory that I don’t know well in detail, and there’s only so much that the Utopias project can do in one shot.

The project has three parts. One is understanding the mechanistic vision of humanity that emerged from the First World War and had its essential formulation in European totalitarianism and the Futurist political philosophy of Filippo Marinetti. The second part describes a machinic vision of humanity, a more hopeful political tradition that has its ground in the metaphysical tradition of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, the four most prominent among a variety of other thinkers who will supply the conceptual centre of the project.

And the final part will describe the core political features of this new world, essentially a self-organizing, anarchistic politics. This is the most amorphous part of the project at this point, and it’s why I’ve been reading Kropotkin again, and will explore Bakunin, Goldman, and others soon enough, along with, perhaps, a little Marx. But no project is ever truly complete, even when it’s finished.

21st Century Kropotkin III: A Challenge to the Libertarians, Research Time, 09/07/2014

A little personal history. When I was in middle and high school, I had a friend who I lost contact with when university started. I met up with G again years later on Facebook, and he was a radical libertarian. We had several stimulating conversations over the following year, which was a worthwhile critical voice for my own political beliefs. My own thinking on several important matters became more nuanced because of G’s critiques and those of some of the folks he introduced me to. 

There are some awful stereotypes
about libertarianism that should be
combatted. Nonetheless, I'm not a
libertarian, nor do I wish to be.

But I never became a libertarian. I think that’s why G eventually defriended me on Facebook, and we hardly talked again, except once when he taunted me in a comment thread. I welcomed a voice that offered a set of political beliefs that were different than mine, precisely because it kept me out of groupthink habits and the resulting dogmatism. Yet when it became clear to him that I wouldn’t accept the dogma of his own libertarianism, G seemed to disconnect himself from me, even though we had spoken regularly for over a year.

I tell this story because there’s a point in Peter Kropotkin’s relation of the political history of Europe’s transition from the Medieval to the Modern period when he almost sounds like a libertarian. And I think this glimmer of resemblance constitutes a fundamental challenge to the essential premise of libertarian philosophy: the political primacy of the individual and the free market of independent individuals.

Kropotkin gives us a narrative of Europe’s transition from medieval society to the modern as the destruction of freedom by oppressive military forces. Communities and craftsmen’s guilds fostered cities of people working together for the common good and achieving remarkable prosperity. Medieval Europe held their cultural pinnacles in city-states, whose central organizing philosophy was an update of the Greek polis: each community was different, but all were equal, and confederated together for mutual defence, aid, and development. With slavery out of the question, their societies were free of most forms of hard hierarchy.

The development of the medieval city-states amped up in the 11th century, and climaxed in the 13th. The period of decadence began in the 15th and 16th centuries, as the grand old families of many city-states became oligarchs and despots, and the guilds grew alienated from their agricultural base in the peasantry. But the true death blow to this self-organized prosperity came with the assaults of the military state. The Catholic Church, as an institution, had taught for centuries that society should be unified and authoritarian. They combined with the growing military force of Europe’s kings to create the modern state.

When the military state crushed the free city-states of medieval Europe over the 17th to 18th centuries, the major thrust of the political movement over the following hundred years until Kropotkin’s time, the 1890s, was that all social and community bonds would be mediated by the functions of the state. My enthusiastic Hegelian friends should note another reason for my opposition to Hegel’s philosophy here: central to the German’s political metaphysics is the notion that the progress of society is the subsumption of all individual and community activities and identifications in the mediating institution of the state. Kropotkin’s philosophy lets you call this out as political authoritarianism.*

The French Revolution's outcome,
which was clearly a victory for the
freedom of working people.

* Kropotkin even argues that Hegel's treasured French revolution was just another form of authoritarianism. Far from freeing the people, it simply traded stewardship of the levers of state violence from the landed gentry and royals to the bourgeoisie and new capitalist class. He never mentions Hegel by name, however, but to anyone familiar with the philosophical tradition, the association is clear.

Here’s where Kropotkin’s narrative can become a critique of contemporary libertarianism. The essential focus of libertarian political philosophy is to make the individual, his needs, desires, and personal freedoms the paramount political principle. But, says Kropotkin, this concept of the totally free individual, unconnected from institutional or communal obligations is itself a creation of the militarized state. 

The modern state was created through the military force of Europe’s royalty and landed gentry (having become overpoweringly rich on colonial exploitation) unleashing a centuries-long wave of mass violence to break the bonds of social obligation and non-hierarchical organizations that were the backbone of the free city-states’ prosperity. Tradesmen’s guilds were suppressed because “there shall be no State within the State.” 

As the state and its functionaries mediated all social ties and obligations, the radically separate individual was the only way that adults could express themselves. The concept of the radically free individual needed the state to create it in the first place. Before this period of violence, the individual was free through the shared benefits of his social obligations, and his identity was a function of these relationships which enabled his prosperity in times of plenty and his survival, through the obligations of his fellows to care for him, in times of poverty. 

Libertarianism conceives of individuals as inherently radically free, any obligation being either totally voluntary or else a function of state repression. But it was only the repression of the state that destroyed the ability to conceive of how social obligation could free you. The freedom of libertarianism is entirely negative, freedom of the individual to disconnect himself from all obligation. The freedom of Kropotkin’s anarchism, inspired by the example of the mutual aid institutions that defined the medieval city-states, is an even greater freedom because it connects you in networks of social relations, mutual obligations, that empower you and all your compatriots.

I know which one I prefer.

21st Century Kropotkin II: The Continuity of History, Research Time, 08/07/2014

A few years ago, I presented some of my work in environmental philosophy at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, a short version of a paper about the usefulness of John Dewey’s ontological thinking for environmentalist ethics and ecological metaphysics. The paper, in longer form, was eventually published in Environmental Ethics. 

At the conference, I met the ageless Joseph Margolis, who was the keynote speaker. One of the interesting conversations he and I had over the week was about the nature of time, and history in particular. He and I disagreed over what could properly be called history. With his Hegelian influence, Joe understood history as an entirely human affair. With my ecological way of thinking, I understood history as a function of change itself, which means that everything in the universe has a history, and all our histories affect each other. 

An advantage to Kropotkin's view of history is that he
doesn't separate the pre-history of humanity from the era
of civilizations that left detailed records.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a take on history similar to mine, but arrives there for different reasons. The book, as I’ve said in previous posts, is weird. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before, which is a commendation as far as I’m concerned. It understands the political associations of mutual aid and communal life as evolutionary adaptations of self-conscious social beings. He explains how this is so by situating the human race in an unbroken continuity of evolutionary history.

Now, Kropotkin’s evolutionary chronology has distinct disadvantages. It’s extremely brief, covering essentially just under two chapters of a book that does largely concentrate on human history. Since the book was written over the 1890s, Mutual Aid doesn’t have nearly the depth, breadth, and detail that contemporary accounts of the evolution of life on Earth can muster. While our own knowledge does remain incomplete, today we do have a better grasp of what kinds of creatures dominated the past epochs of Earth’s biosphere, and rely less on the notion that contemporary animal and plant species can be extrapolated back in time with little change because of their ‘hierarchically’ ‘lower’ place on the ‘scale’ of evolution.*

* I include these terms in scare quotes because hierarchical concepts don’t even really make sense in contemporary evolutionary theory. Kropotkin uses them because they are the terms contemporary to his own time. 

Henri Bergson was one of the most popular philosophers of
the early 20th century, but he remains a cult figure today.

But despite these failures of the technical aspects of evolutionary knowledge, Kropotkin offers a vision of Earth’s history and biological evolution as a single duration. Writing in the 1890s, he was already articulating in his scientific and political writing what Henri Bergson was doing in his concurrent philosophical work. Time and Free Will developed the basic concept of duration, and his subsequent books put it to work. A duration was a single continuous flow whose internal changes were a unified process, affects affecting affects (if I can make a reference to stoic philosophy, causes causing causes causing causes). Each duration was qualitatively different.

The boundaries between durations were sketchy in Bergson’s philosophy. In some contexts of his writing, a duration was an absolute, but in other analyses, what constituted a duration depended on what a thinker herself chose to examine as such. 

I don’t know how much of Bergson’s work Kropotkin was exposed to, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the question seriously. But if Kropotkin could be said to analyze human history in any way, I would understand him as conceiving of human political history as the later stages of a duration that encompassed all that was known of the changes that constitute the history of animal life itself, from his genesis to his own day.

It’s a very novel way to think about human history, and I think we could all benefit from taking this point of view more often.

21st Century Kropotkin I: Indigenous Living May Be Obsolete, Research Time, 04/07/2014

Peter Kropotkin tells a story throughout Mutual Aid about the evolution of human society as an adaptation, the latest iteration of a long line of social phenotypes. The human models of sociality are especially interesting because we can transform them so quickly. Much of ant organization, to take an example close to my philosophical and literary heart, has changed little over the millions of years these beautiful insects have lived on Earth.

Kropotkin, however, traces several different forms of communal and consensual organization among the human race throughout its history in Europe and northern Asia alone. The oldest cultures of humanity, which he takes to survive in the indigenous peoples of our species, all practice communal forms of life: ownership of land and the resources to farm are conceived as common, and it is only the products of individual or familial agricultural toil that belong to that family. 

Even here, care for the misfortunate is taken as read; Kropotkin describes examples from indigenous groups all over the world of how, if a destitute person asks for alms, a person is obligated to take him in for days to feed and clothe him. If a member of the community finds himself ruined, the richest donate some of their livestock to get him back on his feet.

Charity in the contemporary Western world is notoriously slim. Such nefarious examples as the grandchildren of Wal-Mart creator Sam Walton don’t even donate anything substantial of their fortune to their own charitable organizations, and what little they do is largely to avoid paying taxes. During times of economic recession, charitable giving among the general population shrinks considerably. Our civilization has so many financial pressures, including barely manageable debt burdens that are casually accepted as an ordinary part of life. The lifestyle of the rural indigenous makes communal living easier: there is so much less to spend your wealth on.

Can a vision of a human society express an ideal of the
perfect political system and be at all human?

Life as a communal peasant certainly seems easier as Kropotkin’s pen describes. These communities are smaller, simpler, more kind, and gentler. I worry, however, about the orientalism that Kropotkin could be articulating when he praises these indigenous groups. He seems to describe the societies of Amazonia, indigenous Australia, Siberia, and the Berber Kabyle people of Algeria in idealistic terms, as if they had perfected society in their communal practices. After all, idealization accomplishes just the same as demonization in annihilating the human singularity of a people under an idealistic group identity.

The problem seems to be laid off by Kropotkin’s anthropological focus on the peasants of northern Europe in describing their own communal social frameworks. But the problem of idealization remains in his work. Mutual Aid is, as I’ve said for the last while, a strange book. Not only is it a work of evolutionary theory that becomes an anthropological history, it is an anthropological history that also serves as a political argument for anarchism, advocating that we live in self-organizing autonomous communities. I’m still wrapping my head around what precisely the implications, problems, and benefits of such an amorphous approach to philosophical writing can be.

The political nature of the book, while I find myself in great sympathy with it, expresses a vision of the communal lifestyle that may not be possible in our heavily industrialized world. In the world of the peasants and indigenous peoples that Kropotkin describes, every man is capable of building his own house and maintaining all the systems that keep the village alive and thriving. We no longer live in that world. If Kropotkin's vision of the anarchistic ideal for society is drawn from examples of the medieval or older past and non-industrial indigenous peoples, then the very technology I'm using to spread these thoughts and ideas would not be possible in the society he wanted to build.

Anarchistic Philosophical Appetizers, Research Time, 03/07/2014

I’ve missed some days of philosophical reading while I began looking for new steady employment, as my freelance editing gig doesn’t seem to be paying the dividends necessary for my lifestyle (rent, food, internet access, occasionally being able to do things like visit Toronto or buy a book). But I did gather some news regarding the Hobby Lobby decision, which already seems to have completely wrecked any attempt in the Affordable Care Act to provide anything approaching a universal subsidy for any contraceptive services. 

The rights of working people have fallen victim to the
purveyors of . . . macramé.

The legal landscape of the United States now seems to be defined by a series of Supreme Court rulings that, in following through on the conception of corporations as legal persons (that personhood most often expressed in their owners), is on track to completely disenfranchise working people of most of their autonomy. The Court seems, at least to me, to be on track to declaring any attempt of workers to establish independence from the demands of their employers in any aspect of their lives, as illegitimate impositions on the freedom of corporate persons. 

The Hobby Lobby decision treats the rights of employers not to have their religious beliefs infringed as paramount over the right of employees to maintain their autonomy in areas of their lives having nothing to do with the smooth functional operation of the company itself. In light of the very strange historical path the United States seems to be on, I have cracked open the singularly strange Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, a book that is, in large part, a historical narrative of the evolution of human society from the social forms of insects and wild animals through to the humanity that was modern to the author in the late 19th century.

At my current point in the book, Kropotkin has just begun his account of the nature of tradesmen’s guilds in the medieval cities of Europe, covering a period from the 800s to about the 1500s. You can expect more thoughts on where this historical narrative ultimately goes as I get there. Today, I just want to focus on two ideas.

Idea 1. I find it quite intriguing how Kropotkin deals with the boundary between pre-historic and civilizational humanity: he acts as if it doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t. It’s easy for us to see the humanity of urban civilization as having made a decisive break from the humanity that was more like the animals. It’s why we distinguish the cavemen from the humans who lived under Hammurabi’s Code. It’s why we even have the word ‘pre-historic’ to describe these ancient people. 

Archaeology of the indigenous Americas and other very ancient settlements and movements of the human race has helped disavow people of this idea. If you get a chance to see Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, you definitely should, because it humanizes humans that are generally thought of as less than human. There is a continuous flow of time and development throughout all life on Earth. We break up our species and our planet’s history into stages because we find such segregated eras easier to analyze and understand. But their ability to describe adequately the flux of history is limited.

Idea 2. Getting back to my rage about the Hobby Lobby decision (which is one more reason why I am no longer interested in the possibilities of moving to the United States), I wonder what a thinker like Kropotkin would make of this madness. His history of human civilization in Mutual Aid is one of growing tensions of the forces that accumulate wealth and power in an increasingly corrupted cabal with the drive in humanity of equality before the laws and judgment of our fellows. 

Peasants were much more sophisticated than our modern
stereotypes usually depict.

This is how, as I read yesterday evening, he understands the growth of the medieval cities. The village communities of post-Roman Europe practiced common agriculture, consensual decision making, and settled conflicts by independent community custom. Feudal lords arose when commerce among communities increased, and conflicts arose with no common context of custom for arbitrators to apply. 

The notable families of a confederated region accumulated power through their legal capacities and wealth through fines and taxes. When these lords were unable to defend their villages against invasions from such forces as the Normans, Arabs, and Hungarians, the most prosperous communities built their own walls and eventually developed into legendary cities like Florence and Ghent. 

The American political and legal system is now in another period of flux, when the gap in power between richest and poorest is growing and legal institutions only seem to be protecting those already so powerful that they need no real protection. I went to sleep last night wondering how a nuanced and original thinker like Kropotkin would understand our strange modern era, which is nonetheless continuous with the strange eras of our past. 

Why Are Morality and Real Life Separate Anyway? Composing, 27/06/2014

This is just a short reflection for the weekend, a few brief paragraphs about the reasons why I reacted so positively to my first explorations of Peter Kropotkin’s work in nearly a decade. So often in academic philosophy, we classify the theorists who are pivotal in our history. Analytic and Continental are, of course, the two major classifications most people in the discipline are familiar with. Honestly, I feel almost tired discussing these categories, not only because they grossly oversimplify a genuinely complex exchange of ideas, but because they’ve become such stereotypes.

I went back to Kropotkin for the Utopias project, because the foundation of modern anarchism, whose most fertile period was the 19th century, will be very important to its denouement. My Utopias is ultimately a critique of faith in the directed action of large-scale state power to change our world for the better. 

I have some libertarian friends on the internet who tell me that the only true opposition to state power is libertarian society, but that philosophy focusses too much on the dogma of competition in an absolutely free market as a solution. I simply don’t believe that markets can arrive at optimal solutions for social ills without a lot of stumbling, cheating, ancillary destruction, and above all, wasted time. 

Some form of community action — I don’t want to say communism, because that term is so difficult to rescue for any purpose beyond polemics anymore — makes necessary social change as quickly as possible. I’m engaging anarchist political philosophy because of my intuition that its set of concepts offers the best framework for a creative solution to our problem of social change. 

The recent anarchist theory I’ve read, such as Robert Paul Wolff, focusses mostly on negative arguments: arguing for anarchism because of the flaws of capitalism, communism, or representative models of democratic government more generally. That fertile period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — the time of Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Emma Goldman — seems to offer a positive, constructive, creative vision of what an anarchist world would be.

There are very few creatures in the world capable of
surviving and thriving in a dangerous, cold world alone.
Humans included.

Kropotkin is usually included in the typical list of anarchist political theorists. As I said before, I first read his work in an undergraduate political theory course. But when you read his masterwork Mutual Aid, you see a book of naturalism and prototypical ecology transitioning into a work of political theory. It uses an analysis of activities that are optimally adaptive to the harsh environment of the Siberian wilderness to draw conclusions about how humans can best live. From a particular point of view, this makes Kropotkin an early forerunner not only of anarchist theory, but of the environmentalist political philosophers that arose in the late 20th century.

The atmosphere of the late 19th century was so polemical that Kropotkin was considered a radical scientist for even suggesting an alternative to the paradigm of natural selection as shaped by brutal struggle among individuals. In that context, even suggesting the importance of sociality and maintenance of communal peace for evolutionary fitness — hell, even suggesting that many species of animal were primarily social — was an insane suggestion in some circles.

Kropotkin’s move from an analysis of evolutionary adaptation and optimality in natural selection to moral and political prescriptions for the best human practice in organizing our communities is dangerous in some major philosophical sub-disciplines today. It would amount to the naturalistic fallacy, that one cannot derive the rightness of some particular moral principle from empirical facts about the world; that one cannot derive an ought from an is. At most, one can derive hypothetical practical prescriptions: that one could say what is prudent, given our nature and our situation, but not what is right.

My own Ecophilosophy project includes a similar move, developing a moral injunction, or at least an ethical attitude, in response to the question of how best to deal with the current global ecological crisis. Insofar as we are currently drowning in our own multifaceted industrial shit, what are the best political and ethical habits to rescue ourselves, and what are the best concepts by which we should understand ourselves to encourage these habits? It is a political and moral question, but it is ultimately one of prudence.*

* I also discuss how the stance of prudent action to survive can stand up to the broader existential question of whether humanity deserves to survive at all, but that’s for another time.

The separation of questions of moral rightness from questions of prudent actions to achieve specific goals in the world has always struck me as problematic, even though it is widely accepted as a dogma. It seems, as far as I’m concerned at least, to presume that the grounds of what is morally right are somehow separate from the world. Such a presumption inserts an unhealthily personalized transcendence into thought, and I think thought works best when it’s rooted entirely in the material world.

Maybe that’s why Kropotkin strikes me as a fellow traveller. He looked around him, and the world he saw gave him a notion of how the world could be better.

Mutual Aid II: How Living Can Inform the Life Sciences, Research Time, 26/06/2014

Continued from yesterday. Peter Kropotkin was not an ignorant political theorist alone, but a biologist and proto-ecologist with deeply held and detailed political beliefs. As I said yesterday, it is utterly ridiculous to derive a moral principle directly from a scientific principle. This is precisely the fundamental idiocy of Social Darwinism. It took the principle in the evolutionary theory of the 19th century that the engine of change in natural systems is conflict among individuals for resources, and turned this into a moral principle.

If the natural order of things was a ruthless struggle among individuals for life, then there is nothing unjust about structuring your society along lines of conflict. Those who have achieved much have won the struggle for survival and have, in doing so, demonstrated their fitness. Those who have lost have only proven their natural inferiority. The weak and enslaved were so because it was in their nature to be defeated, and any attempt to improve their lot went against the way of nature. The fact of victory by violent means justified violent means to victory. The subjugation of weak peoples by military strength merely articulated the true order of nature: the strong will dominate the weak. Such conceptual idiocy justified exploitation and empire.

Young Peter Kropotkin, an admirable man
with an admirable beard.

Kropotkin’s political theory was anarchistic, and the arc of Mutual Aid describes how the kind of cooperative relations among animals survive in humanity in the form of community and neighbourly relations. As a scientific endeavour, it’s one theoretical perspective on how altruism arises. Such a holistic approach to science should become more prominent in evolutionary biology, at least at the most broad conceptual level. My friend Y is working on a doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of science, a critique of the conceptual blockages in evolutionary population studies that prevents the quantitative science from understanding the development of altruism.

I think, at least given my preliminary engagement with the work so far, that Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid can provide a great service for researchers running up against the altruism problem in evolutionary biology. Where passing on genetic material is an evolutionary priority, the individual, or at least its kin, take precedence, and the notion that one could sacrifice oneself for the sake of an unrelated fellow is inconceivable. However, such behaviour happens frequently. 

This theory used to be extremely puzzled by social insects such as ants, whose colonies were populated by drones that would never reproduce. So they had to come up with the notion of group selection, which, after a fashion, makes no radical conceptual changes to the notion of individuals struggling to pass on their genetic material. Instead, it only treats the group as a super-organism, statistically.

This is just the wild speculation of a philosopher whose work in evolutionary theory concentrated more on ecological concepts than problems of inheritance: Mutual Aid could be a useful theoretical starting point to re-evaluate some basic concepts of the science. Kropotkin didn’t make the same mistake as all those Social Darwinists did, although it may seem as though he did and he has been summarily dismissed in some discussions of the relation of science and morality as having done so. This essay from 1997 by Stephen Jay Gould explains why he didn’t better than I could.

In short form, Kropotkin could think more easily about the problem of altruism because he didn’t have to deal with the wrinkle of inheriting DNA as the primary goal of evolution. But there’s a conceptual subtlety about inheritance that too many discussions of evolutionary theory seem to miss. Ultimately, natural selection and evolutionary change is driven by the inheritance (or lack thereof) of genetic material from generation to generation. But all Kropotkin had to see on his expeditions to Siberia were animals desperately banding together to help each other, as a group, survive hostile conditions.

And in the actual life of organisms, that’s all we know too. No animal, apart from a human with a passing familiarity with contemporary evolutionary theory, ever plans its actions with the intent of perpetuating its genetic legacy. It just wants to survive. If it survives better in a harsh environment by banding together in a group as a social creature as they all share their efforts, so much the better. A group whose members turn against itself can’t survive when environmental conditions become truly harsh. 

Here is how a political principle derives legitimately from a scientific investigation. The investigation has revealed some fact about the world which can guide the practical activity of the human race. Humans are social animals who survive and thrive evolutionarily better as groups than isolated individuals. We coordinate our societies through political means. A politics that values mutual aid over ruthless individual competition will be more likely to ensure that such a community survives an ecological catastrophe. 

Existence works probabilistically. Thinking of an individual alone, whether genetic material survives into a future generation is a matter of certainty: it either does or not. But when an entire population is taken into account, the likelihood of a given individual passing on its genetic material will depend on the vitality of its group. Momentary sacrifices for group survival make sense if we’re all in this together. The science of inheritance will be incomplete until it fully incorporates this ecological contingency, and the greater chances of survival through teamwork and group effort, into its mathematical models. 

Mutual Aid I: Moral Lessons from Evolutionary Theory? Research Time, 25/06/2014

If there is any single notion that all scientists, historians of science, and philosophers of science can agree on, it’s that it is ridiculous to try to derive moral principles from scientific discoveries and interpretive frameworks. There are many reasons why one should never do this. 

But the reason that I prefer to concentrate on in my own thinking is that the movement is much too simple. Moral principles and systems are complex cultural creations that develop over centuries of a community’s physical constitution. Simply extrapolating a scientific principle along a straight parallel into a moral guiding principle is a philosophically awful move. But this move is the conceptual foundation of Social Darwinism. 

Social Darwinism was the largest cultural movement to emerge from evolutionary theory, and it has given the theory a bad name ever since: the notion that the natural order of the world is ruthless competition among individuals, and that it is right and natural to structure human society at all levels that those who can stomp on more people as they rise to the top of society should, because they are able. I have even still found myself discussing this idea with students, who at first seem to consider it seriously. It’s precisely the most dangerous kind of poor thinking that exists: It’s so easy.

A young Charles Darwin, the most unjustly
vilified scientist in human history.

The name itself was an insult to Darwin’s own views about evolution, which were so nuanced, you would almost believe that he was a brilliant scientist who carefully considered his theoretical interpretations and constructions, and meticulously organized his massive collections of observational data. 

I mention this because I’ve started reading some anarchist political philosophy to sort through ideas for the final third of the Utopias project outline. I already have the basic shape of the first two thirds, but this last, purely political section still needs some conceptual work. Peter Kropotkin was the first person I began reading in this regard, mostly because he was the one I’d read before. I was first introduced to his work in my undergraduate degree, in a political theory course offered by Memorial’s political science department. Michael Wallack was the professor, and we were reading Kropotkin in dialogue with selected works of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse in that last half of that course. So I had some haunting familiarity with his works already.

The full manuscript of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid is actually another work that seems to make something like that illegitimate move from a scientific theory immediately to a parallel in prescriptive moral philosophy. At least, this is the popular account of the book. As I explore it further, I’ll have something else to say. A book doesn’t have the legacy Mutual Aid does without being more nuanced than the idiots who took up Social Darwinism.

Already, Mutual Aid impresses me, at least in providing an alternative conception of how evolution works than the Darwinian mainstream of his time. Darwin did his seminal fieldwork in the tropics, with a booming population of species and individuals squabbling over a lush landscape. Kropotkin did his in the wastelands of Siberia, where a sparse and dispersed population of all creatures helplessly scrounged for whatever occasional scraps of sustenance they could find in the desolation. In such an environment, creatures have to band together for a slim chance to avoid starving to death. Kropotkin’s detailed observations of animal behaviour in these harsh ecosystems were the basis of his biological framework of the evolution of mutual aid. To be continued . . .