The Social Drift That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Research Time, 15/06/2018

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of convergence between research for my philosophical writing and the political activism work I’ve been doing. Here’s an example.

As you can tell from my Twitter feed, I spent the last month working a contract for the New Democratic Party in Ontario on a district campaign in the provincial election. We lost that race by a respectably small margin, but there were some promising and troubling signs of future directions in how people engaged with state politics in this part of Canada.

On a province-wide level, the New Democrats had a remarkable success, nearly doubling their seats in the legislature, showing a strong performance province-wide, and breaking into victories in areas that hadn’t supported them in some time or ever.

When I was searching for artistic images of Ontario Premier Doug
Ford, I ended up discovering that there's a whimsical visual artist
in Auckland, New Zealand who is also named Doug Ford. One
of his ongoing projects is painting amusing or pastoral scenes on
traffic light control boxes.

The New Democrats swept most of urban Toronto, and even into the metro suburbs like Scarborough and Brampton. They gained seats in Kingston and central Ottawa, as well as growing and consolidating support in and around Windsor, Hamilton, Niagara, Thunder Bay, the lesser London, Peterborough, Sudbury, and Kitchener. But the rural-urban divide in support was stark and disturbing.

The only rural seats that went New Democrat were Indigenous-dominated populations in the far north of the province and the area around Sudbury. Two smaller cities with very working-class backgrounds went to the Conservatives: Sarnia and Sault Ste Marie. A major Sault Ste Marie Steelworkers union endorsed the Conservative candidate after its members demanded it. It was probably a major factor in his slim victory.

Sault Ste Marie offered the most troubling story for an organizer in progressive politics. The New Democrats have historically been a very pro-union party, traditionally linked to the concerns of working-class citizens.* This is especially true in Ontario, with its powerful government, higher education, and manufacturing unions.

* I mean, the New Democratic Party was literally created from the merger of Canada’s federal socialist party and the country’s largest association of trade unions.

But many union members are turning away from the New Democrats, even though that party’s policies are generally the best for people in that sector and class. I want to do some investigations about this, but my hypothesis is that the socially conservative, pro-white sentiment among many working class people are driving them to support a party that dog-whistles sufficiently to let folks know their stance.

He's a symbol and a voice. A voice that does speak for far too many
people out there.

Yes, Doug. That’s what “I’m taking care of our own first” means.

One of the most insightful popular analyses of this problem I found last year, written by Erik Loomis, a historian at University of Rhode Island. American union leadership and membership has taken the side of heavily-polluting oil companies against environmentalists and Indigenous people. Throughout the country’s history, American trade unions have supported openly racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and supported Donald Trump’s economic isolationism.

During the campaign, a Meet-and-Greet I was organizing fell apart. It was with a group of strong NDP supporters, all of whom had spent their entire lives in Toronto’s manufacturing and construction sectors, all of whom were dedicated union activists. My contact in the group even told me why.

Late in the campaign, the Liberal and Conservative parties began blanket messaging of opposition research on different New Democrat candidates around the province. I didn’t consider any of these issues a dealbreaker. In fact, I considered these additional reasons to endorse those candidates. But I can understand why many Ontarians who aren’t me found these people’s activism disgusting.

Gurratan Singh, running in the same Brampton riding his brother left to become federal NDP leader, once held a sign at an anti-violence protest reading “Fuck the Police.” Jessica Bell, running in central Toronto, once got herded into a police wagon and arrested at the protests against Stephen Harper’s G20 summit that saw Toronto’s entire financial district occupied by the Canadian military.

Erica Kelly, running in central Etobicoke, once said on social media that gun owners disgusted her after a blitz of post-Stoneman Douglas NRA ads made her blood boil. Laura Kaminker, a candidate in central Mississauga, refuses to wear a poppy leading up to our Remembrance Day because of how the symbol has been turned from a sign of mourning to one of patriotic jingoism.

Because the government of Tony Blair brought nothing but justice
and prosperity to Britain and the wider world. People got a little
disappointed about this, and more than a little angry.

We also ran a young trans woman in the Vanier suburb of Ottawa. She lost. So did Kelly and Kaminker. Singh and Bell won, though.

What reason did my contact give for his community turning down our campaign event? They were all disgusted by Kaminker, Singh, Bell, Kelly, and the other candidates slammed as ‘radical activists.’ They all threw their support to the Conservatives.

Jeremy Gilbert describes a parallel problem happening in Britain in the late 1990s. After Tony Blair led Labour to an electoral victory in 1997, the British labour movement of union activists and organizers largely shut down for several years. They presumed that, with the unionists’ party having taken government, there was no need for them to advocate. They had won.

You never win. The Labour Party won the 1997 election, so the popular movement for social justice in Britain was complete. I couldn’t finish writing that sentence without laughing. I’m not sure how much I should trust Gilbert on this assessment. It sounds a lot like hyperbole.

But I can’t deny that when one sector associates themselves with a political party so much, you can identify the party’s electoral victory with your own.

If the NDP ever wins government in Ontario again, I’ll be among the first to criticize its policies if they fall short of what we want to do and what we can do. Even if they’re giving me another job. My principles will never take a back seat to any party loyalty.

It seems the union folks abandoning the New Democrats think the same.

Whither Capital VI: Unlike Attracts Unlike, Research Time, 06/06/2018

Political alliances are marriages of convenience. That’s true when we’re talking about the coalitions of political parties. But it’s also true in other contexts. Some straightforward illustrations first.

If things go well in the Ontario election tomorrow, the province will have a government led by the New Democratic Party. In the popular gathering places of conservative and reactionary folks, it’s painted as a monolithic left – an undifferentiated mass of feminist trans gay communist black Jews.* But reactionaries don’t really understand the left.

* You can fill in what they really call us yourselves. But I’ll give you a hint. Actually no. I’ll just tell you, so that you can know how much progressive people are really hated. Bitch tranny faggot commie nigger kikes. That’s the language of Ford Nation.

This election campaign has been consuming significant amounts of my
life. It better, because I'm paid staff putting in 25 hours per week. So
naturally, I'm invested. And while I don't think the state is the most
effective machine to drive political transformation, its oppressive
machinery is extremely effective. So I want the state's purpose
perversely channeled toward helping the poor and the marginalized
instead of helping to destroy and enslave them. The New Democratic
Party, in Canada, is the best vehicle for those lewd perversities,
prosperity and peace.

So let’s go over who the coalition of the New Democrats really are. In broad swaths, of course.

There are trade union folks. There are anti-poverty activists and actual poor people. There are social progressives of the big cities and suburbs. There are people of non-straight sexualities and fluid or trans gender identities. There are environmentalists. There are racial justice advocates and the racialized, especially black and Indigenous people. There are religious people from traditions like the Catholic Social Gospel, liberal Islam, communitarian Sikh, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths, peacenik socialist Jews.

This is a really unstable coalition. For a really obvious example of its instability, look at the conflict between the NDP governments of Alberta and British Columbia over building an oil pipeline from the tar sands through the temperate rainforest of the Rockies, to the fjord network by the Pacific coast.

John Horgan’s NDP government is rightly concerned that this is an inevitable earth-shattering ecological disaster. Rachel Notley’s NDP government is rightly concerned that Alberta’s natural resource industry and the many thousands of well-paying jobs it fuels needs pipeline access to thrive.

This is a conflict between two major components of the party’s coalition – trade unions and environmentalists. I knew it would happen eventually. A dedicated trade union man will gladly drink carcinogenic water and breathe black air as long as the salaries, pensions, and medical benefits are good. A dedicated environmentalist will gladly live in poverty if his world is clean.

There is nothing necessary about any political alliance. As the circumstances of the world change, people will come together and drift apart. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing that brings such a disparate left together is that such a unified reactionary movement hates us all so much.

It feels good to rage. Feels good to steal. Feels good to bully. Do it
because it feels good, man.

What does this teach us about social movements’ need for leaders? It’s instructive because one of the main reasons people will say social movements need leaders is to unify them and give such a disparate collection of people a direction.

When even a political party’s identity doesn’t unify its own social coalition but can win anyway, it’s a sign that total unity isn’t even a condition of victory. Politics is more creative than that.

Believing that unity is necessary for political alliance presumes that the act of allying never actually happens. That has two possible meanings.

One is that the movement is always already unified, making alliance unnecessary and differences among allies meaningless. We know empirically that this isn’t the case because significant differences** persist among those happily in political alliances.

** Differences that make a difference in your lives – just ask Rachel and John.

The other possible implication? That leaders alone inspire political unity, whether through charisma or coercion. So a social movement needs a leader to unify them through their authority. Maybe it’s moral. Maybe it’s steel. The point is that people aren’t capable of action on their own, building networks of cooperation.

Alliances are forged among all the members of different communities learning about each other and helping each other out. They have a lot in common with friendships that way, but coming together faster, spreading at a higher intensity. Friendship, solidarity, alliance are all different words for different contexts of the same phenomenon.

Building a network of self-conscious agents. If you think you need a leader for that, then you depict people as entirely passive, incapable of change on their own power or through their own decisions. Acting only through the will of the leader.

Don’t mistake one model of politics for its necessary essence. Especially when it’s such a horrifying, destructive model.

Mapping Thought II: Can the Ideal Save Us? Research Time, 24/04/2018

So that's a look at the history of philosophy. What about the philosophy of history? A concept develops in response to a particular, singular problem as it arises in human society. The concept itself then develops historical power.

We don’t often think of concepts as having historical, material power. It’s an unfortunate tendency of the way the Western tradition of thought has separated thinking and the mental from the material, physical world of institutions and acts. But concepts do have material power.

Concepts are the components of people’s education and socialization. Let’s go back to our example from yesterday, the concept of the social contract.* It’s a concept, and so a matter of thought. But it’s thought that guides action in a very complex, profound way.

Does the violence of revolution overcome our ideals of freedom,
even as it overcomes whether we can actually use that revolution
to achieve anything like freedom in our own lives?

* There’s going to be a pretty intense interrogation of the concept of social contract, particularly its authoritarian characters, in Utopias. Not sure where in the book I’ll put it.

As a concept that sits at the heart of so many approaches to political thinking throughout the Western tradition, the different iterations of and approaches to the concept affect how we think about our relations to each other and to our state institutions.

Those thoughts inspire our actions. More than that, they drive our actions from central locations in our understanding of our social world.

Now I want to ask one more question – Do our concepts still have value when the events and movements they inspire become violent, corrupt, or self-destructive?

I’m going to step my example away from the social contract, and toward the more general concept of freedom. Freedom is a concept that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and has over centuries – And I’m just restricting my thinking in this case to my general knowledge of the Western tradition, what I know best.

Horrifying things have been done in the name of freedom. A contemporary example is Operation Iraqi Freedom. A classic example is the French Revolution.

The French Revolution was the subject of speculation by some of the leading philosophers of the time, who became some of the most influential philosophers down to the present day. So those complex examinations and investigations of the French Revolution have incredible influence on the Western tradition of philosophy as it stands today.

Because the truth is, just like the absurdity of a popular heartthrob like
1950s Marlon Brando playing Napoleon, the political events that saw
imperialism and wars of conquest emerge from the French Revolution
were contingent events. It need not have happened that way. Every
material event need not have happened that way, and only did
because of a complex interplay of events and relationships. The
slightest disturbance in this networks can have massive effects. So
should we resign ourselves to the fragility of our ideals? Or hold
onto them because that possibility of real success always remains?

The problem is that the event itself betrayed its motivating concept. The French Revolution was the successful overthrow of an absolutist monarchy in favour of a system of government that was more accountable to ordinary people. But the revolution itself quickly descended into the first major purge of modernism. The Terror was the assembly line of execution that continued for years after the overthrow of the monarchy.

Beyond this, within a decade, France was ruled again by a dictator. Napoleon was something of an improvement over the decadent, incompetent monarchy of Louis XVI, in that he actually introduced a system of law that governed even the practice of the state. Civil law was an improvement. The attempt to conquer Europe and the Mediterranean coast of Africa, not so much.

The same is true for so many other revolutions and revolutionary periods in politics. Civil war and Stalin’s system of governance by secret police destroyed any potential for genuine freedom to come from the Russian revolution, for example.

Same goes for the absolute dictatorship of Fidel Castro, the corruption of the United States with slavery and its cultural legacy, the revolutions of Simón Bolívar, José de San Martin, and Bernardo O’Higgins that descended into squabbles among warlords, and the deranged mass mobilization schemes of Mao Zedong, among many others. Revolutions in the name of freedom either fell into corruption or were quickly overcome by revanchist reactions.

So what’s the good of revolution? Paul Patton’s answer, riffing on the concepts of Gilles Deleuze, was the preservation of the idea of freedom. The total realization of the ideal freedom in the world is impossible, just as no one ever really signs a social contract. But the idea, the concept itself, is its own reason for existing – to inspire us to fight the reactionary forces that would take even our partial freedom away from us.

Is that alone worth it? I don’t know.

Tainted Left I: Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Research Time, 19/07/2016

My two-year online friendship with a pair of radical right-wing libertarians was one of the most philosophically enlightening relationships I think I’ve ever had. 

I don’t mean this in the sense that it made me an equally doctrinaire right-wing libertarian, even though that was their goal. Our relationship was a micro-level anthropology of North America’s radical right – I saw Trumpism in its embryonic form, a new fascism waiting for its catalyst to blossom.

What Sandifer explored through his critical analysis of neoreaction’s central writers (Mencius Moldbug, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick Land), I saw unfold before me in two real people. 

There's one particular memory I want to share with you, as an introduction to what will probably be a whole week talking about a problem inherent in any kind of left-leaning politics in the West. An image Libertarian G shared with me on the anniversary of Jack Layton’s death.

He wasn't even really all that radical in what he fought for.

It was a picture of Vladimir Lenin, with a short, respectful caption lamenting Jack’s passing.

At the time, I thought his equivalence of Jack Layton with Vladimir Lenin was just a joke, a ridiculous exaggeration for me to laugh at. But after several months more of almost daily interaction, it struck me that G really believed that. And as I learned more about right-wing libertarian society, I discovered that virtually all of them did too.

They believed that all left-wing people – no matter their real diversity of mind – wanted government to act as a fully collectivized communist totalitarian state. 

It seemed ridiculous, like a complete delusion. Finally reading Freidrich Hayek made it clear where this idea came from. From him, naturally. Because he says it – explicitly and repeatedly – in The Road to Serfdom. 

I sincerely believe – given what’s become an immensely powerful political movement in our time – that every academic philosophy department should include The Road to Serfdom in its political curriculum. And they should require students to attack its arguments with all the critical vigour and aggression they can.

Even though The Road to Serfdom can read like a work of philosophy, and be philosophically interpreted, you can make a strong argument that it isn’t philosophy. Following a concept Louis Althusser develops in For Marx, it’s ideology. Specifically, ‘mere ideology.’

We should all study the book critically because it is probably the most influential single book of political thought of the last 100 years. From the ideas of this one book, and the network of think tanks he built with Milton Friedman and other academics to spread their ideas to the wider public, came the foundational orthodoxy of modern conservatism.

The face of a bestseller, the most
influential political thinker of the last
hundred years. He can't be ignored.

A cut-down version of Road to Serfdom was published in Reader’s Digest of all things in 1945, and reached a huge popular audience across America. Hayek wrote the book as an explicit warning about the danger of totalitarian ideas, as the sustained confrontation of the Cold War was looming. 

That popular idea about left-wing people spread to all of society through conservative partisan political messaging for the rest of the 20th century. It spread through everyday conversation with people who came to accept it. It’s an opposition every progressive has to defend against, and can appear at any time.

“How are you not a communist!?” he shouts. 

For the next few posts – however many it’ll take me to work through the idea – I’m going to work through my impressions of how Althusser handles this in For Marx. He asks it specifically about marxists, of course, because he was himself a lifelong communist party activist in France. 

But today, we know the same question applies to everyone on the broadly left side of the political spectrum. How are our ideas not of the same path as the crimes of Stalin? . . . To be continued

Creative Miscellany: Reading Writing Replying Networking, Jamming, 14/07/2016

Just a general update today, since today turned out to be pretty eventful – in both a good and a less good way. Some projects have had some wonderful boosts, new opportunities for smaller works have come up, and one big project got a setback that I think could ultimately be for the best.

• • •

My first “LEAPing Beyond” workshop for the New Democratic Party went quite well, as you could probably tell from the last two posts. This weekend, I’ll be writing an official update on the first workshop to go up on official channels of Toronto’s NDP. 

I like the aesthetic of holding these workshops in parks,
islands in concrete that pretend to be wilderness. It
provokes the kind of juxtaposed thoughts that I want
to encourage with my words as well.

I’ll also make contact with riding associations presidents in the heart of Toronto, to promote the next workshop in early to mid August. I think Christie Pits park will probably be the best location. 

It’s less mainstream than Trinity-Bellwoods, and so offers a little more peace and quiet. I also like that Christie Pits is always within reach of road traffic – I think the urban oasis nature of most smaller city parks reminds us of the delicate relationship that a city must maintain with its green spaces.

• • •

I finished my first read of Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk, and secured a slot for a review of the book at the Reply Collective. I’ve already brought Sandifer to the hard drives of the Collective, as he was a significant interview for “Beyond the Academy.”

But this is the first time my American colleague’s work will have been brought for a review. Part of my mandate from the Collective’s Review’s editor – my old friend SD Card – is to keep the social epistemological parts of the book at the forefront.

That won't be hard. As I collect my thoughts and notes for the first pass at the review, quite a lot of what I’m thinking about revolves around ways of knowing. The book is, from the start, a critique of the traditional concept of rationalism from a variety of angles.

You wouldn’t think that was necessary anymore. But if you thought that, it was a sign that you’ve been reading too many progressive epistemology journals, and not enough neo-fascist pro-slavery blogs or anti-feminist Reddit or 4chan forums.

I'm also waiting for the supplementary material (thanks
to a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign),
especially Theses on Trump.

Now, I don't blame you for not reading these things. Part of what I find awe-inspiring about Phil and his work is his level of commitment. This man – with his deeply held political, moral, and ethical beliefs – sat down and read the neo-fascist pro-slavery rambling tangents of Mencius Moldbug. 

Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of words written by the most vile, self-absorbed, and unrestrained avatar of the genuinely neo-fascist pro-slavery software engineer Curtis Yarvin.

Phil has dived into something that most of us who thought that traditional conceptions of reason and rationality had been thrown on the dust-heap have ignored to our peril. This religion of pure reason exploding through right-wing online forums has become the dominant ideology of North America’s newest and most prominent reactionary social movement.

From Gamergate to the shock troops of the Trump campaign, the rank and file of American reaction in the 21st century have made a vision of purely objective rationality their sole epistemic yardstick. We have to grapple with this ideology, and that’s what I see Phil’s book as doing.

More details in a few weeks when the review actually goes up.

• • •

I’m working on another piece for the Reply Collective. This one is a reply to a recent piece by my favourite dialogue partner in the group, Steve Fuller. In this case, I want to write a response to his account of the Brexit phenomenon.

And Boris Johnson still won't go away.

Now, Steve has a few advantages over me on this. For one thing, he actually lives in Britain, and can see the media landscape daily through direct experience. I only see snippets and flashes from North America. So I don’t want to get into too many of the details.

Basically, I plan on responding to Steve’s perspective on the role of elites in political life, and whether the British constitution of parliamentary sovereignty has passed its sell-by date. It will come from the Negri-Foucault trajectory.

In short form, elite management of politics always risks disenfranchising or generally separating people from the institutions that hold incredible power over them. But contemporary communications technology and the political organizing it enables can bring that power to the people. Our era – thanks to our communications abilities – can open the most true and thorough democracy of all.

• • •

Finally, the partner I’d been working with on the development of You Were My Friend and I parted ways professionally yesterday. She’s still a fantastic actress, and I’ll probably still cast her in the same role she played in the theatre version. 

But I think our aesthetic instincts and priorities were a little too different for us to keep on the same page. Each of us had different ideas of what we thought were the most promising aspects of this story. I didn’t communicate my own such ideas clearly enough. And I still don’t quite understand what her own such ideas were.

So now I’m looking for a new director. And it has to be a woman. I need a female director so that the entire production can understand that You Were My Friend is a women’s story – with all that entails.

Were There Ever Really Any Great Atheists? A History Boy, 11/07/2016

There's a longer series about the nature of history in the works, but that will start tomorrow, because I've had a very tiring weekend. Today, I want to write something a little more personal. Just a small topic like my relationship with God in a few hundred words.

In particular, there’s a passage in Neoreaction: A Basilisk* that got me thinking about this part of my life. He talks about a typically long, rambling post by Mencius Moldbug, one of the intellectual leaders of the American neoreactionary movement – called “How Dawkins Got Pwned.”

* I've written about Phil Sandifer’s latest book before, and I may see if I can write a review later on this summer for the Reply Collective. It may also include some other parts of my interview with Phil from this Winter. And I may also try to sell other versions of it up the chain to different publications. Anyway . . . 

Anyone who refuses to bow to such a cruel,
authoritarian God, no matter the suffering
that refusal would cause yourself, will
necessarily be a hero.

Now, I'm not about to start parroting the ramblings of Mencius Moldbug. You know a little bit too much about my actual political beliefs to think I’m very vulnerable to his ideas. But Curtis Yarvin is still a smart person who, at least when filtered through someone else’s analysis, can make a fascinating insight or three.

In this case, it’s about Richard Dawkins, and the aggressive, contemptuous, rage-aholic New Atheist movement where he sits at the head. Now that Chris Hitchens is dead, anyway. 

As a younger man, I’d meet quite a few friends who were atheists in this loud, frothing sense. Religious belief, goes the convert’s intensity, was a delusion and a disease. A mental and social sickness. A profound stupidity of sincere belief that a magic invisible man who lives in the sky is your perfect authority to be followed.

I don't need to go into any great detail about why this kind of argument is flawed. Essentially, it’s just a big straw man. Taking millennia of philosophical development about what divinity’s nature could be, and casting it as a childish failure of people still dazzled by an adult-targeted version of the “Where’s the Ball?” game for infants.

I don't think I’ve ever been able to accept that massive reduction of intellectual history. To say that there were no valuable ideas or concepts in all this philosophy? To accuse them of stupidity? 

No. Anyone with respect for philosophical history at all must accept the legitimacy of thought and writing about the nature of God and the divine more broadly.

Yet I am an atheist. I was raised an atheist, and that’s always been my default way of thinking about divinity. Even though I believe in divinity and have embraced a relationship with Judaism as part of my family and identity. As an atheist, wouldn’t that seem incompatible.

You might think that no matter what reason I’ll give in the last few paragraphs of this post, I’m an idiot for saying so. That’s frankly your problem. 

He's just a very angry man.

It lies in this key idea that Sandifer dug out of Mencius Moldbug – that Richard Dawkins isn't just a straight-up atheist. He’s an Anglican-Calvinist atheist.

In other words, the self-declared neoreactionary spotted a fellow traveller. He correctly pegged Dawkins’ own beliefs about the nature of the divine as a product of reaction. Angrily turning against the Anglican and Calvinist traditions and beliefs in which he was raised.

This is why Dawkins’ period of peak cultural influence found his religious attitudes so aggressive, oversimplifying, shrill, and dismissive. They weren’t attitudes of a positive, productive identity – they were reactions, pure negations of beliefs.

Because I was raised atheist, my atheism has never needed that aggression. Or that strident refusal to bend, to make what would even risk appearing to anyone else as a compromise.

It’s not an issue for me to say that the material world itself has some divinity, some majesty to it. It’s not an issue for me to say that divinity can arise from profane sources. Like – in the Jewish philosophical tradition – the divine manifesting in ethical principles and good actions themselves. 

A reactionary’s God is the authority figure that sits above us all, judging, punishing, and commanding us. An atheist’s God can be the divinity that arises when people are kind to each other, in each act that treats each other with dignity. That God is no authority, but the grace that emerges from our own nature and the world.

Terrified of Change and Its Terror, Composing, 25/04/2016

My old friend The Yalie, who I’ve known since we were in university together back in Newfoundland, used to comment pretty regularly in the early, clunkier days of the blog. I remember in those early days, he’d compare my own thinking and perspective to Max Weber, one of the innovators of sociology.

I didn’t know Weber’s work well at the time, so I didn’t really know what The Yalie saw of Weber in me. I’ve read a little of his work since then, mostly the Vocation lectures and a few critical essays about Weber’s theories and character. 

I'd like to get his opinion on this again, now that it’s been nearly three years since I started this bloody project. Because I’m not sure that my ideas and Weber’s are really all that close.* Maybe it’s because I’m reading him with a particular intent of my own, that I focus on some ideas but not others. So here’s what I see and why I see it.

Max Weber and his piercing eyes.

* I have a lot in common with his ideas about bureaucracy and the culture of state organizations. But that’s not really what I’m thinking about when I read Weber.

Weber seems to have a lot of pessimism because he could see Europe’s growing popular collapse of belief in religious authority about moral and spiritual truths. And he thought this was a bad thing, because it undercut people’s beliefs about whether there were universal moral truths. 

It’s based on his reading of Nietzsche, which understood him mostly as a nihilist. In this sense, Weber was among the first generation of postmodernists. Here’s another oversimplified story about how this idea works. 

The liberal ideas of secularism and cultural pluralism had worn away the ability for reasonably educated people to think that their religion was better or more true than anyone else’s. Pluralism about the nature of God is incompatible with religious belief in a simple, popular sense, because religious belief is authoritative and exclusive.

And loss of faith in a religion corrodes people’s moral sense – again, according to this really simple but very popular view about what God is for. God’s purpose is to underwrite our moral beliefs so that they’ll be valid. God is the transcendent authority whose stamp of approval makes a moral principle universal.

This is a popular view. It’s Oprah’s view. The idea that atheists can’t be moral people, because they don’t have a transcendent authority underwriting moral principles. Far be it from me to say that a moral principle can be justified immanently, through their pragmatic effects and the constants of human nature. I might contradict Oprah.

But Weber was in a less condescending form of the same trap in thinking. Without a society’s unity and faith in a godly authority underwriting their morals, social harmony would be under serious threat. He was still trying to wrap his head around what atheism was. Thinking of Nietzsche as a pure nihilist is a sign that Weber couldn’t even catch up to the moustachioed one in his own lifetime.

I’m looking into Weber because he was one of the major creative figures in philosophy of this clique of thinkers who were trying to figure out the end of modernity in the shadow of the First World War. They could see that the dream of modernity was coming to an end, that it was going to be disastrous, and that nothing modernity promised us was going to work out, or work out well for people.

Some embraced it and some were afraid. Some who embraced it were the reactionaries of this generation – Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt. The scared ones – Weber, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Husserl – were afraid of more terror if industrial technology was used with a nihilist attitude. 

When I sit down to write Utopias, it can’t be a typical academic-style book of philosophy. Not only am I not in academia anymore, but I don’t even have access to the same resources. I can’t use a lot of the paywalled journals as resources. So I’m going to try to write some valuable philosophy using only primary sources.

The idea isn’t to make the book’s goal about providing commentary on specific thinkers. Instead, I’ll discuss some broader social and political concept by – in part – thinking along with different primary, creative thinkers from the whole tradition. 

So the ideas of that first postmodern generation will supply my framework for understanding a world without the moorings and foundations of an authority to give you your laws. Facing the prospect of such a world, you can react with fear, reaction and restoration, enthusiasm, or a kind of redemption. 

Hopeless Helpless II: To Mystify, Composing, 22/04/2016

Continued from last post . . . Here’s what my next big book of philosophy, Utopias, will be: a multidimensional exploration of the power of people to revolutionize our societies, developing whole new ways to be human. 

Here’s what it will also be: a refutation of some of the most remarkable arguments that such revolutionary change is impossible, that humanity has no power to change its nature. 

A message in popular culture that resonates with my
political thinking in Utopias: "Never give up; Never
give in."

Utopia is, in simple terms, an embrace of action – no matter whether it’s physical and social or purely imaginary and communicative – to drive and encourage social transformation. So the enemy of utopia – humanity’s idealistic striving – is not any other contrary vision of progress, but passivity. Will you continue to strive? Or will you give up?

One of the biggest challenges of political activity is actually getting people to wake up and care about the crises happening all around them. Getting people excited about the correct stuff is hard enough – there are plenty of times in history when people have mistaken their enslavement for freedom. And it’s a tough time convincing them otherwise.

And there are so many ways to keep someone from acting in their best interests. Hell, so many ways to keep a person from wanting to do anything to rock their own boats. 

One way to do that is to confuse people with profound language and ideas – meditations that end up breaking down all your own powers. All your abilities to act. Martin Heidegger and his philosophy is one of these vortexes of action.

I’ve always seen this weird tendency in a lot of Heidegger scholars I met back in my academy days. The ideas of Heidegger consumed them, and they related every philosophical discussion they could back to Heidegger. If they couldn’t find an angle to relate a conversation to Heidegger’s work, they walked away. It was a peculiarly awful self-absorption. 

The academic culture surrounding him had a similar gravity. I comment, during one of my brief discussions of his work in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity that you can’t refer to Heidegger without the entire discussion starting to revolve around Heidegger. 

Expertise is a stern taskmaster.

It goes beyond the usual command of the commentary that academic culture demands you have before you’re allowed to say anything legitimately like a critique. It’s the ability to ward off any counter-argument that begins anything like, “Ah, but have you read Russon’s article on the concept of verfallenheit?”

So what’s going on when Negri brings up Heidegger? Negri’s critique is that Heidegger offers a moment of mystifying the real power of the poor to make real change in the world. As Vienna falls to Allied troops and the Soviets are about to march on Berlin, the enthusiastic Nazi Martin Heidegger delivers a lecture on poverty.

His goal is to deliver, in the face of his movement’s inevitable defeat, a lecture on poverty. Its outcome – the poor are powerless, and their apparent power in such political movements as communist states and political parties is a self-delusion. 

The poor, says Heidegger, already possess a wealth greater than the superficial riches that communist ideology promises them. In their poverty, they’re closer to the spiritual truth of being, less distracted by the stresses and worries of wealth. The suffering of poverty and destitution is not something to be cured. It’s a path to spiritual fulfillment. 

His conclusion comes from analyzing a line from Friedrich Hölderlin, the German poet at the centre of Heidegger’s own philosophical vision. 

“With us, everything is concentrated on the spiritual; we have become poor to become rich.”

Unpacking this single line for a whole lecture, he concludes that being poor means you have spiritual richness – you live in the proper essence of being itself. You don’t have anything but absolute necessities, and any of those non-necessary things would only distract you from what make you truly rich.

The roots that Hölderlin experiences today are mostly
plants. Ba-tum-tish!

And that is knowing your proper place in the world and living it. 

Heidegger’s analysis itself is composed of long, profound meditations on a few specifically selected words of classic poetry, and includes a discourse on the ancient meanings being his (dodgy) etymology of old German words – in this case, the roots of frei, freedom, in an idea of preservation, guarding its essence. 

Heidegger confuses you by leading you to believe that a stern piece of dogma – “Don’t you get any ideas above your station, young lady!” – has a profound philosophical essence. That it’s rooted in the fundamental essence of human thought when it’s closest to being, and in the ancient roots of the most philosophical languages. 

Don't let your desire for the profound and deeply meaningful deny you your natural power. 

What Jerk Wants to Trigger Someone Anyway? Research Time, 10/03/2016

So I was planning to write about the New Democratic Party party in today’s entry. But that seems to be the theme of this week on the blog – and this month in my life, as projects keep getting interrupted by other, equally serious stuff. Something else remarkable happened, and I realized I should say something. 

"Why can't everyone just care about each other?" is the
fundamental question spurring humanity's utopian drive.

I got into a healthy, hilarious Twitter fight with a lot of assholes yesterday morning before I went to work. It was #TheTriggering.

This was a hashtag, clearly. I believe it was organized on 4chan – surprise, surprise. Its mission seems to have been a mass provocation of the people they call Social Justice Warriors by posting as many racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive and horrible memes and tweets as they could, all day long.

I’ve been fascinated by this community for a while now. I’ve spoken about them with Phil Sandifer, in an interview for an article (or likely multiple articles) that I’m still working out how best to freelance. 

They’re a self-organized gang of trolls, but there are actual philosophical concepts behind all this childish bullying and stupidity. We’re not going to deal with these 4chan jackoffs by dismissing them as simply a bunch of jackoffs.

#TheTriggering is an expression of a powerful grassroots reactionary movement, one of the most powerful and seductive in the West today. And here’s two ideas that reading through and engaging with #TheTriggering have helped make clear to me.

1) 4chan reactionaries wildly misunderstand what motivates social justice campaigners and what they actually want. 

My exchange with these people yesterday morning typically went like this. It started with two tweets of my own, basically laying out my thoughts on that whole shit-storm. Of course, they attracted the attention of reactionary trolls. That was the idea.

But they thought that I expressed my disdain for them because I was myself triggered, as if their racist bile actually caused some kind of PTSD-like anxiety attack. Really, I was trolling the trolls with a little of my own ethical philosophy.

They also spoke to me as if being triggered wasn’t actually what it is in sincere discussions of triggering – PTSD anxiety. They seemed to think that being triggered was the same as simply being offended. As in, a haughty exclamation of “How dare you, good sir!” 

4chan reactionaries seem to think that social justice activists – be they for women’s rights, anti-racism, economic justice, whatever – are in the model of Tipper Gore’s disgust and offence at swearing in rap and metal music. 

Unfortunately, many campus activists against racism and sexism are misguided in their methods of stopping verbally violent behaviour. They actually appeal to university authorities to put restrictions on what speech is allowed for students to say in public forums. 

These kinds of appeals to authority are never effective, because people naturally chafe at having to follow rules with which they don't agree and whose ostensible purpose isn't even adequately explained to them. Forcing authorities to control speech will only encourage those whose speech is being silenced. The examples of authoritarian control of speech only encourages reactionaries to resist by spouting more racism and sexism.

But not all social justice advocates make this mistake. The best of them – the most effective leaders and thinkers – know that engagement and empathy are the true routes to cultural change. The most counter-productive activists try to use censorship.

Robert Nozick was actually such a kind person
that I think he'd actually be quite saddened to see
the kind of spirit and culture his ideas inspired.

Which brings me to my second point.

2) 4chan reactionaries believe moral obligations to be a form of censorship and oppression. 

This is rooted in their errors about what a social justice activist really is – their conception of the activist as Tipper Gore or Mary Whitehouse. They think the goal of a social justice activist is to restrict people’s liberties to speak their minds. 

That’s another recurring theme in my own Twitter fights with these people yesterday morning. They accused me of wanting to censor their speech, restricting their liberties. But I was actually asking them why they valued their right to speak freely over their moral obligations not to be an ass and a bully to others. 

The response on this issue was the most illuminating of all: that their right to speak freely REQUIRED them to be offensive and cruel to people. A duty to be ethical in their speech and behaviour was actually an assault on their liberty.

So we now have the philosophical centre of the 4chan reactionary social movement. It’s Robert Nozick’s radio show argument: that even basic moral obligations like keeping promises or backing away from cruelty are violent oppressions on individual liberty. 

When someone first said this to me on Reddit years ago, I thought he was out to lunch. But the idea has genuinely impressive philosophical pedigree. This is the ethical centrepiece of the most visible and energetic reactionary social movement of our time.