Two Utopian Visions of a 1600 Year Civilization in One Page, Research Time, 13/07/2018

One of the reasons I wanted to review Raphael Sassower’s new book formally* was that it’s relevant to my own major book of political philosophy – the messianically in-progress Utopias.

Few images of Jesus better communicate the essential idea of the
Incarnation better than Buddy Christ – He really is one of us.

* Which these blog posts are most definitely not. I’ve already outlined the review formally speaking, and know which points I’ll be covering. No specific critiques or interpretations that I’ll be throwing down in the review at the end of this month will be included in these blogs. It’s a compliment to Raphael that I consider his book complex enough to sustain more than one take. As all books should if they’re worth the paper or the hard drive space.

Concepts of prosperity all tend to focus on building a more perfect society. This refers at least to concepts in the Western tradition, in which I grew up and which until recently dominated the popular imaginary of most of Earth. To prosper is a joyful wealth, joy in wealth. Prosperity is a wealth about which you need no longer worry, a secure wealth.

How individualistically you read those last couple of sentences tells me a lot about your ethics and personality. The progressive political movements of contemporary Westerners share a common ground in their economic philosophy – we no longer believe that the prosperity of individuals in a community is the same as the community’s prosperity.

We ask how many individuals are prospering. We measure highest achievements, averages, create ranks, tax brackets. But if those prosperous individuals become wealthy from dynamics that keep others poor and suffering – whether intentional, systemic, or both – you don’t have a prosperous community.

Never mistake the prosperous man for a sign of a prosperous
community.

In a single page from his introduction, Sassower lays out the religious and ontological framework that – broadly speaking** – Christian civilization has centred in thinking. Put very broadly, the Christian engagement with time is a sublime and terrifying teleology.

** This is based on a note from page 6. Literally the first chapter of The Quest for Prosperity. We’re still talking in broad strokes before more detailed examinations of the concepts. It always annoys me to meet academics who’d quibble over the details of clearly broad ideas to accuse an author of sloppiness. People with enormous institutional authority acting as if their research was to poke needless holes in the work of their colleagues. It’s called contributing to the current debates.

The Christian Bible is organized as the history of existence, and so conceives of the passage of time itself in human, Biblical terms. Christianity’s foundational and focal idea is the event of the Incarnation – when God literally becomes a creature, and that creature is human. Given that, you conceive all of existence as being for the sake of humanity.

Humanity’s existence and development is the purpose of the universe. How is that purpose framed? By utopias.

When the first skyscrapers of the United States
were built, popular culture conceived them as a
great achievement of human (and Western)
culture – the towers of our living paradise. Now
they're a sign of gentrification, condo crises, the
marginalization of poor people to distant suburbs,
the longest commutes, stress, misery.

Time begins with Eden – the pure presence of God with humanity on Earth. Time ends with Heaven – Earth’s corruption is cleansed and God now lives with humanity on Earth as one of us in this newly pure world. God the Creator is now God the Neighbour.

Jesus built my hot rod. Literally.

It’s not only time that happens in the middle of those two utopias – perfect existence at the beginning and perfected existence at the end. A Christian framework of thinking understands that middle temporality as purposeful suffering. We suffer now so that we can live in the utopia of Heaven.

Time becomes a process toward perfection, and the suffering of the present is an investment in achieving that perfection. You can secularize*** Christian utopian time, ending up with a teleology of technological progress. Human scientific, technological, industrial, and capitalist endeavour end with achieving paradise on Earth.

*** That’s how I want to understand secularity when I’m examining the religious aspects of Utopia’s argument. I may not engage with this too much, but it’ll be in the background. Faith: dogmatic religious belief. Atheism: pushing the logic of materialism to its limit (like Spinoza, or some readings of Kabbalah). Agnostic: Fucked if I know. Secular: retaining the concepts, the frameworks for understanding, of faith, but dropping reference to the dogma.

Heaven.

Despotism as Over-Writing and Overriding Thought, Jamming, 31/03/2018

A couple of days ago, I finished a white paper for a Toronto-based think tank / consulting firm on democratic governance. I’m not going to get into the details of it right now, because it’s pretty dense.

Happily, the firm’s research supervisor enjoyed what I wrote and had some great recommendations for the second draft. A lot of his suggestions had to do with signposting – letting a reader know explicitly why you’re making a particular inference or reference.

If we understand the world according to only a single set of ideas,
we'll do serious injustice to people who think differently, and
impoverish our thinking and our civilization. Spirits must become
more than ideas and practices.

I always need an editor’s hand with signposting in a lot of my non-fiction work. I immerse myself so deeply in the research material and the concepts that what appears clear to me needs to be made more explicit. The connection is there – I just sometimes have to be reminded to say it blatantly. I can be too subtle for my own good when I write.

The paper explores the chaotic and dangerous nature of online social media platforms. They can encourage democratic movements – the Arab Spring, Idle No More, Stoneman Douglas – or revanchist, reactionary movements among all ideologies – the alt-Right, left-wing Putin boosting.

One of the best comments I got from my editor was that I should add, in the final section of recommendations, a brief response on whether these platforms should be nationalized to control them in the public interest.

I think this would be disastrous. Because while the rapid chaos of barely restrained social media can encourage dangerous extremism, nationalization would put media that can also encourage democratic revolution in the authoritative hands of the state.

In most of our political conversations today, talk about the danger of state authority is a libertarian idea. I take a different tack, following the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – along with the philosophical current in which they were major players. Their conception of the state’s dangers is rooted in their concept of despotism.

As much as we fear Trumpism – and there's plenty to fear in his regime
of egotism, corruption, and validation of racism – his politics merely
makes explicit the inherent oppressive danger of state institutions.

We associate despotism typically with despots – dictators or authoritarian rulers whose power falls short of the Führer ideal, while still moving along that trajectory. But Deleuze and Guattari talk about the despotic machine – this is the state itself.

When the material power of a state institution is barely or not at all restrained, it overcodes everything in the territory it’s responsible for. What do I mean by overcoding? It’s a technical term, referring to institutions that orient more and more (and eventually all) of people’s activity to the state.

In a despotic machine, if you want to do anything in your life, you have to run that activity through some kind of state machinery. State institutions, regulations, and rules determine every aspect of life. Not simply in terms of conditions – like laws, safety or environmental rules.

I mean state institutions and machinery determine and actively shape cultural and social development. Diversity and indigeneity are wiped away by state mandates for uniformity.

Here’s a simple example. It comes from touchstones in Deleuze and Guattari’s own work. Franz Kafka was a Czech Jew living for most of his life in the Austro-Hungarian empire, whose thinking and work was informed by his sardonic attitude toward the bureaucratic drudgery of his day job, as well as his personal engagement with Jewish mysticism.

As useful as state institutions can be for supplying common goods to
huge populations, the institutions are very dangerous. They can all
too easily be used to oppress people, and force the many ways of
living across a population into a single, uniform character. That's the
power that Deleuze and Guattari called overcoding.

Kafka had a complex identity and set of ideas, whose linguistic influence was Czech, Hebrew, and Yiddish. But the language of his fiction writing and daily business life was German. This was a state imposition on his identity, which was more complex than the monarchist political morality and subtle German supremacism that the Austrian state imposed on all its citizens. It didn’t matter whether you were in Vienna, Prague, Ljubljana, or Timisoara.

Here’s a more complex example. Last year, there was a very strange court decision in British Columbia. The Ktunaxa people sued the provincial government to stop the development of a huge ski resort on their sacred mountain in the Jumbo Valley, where their religion holds that a grizzly bear spirit lives.

The court mandated that an area of the mountain be set aside from development for Ktunaxa worship. According to the laws of the state of Canada, freedom of religion requires that the Ktunaxa have a place set aside on the mountain to practice their faith.

But the Ktunaxa’s ontology of the divine has nothing to do with having a place on the mountain to worship. The mountain itself is the material manifestation of the bear spirit. So any resort development would be an act of violence against their divinity. Full stop.

Ktunaxa thinking sees the mountain as the manifestation of divinity. Canadian law sees the mountain as a place where the Ktunaxa need some accommodation to practice their religious beliefs. What is a matter of existence for the Ktunaxa is a matter of cultural practice for the Canadian state.

The court judgment couldn’t even comprehend Ktunaxa ontology, let alone acknowledge it as valid. Their entire way of existence was invalidated, overcoded by the state’s systems of meaning. That’s the despotic character of even the most democratic states.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When God Becomes a Triumph of the Will, Research Time, 16/01/2018

Here’s an interesting way my colleague Morteza Hashemi’s recent work found itself contributing a really important point to my own ongoing research.

In the off-kilter ontological chapters that will take up the strange middle section of Utopias, I’ll work from two core concepts – time as lived duration, and the univocity of being. Morteza’s work has really helped me with that univocity concept.

Christianity is a religion of contradictions – it's what makes the theology
and ontology so fascinating and strange. Now, those contradictions
make it very difficult for me to adopt Christianity as my own path to
engage with the divine. But the story of Jesus himself is beautiful
and deranged, one of the most profoundly bizarre myths humanity
has developed. While I can't sign on to that myth, I love the story.

Short form – the concept of being’s univocity is the conception of existence as entirely immanent. No realms of being somehow separate from each other – material, energy, spirit, whatever other kinds of being that exist – everything can commingle, interact.

This concept began, in its most intense trajectory, with John Duns Scotus. Reading this old book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, the essay on Scotus mentions that the 13th century writer was never able to see his concept of univocity through to its natural conclusion.

That conclusion? Atheism. Or at least a pantheism that’s functionally indistinguishable from the best kinds of atheism.

If you lay down as a foundation for your thinking that existence has only one plane, then you are in the same way that God is. God doesn’t become a being in a transcendent realm – God becomes a force in the world* who’s present through action.

* Or the force of the world, if you’re going to see is through to its end.

Morteza’s book traced how later generations of thinkers saw that concept through to its end. That was, for me at least, the most fascinating exploration of Theism and Atheism in a Post-Secular Age. The ground of atheism is found in this remarkably pious Christian concept.

Univocal existence applies the ethical lessons of the Christian concept of Incarnation to the complete ontology of the divine. The ethical meaning of Christianity is that God loves humanity so much that God became a person who’d be sacrificed for our onto-theological redemption. God becomes us and dies to save us.

One of the several artistic representations of John Duns Scotus, the
first great philosopher Scotland contributed to the Western tradition.
I like this image best because of how ordinary it makes him. A
skinny monk with big ears and male pattern baldness.

What matters in this context isn’t God’s law or reason, but God’s will, God’s desire, God’s yearning. God becomes an emotional force of love in the world, an immanent power. God’s will is in instant-to-instant sustaining of existence. God’s will that the universe exists permeates existence itself.

God becomes the same as the substance of existence itself, meaning that God and the world is the same. We’re expressions of God’s will because God’s energy is the energy that drives material existence. But now God and existence are the same, two ways of talking about the same thing.

If you want to speak strictly ontologically about existence, you say ‘being.’ If you want to speak ethically about existence, you say ‘God.’ The will of God is literally the development of the world. If you simply want to stop talking about God, you can without losing everything. When God is existence, then the totality of existence is always already God.

That's atheism – there’s no God over and above existence. What happens in the world is God’s will because God’s will is literally all the events, processes, and developments of existence. God becomes superfluous when being is univocal.

Where Morteza’s book kind of deflated me was when we got past this and started engaging the two major schools of popular atheism today. The aggressive, reductive atheism of Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, and others like them is a dead end of empty spite and resentment.

But the major alternative is Alain de Botton’s existentialism as self-help. Morteza calls it tourist atheism. As much as I like the attitude – a joyful acceptance of the world’s plurality of thinking about the divine – ‘tourist’ really is the best label.

There’s nothing profound happening in this atheism either. It’s nicer, because you’re not being a belligerent prick. But it’s ultimately an obnoxious way of seeing the world in superficialities.

If, over the next decade or so, I can build any reasonable profile for myself as an intellectual author, I want to promote an atheism where you can still think about the divine as a profound, awe-inspiring topic.

It can be done. Just follow the univocity of being through to its natural end. See where you end up.

Scattered Thoughts on Cultural Paranoia, Jamming, 30/08/2017

Call this the epilogue to “Hey! Cultural Marxism!” Just a few reflections on how we got into this mess as a society. No claim to completeness or even an escape from my partiality.

I do suspect that there may have been a little systematic causation between the old moral panic movies of the 1930s and the hysteric paranoia of anti-communism from McCarthy to John Birch to Goldwater to Breitbart. But since this is an idea that literally came to me over the last few days, I don’t exactly have a huge pile of pre-existing scholarship backing me up.

The paranoia of modern American culture is one of the strangest
social phenomena I've ever thought about. Such fear of all aliens is
only possible through profound and thorough solipsism.
My thanks to the source.

That said, there is a common tone – a paranoid fear bordering on ecstasy, expressed in the aesthetics of a live-action cartoon.

Anyway, this one is for fun. A set of reflections.

Thought One. The dominant mode of Cold War anti-communism was paranoia. This was the engine of Joseph McCarthy’s hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC had existed for decades, but McCarthy’s leadership brought it into legend.

Those hearings and the cultural atmosphere they created basically burned the socialist left out of American consciousness as a society.

Thought Two. That paranoia was a reactive fear. Obviously – its name is ‘anti-communism.’ But the wildest delusions of the anti-communist paranoid was precisely that of McCarthy. They could be anywhere; It’s possible they’ve infiltrated everywhere; Won converts who keep their actions secret; A demoniacal cabal.

I never saw this in action in my own lifetime until it became about Islamist terrorists, not communists. Terrorism paranoia differed quite a bit from anti-communist paranoia. Mostly, the paranoia I experienced in 21st century Canada (watching America on TV) had an extra racializing flavour.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the expression of McCarthy's
paranoia in techno-horror cinema.

The Arabs and South/Central Asians who faced that stigma had distinct ethnic differences that were pretty quickly racialized into a vector to marginalize them. It’s sad, because Salafists would have a lot in common with radical American Evangelicals.

Thought Three. Lots of Americans were anti-communist in the 1930s, the same time those moral panic films first exploded. But that was actually the United States catching up with Europe’s anti-communism – it was oligarchical and right-wing opposition to the trade union movement.

This first American anti-communism strikes me as very much like the European version. Communism at the time was the farthest left wing of the trade union movement. Radical communists as fellow travellers with Eugene Debs, Woody Guthrie, and Jimmy Hoffa. Mostly, it was a vehicle for America’s money’s WASP class to remix their traditional anti-Semitism.

Thought Four. The hysterical lunacy of it all. That’s the only way I can think to describe the tone of that paranoia. I’m talking about McCarthyism, but it shared the same tone, the same deranged outlook on the world as those moral panic films.

Reefer Madness and all those others. It could be weed, cocaine, sex. Eventually, it was motorcycle gangs. Above all, those films were about fear. Fear that ordinary looking people could turn their whole lives upside-down – one act of deviancy was all it took to send your life to hell.

The Puritan bides his time through eras of liberalism until at last, the
more moderate among them reaches a breaking point of even their
disgust. Public acceptance of homosexuality is too much for them.
A group of Evangelical extremists published The Nashville Statement
standing against LGBTQ rights yesterday, and I saw one social media
exchange. "How could you condemn Christians praying for gays
when Muslims kill gays all the time?" Well, Christians kill and
persecute LGBTQ people all the time. The American money goes
to Africa so their sensitive domestic audience doesn't see the blood.

The 1930s wasn’t just the era of the Great Depression – it was also Prohibition, the greatest triumph of the temperance movement. Temperance was the most powerful expression of Puritan Christian popular asceticism since the foundation of the United States.

The Puritan was the most extreme ascetic ideology. Beyond the traditional asceticism of an elite, powerful holy one’s path. No, Puritanism and the temperance movement was devoted to mass asceticism. The denial of all deviancy was necessary to save the soul.

Electric fear of total destruction – death, murder, the surrender of your own identity to a deterritorializing desire. “Play faster! Faster!”

They were education-exploitation films. Reefer Madness was itself first financed by a church organization. Did that Puritan energy somehow mutate through McCarthy and John Birch to become hysteric anti-communism?

Thought Five. I don’t actually know. But the possibility intrigues me.

Come Together III: In Perfect Harmony, Research Time, 17/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . An impossibility is an inspiration. It is Eden. Heaven on Earth. Rather, it’s Earth becoming Heaven.

That’s the movement Rousseau makes from the reality of humanity to its perfection. In real life, we’re a bunch of incurably corrupt, inescapably ignorant bastards. But in our perfected state, we damn near perfectly understand the common interest of our whole community, and are kind enough always to act on it.

Submitting completely to an authority that speaks with the voice of God
has never been a request that turns out well for anyone of whom it's
asked. Usually, it's a submission to slavery, as when Indigenous
Canadian children literally had Christianity beaten into them.

This is the mind-set of the individual when the will of a community is expressed as the general will. The harmony of thought across the whole society isn’t somehow imposed from above.* It’s a perfectly harmonized expression of every individual spontaneously.

* I haven’t read nearly enough Rousseau scholarship to say authoritatively whether my hypothesis is generally on target. Nor would I really want to, even if I had time. It’s not like I would have had time as a professor either – I’d have had budget meetings to attend with the associate vice-deans.

When he says that “Gods would be needed to give men laws,” he isn’t talking about God as a person standing over obedient humans. This isn’t any divine absolute despot, giving orders to which you submit.

If that were the kind of god that was on order, then Rousseau is quite the totalitarian. That’s what it means to submit all of human existence to the orders of an authority. But I’m taking Rousseau as a thinker of radical freedom, and it’s easy to do so if you just think of God in that line differently.

Remember that he’s said that the only true laws that a legislature could write were rules and institutions written as the expression of the general will. Only when the entire community (politicians and bureaucrats included) act in perfect harmony and love spontaneously is any legislation a truly legitimate law.

In any case less perfect than that, the laws are just rules backed up by threats of punishment (like jail time) or rewards (like tax credits). The law has only moral significance.

No ethical significance. The general will is the immanent expression of a community itself. Now you see it.** I’m using Rousseau in Utopias as part of a tradition of political materialism, whose fulcrum is Spinoza.

Well, hello there, good sir.

** And so do I.

I have one question for any of my scholar friends who might come across this. I may actually just write a former professor of mine who I remember has published academic articles on Rousseau. I’m not sure how believable this reading is. Maybe I should call it an appropriation. I feel like that’s a more accurate term for what I’m doing with the historical research for this book.

One of the problems with Rousseau is that he knew his audience too well. This is what makes it difficult – as a scholar or just an attentive reader – to be sure he’s really thinking what you think you read in his writing.

So when he uses terms like “the sovereign” or tosses off flourishes like that line above about gods, he sounds like he’s referring to monarchs and God the Father. Because that’s what his audience of reasonably intellectual literate people in 1760s Europe thought of when they heard those terms.

It’s how Rousseau’s own audience thought of power, authority, kingship, and the divine. This conception of divinity as a perfect material expression would have gotten someone strung up for some hardcore heresy.

Geneva was a Calvinist country at the time, and that is not a religious authority known to tolerate leniency. At the time, “Spinozist” was an insult you hurled at someone when you wanted to destroy their reputation. Materialism of Spinoza’s expressive, free kind was considered just as corrosive as atheism.

So how plausible would it be for me historically to make Rousseau a chain link in a semi-underground Spinozist tradition? Should I even care about plausibility to the scholarly community when I don’t even plan on making Utopias a scholarly book? . . . To be continued

Free Speech Martyrs in History III: The People, Research Time, 10/02/2017

Running through some lessons from the classics – John Stuart Mill.

Socrates made for a prime example to argue for freedom of speech because the subsequent history of Western philosophy has shown just how right he was. His principle that you should always probe and question the unquestioned dogmas of your society became a cornerstone of philosophy as a tradition and democracy as a value.

You can probably tell where I'm going to come down on the modern
question of what constitutes religious freedom.

In Mill’s own time, European Christianity was undergoing extreme turbulence. There were pressures to secularize society. The Vatican was straining to maintain its political control over the governments of Catholic-dominated countries around the continent. Protestant Churches were splitting faster than bacteria, frequently in violent schism.

So Mill spelled out a democratic solution to this religious turbulence – the principle that all people require freedom of opinion. This argument was centrally targeted as religious belief – each of us had to engage with the divine in our own way. It would be as unique to each person as their own identities.

But these principles – freedom to critique authority and custom, freedom of opinion and religion – faced one obstacle more powerful than any one person who disagreed. The state – the power and authority of government to enforce dogma and opinion with the police and military.

If it hadn’t been for the judgment of a state institution, Socrates would have continued annoying his neighbours. The medieval and modern history of Mill’s Europe was stained throughout with atrocities against people over religious opinion. Those atrocities were worst when one side in a religious battle controlled the arms of the state and the other side didn’t.

I feel like John Stuart Mill tends to be stereotyped really easily. I met
a few academic philosophers who called themselves "Millians" or
"utilitarians," but even these professors would discuss Mill's own
writing as if none of the complexity and difference that I find in
even a relatively straightforward work like On Liberty just isn't there.

Ask the Huguenots, for example. St Bartholomew’s Eve was one of the earliest massacres in Europe’s religious wars between Catholicism and its rebels. A massacre of thousands enabled by the Vatican and the French government.

Mill was correct that the government should never be entrusted with endorsing and enforcing any religion. It makes belief itself subject to police and military action. We make a big deal, having swallowed so much Orwellian language, about “thought crimes.”

But state enforcement of religious orthodoxy on its populations was the original thought crime. And it’s been everywhere. There are such religious enforcer governments today – Saudi Arabia to the greatest intensity, Iran with some gestures of tolerance and tolerance for mild dissent, and the creeping religious authoritarianism of Orthodox Christianity in imperialist Russia.

You don’t argue against a state that also enforces religious belief. Not if you know what’s good for you.

So that freedom of religious opinion so important to modern liberalism is always a freedom from the state enforcement of religion. It’s the refusal to follow religious authority – no matter how many or how few police departments they control – blindly, as a matter of obeying the state’s laws.

Vladimir Putin with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, both heads of
Russia's state institutions and government. Not constitutionally, but
culturally and politically.

Returning to this argument in the classics of liberalism shows how monstrous modern conservative talk of religious freedom is today. Their religious freedom is the freedom to discriminate – in business, hiring, any rights or responsibilities – against those your religious dogma declares the enemy.

Denying service to gays, Jews, or Muslims. Refusing to supply reproductive health coverage. And using the machinery of the state – the legal and police forces – to enforce the dogma that such denials of rights is proper.

Modern America’s fascism’s central weapon is an ironic mirroring. Call a law that enforces an oppressive religious opinion with courts and police the protection of freedom.

This is one reason why you revisit a classic icon of liberal thought like Mill in times like these. To show you how to see the world for what it is – not simply as it appears at first, inattentive, glance. Not just for what someone with an axe to grind says it is.

Now that you see it, what are you going to do about it?

Free Speech Martyrs in History II: The Heretics, Research Time, 09/02/2017

So that’s one example John Stuart Mill used to describe how the suppression of free opinion harms society. The pestering presence of Socrates’ free opinion so offended the powerful of his city that they executed him for interrogating their tired received dogmas.

Athens’ leadership executed the man whose work literally produced the Greek Enlightenment in philosophy and science. Not a smooth move, leadership of Athens.

Bill O'Reilly was pivotal to popularizing, in the mid-2000s, the notion
among America's socially conservative Christians that the religion
is under attack in America among that country's socially
conservative Christians.

And the second example? Freedom of opinion in theological beliefs – the suppression of divergent Christian faiths. It seems a bit weird today, since a contemporary reader approaches On Liberty in a world of aggressive Christianity which sees itself under attack.

That aggression is the peculiarly American Christianity – heavily influenced by radical Evangelical Christian movements. I’m talking about a North America where apparently devout Christians are advocating to make discrimination legal.

Basically, it would be legal to refuse a person service or medical care, even fire them from a job, if not refusing would contravene your religious dogma. Want to keep your job while pregnant while unmarried? Or ask me as an employer to include birth control in the health insurance package? Or be allowed in my shop while gay?

Absolutely not! Because my god says no. Far more horrifying than this, is the radical American pastors lobbying and organizing in Africa for laws declaring homosexuality illegal.

Stephen Colbert was responsible for some of the best jokes about
how hilarious this conservative American paranoia about the
persecution of Christianity really was.

Meanwhile, American Christians believe their lifestyle and moral values to be under attack. Religious pluralism or official secularism becomes attacks on the Christian character of society. Even expressing values in favour of civil liberties is seen as a violent opposition to Christianity.

All this pontificating ignores the actual violence Christians face throughout the world beyond North America. Coptic Christians in Egypt and Christians throughout the monarchist, dictatorial Middle East face violence, terrorism, and discrimination.

North Korea has a goal of utterly eradicating Christianity from the country – using concentration camps as the first go-to. That’s only two of the worst among many examples of Christians facing police state oppression because in part of their faith.

Yet Trump, O’Reilly, and Limbaugh prefer to talk about the violence of fellow Americans using secular holiday greetings.

So it can be bewildering to read Mill talking about the state suppression of Christianity in Europe. Well, I suppose I should call it the state suppression of Christianities.

Mill’s Europe in the 19th century was a time of incredible flux in Christian religion. Protestant Churches were splintering and generating constantly, with huge social strife appearing over theological arguments that today are the subject of an otaku interest.

That American Christian paranoia seems especially ridiculous when you
consider how many Christians outside wealthy Western countries face
real violence and persecution. Look at this photo of funeral services for
some of the victims of December's bombing of a Cairo Coptic Church.

The Vatican was an aggressor in a Catholic context, as it fought efforts to bring many aspects of majority-Catholic states’ laws to the responsibility of parliaments and local governments.

And there were struggles throughout Europe’s industrializing societies to force Churches to leave their authoritarian, anti-science principles behind. Well, we’d still recognize that at least.

So in a continent wracked by all these conflicts over differing religious beliefs, it was a radical act for Mill to publish On Liberty. Here’s an essay that argued for free opinion about theological matters was an important condition for building a strong society and achieving essential human goods.

An argument that religious diversity is a path to human betterment. An argument that separated truth as a subject that mattered at all to religious doctrine and practice. One believed in a religion not because it was true and should be believed by all as a basic fact, but because it was your most natural expression of your own quest for the divine.

One enemy present in both of Mill’s examples that argue the necessity of free opinion – state authority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hating Democracy V: No I Seriously Mean They Hate It, Jamming, 26/10/2016

Continued from previous post . . . When I remember the days of the W Administration, I remember some pretty terrible days. 

Days when a soul-crushing national trauma was perverted into a justification for war and torture. Days when a government that conceived itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom employed trigger-happy mercenaries who thought nothing of committing mass slaughter in the streets.

But Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of their crew never turned against democracy in their hearts. Their practice may have had horrifyingly anti-democratic effects, but they always fundamentally believed in freedom. 

I was 21 years old in 2003, when George W Bush was invading Iraq
in the name of democracy and the United States was torturing and
renditioning people in the name of safety from terror. At the time, I
didn't think American politics and culture could get more surreally
weird and horrible. Never bet on the limits of human perversity.

When Jacques Rancière was writing Hatred of Democracy at the height of the Bush years, he likely sounded like there was a lot of hyperbole in his words. Ten years later, reading him sounds like prophecy.

The current moment of Western politics isn’t all that friendly toward democracy. And I’m not just talking about Donald Trump’s disturbing resurgence of egomaniacal fascist aesthetics and white nationalism. Even relatively sedate Western conservatism is turning against democratic values in significant and disturbing ways.

Jeet Heer at The New Republic gives a pretty solid breakdown of three anti-democratic trends among the American (and to a lesser intensity the Canadian) right wing. Each are challenges to democratic life, the striving of people to live as they wish with dignity. But those challenges differ in important ways.

1) The demand for society to be defined by white European Christian heritage and tradition.

I can’t help but find this the least profound challenge to democracy, even though it might be the most powerful in the world. Transforming society along authoritarian Christian lines is the goal of the radical Christian Right of America. 

But it’s also the successful political program of Aleksandr Dugin, chief philosopher of Putinism – a union of state police authority, Russian white supremacy, and Orthodox Christian moral authority. 

Russia's leading philosopher of white nationalism, Aleksandr Dugin.

American religious conservatives praise Vladimir Putin as a leader who unites social conservative values, strong gender role segregation, and opposition to alternative sexuality. While the Americans may be Evangelicals, they see the radical authoritarian Orthodoxy of Putin and Dugin’s underlying philosophy as their fellow travellers.

You might even be able to call this international coalition of Christian authoritarianism a reconciliation of the ancient Schism of Christianity. All they needed was the common enemy of secular democracy.

But authoritarian Christianity is an inherently reactionary position. It’s the social fear of a group of people who face the ultimate denial of their faith – that their universalism is false. It’s the immature demand to be right, despite the world’s proving you wrong. In that, it has a similar structure as . . . 

2) Capitalism against democracy. This is the faith that billionaires have, that their riches are deserved and that any attempt to cajole them into directly contributing to their community is an assault on their freedom.

A lot of libertarian philosophy falls along this line. It’s the notion that property rights are the most fundamental – if you happen to have so little property that you can’t live a dignified life, so much the worse for you because you have no right to my property.

Follow this with a few libertarian.org memes like “Taxation is theft!” and “My guns are my freedom!” eagles with M-1s for eyes clutching the shreds of the US Constitution in their talons, that sort of thing.

The ultimate absurdity of this image is a famous story from Donald Trump’s life, appropriately enough. Sometime during his string of bankruptcies through the 1990s, the apocryphal Donald walks along a Manhattan street with Marla Maples or Ivanka. 

When Trump first started gaining popularity in his run for US President,
I worried that he could be a serious threat to America's democracy. I
no longer have that worry. But I think that if Peter Thiel eventually
takes over the political momentum and vacuum of right-wing
American nationalism after Trump's final implosion, that will be a
genuine cause for worry.

He sees a homeless man begging for change in the street, and says, “That guy probably has more money than I do right now.” Then Donald walks into the expansive lobby of the first skyscraper to bear his name and retires to dinner in his opulent penthouse while the beggar freezes to death in the winter.

It’s depressing and more than a little scary that all these anti-democratic ideas are so mainstream. It just goes to show that democracy is never a finished process. We’re never fully, completely, and irrevocably free. 

But that doesn’t mean we should give up on freedom. It means that an essential part of human freedom is to fight for freedom, and to think hard about the concept of freedom and what a free life would really be. That way, we’ll keep our democratic institutions and cultures on track to work for universal freedom and dignity.

Yet it’s not as though democracy hasn’t been criticized and denounced ever since the idea was invented. One of the most insidious and profound critiques of democracy today is also an echo of the oldest. . . . 

3) The idea that most people are too ignorant and stupid to have any say in how their government and institutions should be run. 

I was going to talk about this for most of this post, but I spent too long explaining my preamble, as I do on this blog pretty often. Especially when I'm in a series. So there’ll be more detail about this flavour of hate for democracy on Friday, after my review of “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.”

Hopeless Helpless I: Power to Poor People, Research Time, 21/04/2016

It's been a pretty busy time for me lately, which is why I haven’t been able to go through Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth as thoroughly as I’d like to have done yet. The first of the book’s six chapters is about understanding the material powers of poor people. It’s something that actually needs a little work to get done.

Understanding that poor people have real, material power in the world is a tough proposition. We seem, as a society, accustomed to thinking of poor people as inherently passive and powerless. 

Does a boy like this, working in a Pakistani brick
foundry, deserve only our pity? Or can we learn from him?

They’re recipients of welfare benefits or charity, the passive role of waiting for handouts or aid. Their passivity could be used to encourage sympathy for them, like calls for charity or for poverty alleviation policies from government. Or their passivity could be a reason to despise them, like the (often racialized) accusations that the poor are lazy, contemptuous, or criminal. But they remain passive.

Negri discusses two of the most profound ways to dismiss and obscure the power of poor people. One of these was Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical God Is Charity. This was the Pope’s official dismissal of all calls for social justice as unrealistic for people to strive for in the modern world. All that we could achieve for the poor is to pity them and give them our charity.

When Negri and Michael Hardt wrote Commonwealth, Benedict XVI was still the Pope. Given Francis I’s election shortly after his predecessor retired for health reasons, it makes me wonder if there weren’t many in the College of Cardinals who thought true social justice needed restoration in the Catholic Church’s mission.

Benedict’s dismissal of poor people’s power and dignity rains with a common theme of contemporary life – hopelessness. It’s really only in the past few generations that the idea that humanity will likely drive itself to extinction has really become mainstream. To the point where it’s a casually accepted discussion point.

This is a radical idea compared to human history – the idea that the entire human race would be gone within a few generations. Not raptured or elevated, or any other religious apocalyptic visions. There have always been those as long as there’s been religions that imagined the end of the world at all. 

In many ways, Francis I is the Pope of hope.

I just mean sad, final, plodding extinction. The base indignity of cold, simple, stupid death. We will drown in our own shit. This is the endpoint of our global ecological crisis – we will either dig ourselves out of it or we won’t. 

This hopelessness began before the ecological crisis, if we’re talking about the general feeling of cultural dread that comes with the first shocks of the most thorough atheism. I mean this in the sense that we now realize that we live in a world that has no absolute meaning or transcendent justification beyond the brute fact of its existence.

That feeling of hopelessness about the aloneness of humanity and the indifference of the universe to us kicked into gear in the West in the late 19th century. But that was only for an elite of intellectuals and philosophers – the foundational existentialists and their fellow travellers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,* or the young Max Weber.

* If you make sure you take his devout Orthodox Christianity not as a dogmatic religious experience, but as a mystical gesture of gratitude to the Czar who spared him from a firing squad.

The true popular shocker about the irredeemable, hopeless nature of humanity was the terror of the First World War. I keep returning to this epoch because I’m trying to find the best way to deal with the heritage of this influential period in human thought. 

It’s vital for Utopias because the hope of utopian thinking meets its opposite in the profound pessimism that dominated the last century of thought. This is the fight that hope needs to survive in politics and in human society. The book Utopias itself will be a dramatization of that fight in philosophical writing. 

Understanding the power of the poor could be a major element of hope’s victory in this battle. Because if the abjectly poor can generate this hope from their own horrid condition, then we can all dream of a better world for us all.

But I have to understand the most profound conception of that horror, dread, profane, abject, hopeless pessimism. There are many ways you could go. The immediately intuitive path to the profound would, I suppose be Martin Heidegger. Well, let’s have another look . . . To be continued.

Grinding Us Into an Essence I: On Fundamentalisms, Research Time, 14/04/2016

So here’s another post about my philosophy research that contributes to bugging everyone I know to read more Antonio Negri. It’s been a busy week so far, but I’ve started reading Commonwealth, the culmination of his decade-long trilogy of masterworks co-written with Michael Hardt.

The first two books were largely critical. Empire was a diagnosis of the major changes in the qualities of our economy and politics as globalization reached its most intense form in human history. Multitude was an analysis of how to resist the different vectors of oppression – states raging against their falling power and the systematic pressures of poverty.

Commonwealth is about understanding what kind of new subjectivities can emerge from that struggle with the utopian potential to overcome our cycles of violence to build a more just global humanity. So that’s a pretty tall order for a 400 page book. Little steps make a big achievement.

The book’s first little steps explore the different politics that focus on the material nature of the human body. There are a lot of approaches to this, and not too many of the ones people have tried so far work at all. 

Probably the most visible politics focussing on the material body today are the fundamentalisms – religious, nationalist or racist, and economic. It sounds weird, but follow how the reasoning goes.

Religious fundamentalism – whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu, or Jewish, the major world religions with noteworthy such movements – focusses an enormous amount of authority on controlling how people treat their bodies. What they eat, their social lives, how they have sex and who it’s with.

Nationalist fundamentalism similarly exercises authority over people’s bodies, controlling their social networks, sexual, and family lives. It targets people for oppression and violence based on physical attributes like skin colour, ethnic markers, or physical stereotypes like big noses or even height.

Economic fundamentalism is the same, though we don’t often talk about this right-wing vision of humanity this way. Here, the material body faces analysis and control of its physical production and consumption. 

Then a contradiction appears in all these fundamentalisms. All that focus and effort spent controlling singular individual bodies is justified in the name of a transcendent ideal.

The religious fundamentalists subordinate the meticulous control of the body to a purpose of care for the immaterial soul. It forces conformity to its dogma of the divine. With nationalism, the singular nature of the body is ignored, and all that control ends up being only to maintain conformity to its vision of nationhood and ethnic character. Economic fundamentalism reduces all the different aspects of human life to economic relationships. Instead of individuals and people, we’re homo economicus.

But until the moment of that contradiction, the unwavering focus on people’s material bodies and what’s done with them makes fundamentalisms of all kinds into powerful biopolitical perspectives. And it’s a good route to help understand exactly what this overused but less-than-understood term actually means. To be continued. . . 

I’m Many Different Readers Myself, A History Boy, 01/03/2016

This cover is my copy.

Yesterday was the last post I had based on my notes reading Empire. I started Multitude a while ago, but I don't quite want to share that yet. I've also, in the spare moments I can get for it, been re-reading Soul Mountain.

I’ve mentioned Gao Xingjian on the blog before. I don’t know that I really got into much of my history with him. It’s a pretty simple story, really. One day when I was 17, I remember reading that a Chinese author had won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the first time.

His name was Gao Xingjian, and his most impressive, imposing, and inspiring large work was the novel/memoir Soul Mountain. Or Lingshan as the Chinese goes. So later that week, I went to my local Chapters and bought a softcover copy of the English translation.

Later that summer, I read it, entranced. At the time, I had just decided that I wanted to develop my fiction writing abilities and eventually publish novels. That this was something I wanted to do with my life.* And I had read James Joyce’s Ulysses earlier that year, which left me fascinated with how writing could play with subjectivity.

* Two books out already, plus a play produced and developing a couple of movies. Not bad.

This struck me most plainly about Soul Mountain when I first read it. It’s composed of short chapters. Some unfold normally, from a realistic first-person perspective. But many chapters, especially in the first half of the book, are more impressionistic. 

They’re sparse descriptions of the physical environment, as if that’s no longer important. Instead, most of the writing is a biting back-and-forth conversation, written in second-person, between you and she. Most of these conversations are aggressive, lovers wounding each other.

Our author as a young man, wandering Sichuan and
Yunnan on an existential journey into the twisting
depths of his own mind. And to avoid the police.

Those formal innovations made the most impact on me initially. When I read Soul Mountain for the second time shortly after moving to Ontario, its formal quirks stood out for me again. I think it made me feel at home as I was building myself a new home for the first time.**

** Very unpatriotic of me as a Newfoundlander to say that a Chinese novel made me feel at home. Well, too bad for the patriots of my old country. Patriotism is just a gauche self-deception you share with a few million neighbours.

The third time, which I’m in the middle of now, is a very different experience. Yes, I see the formal experimentation. But I see more easily that Soul Mountain isn’t just an exercise in the depiction of subjectivity. It’s about the psychology of loneliness.

When Gao writes his intense chapters, ‘you’ is how you refer to yourself when you’re talking to yourself because there has been no one else to talk to for so long. And ‘she’ is the imagined amalgam of all the women that Gao has ever done wrong in his life. 

And when he’s relating some event that happened to him in casual style, he speaks from the ordinary first person because he doesn't crave company anymore. He’s with people. He doesn’t have to have these disorienting cyclones of conversations with imagined selves and lovers. 

• • •

A more recent photo of Gao, taken now that he lives in
France.

A curiosity I realized reading it now for the third time. Soul Mountain is written (in English) in the present tense. It made me think that having made such an impact on me, it influenced my decision to write almost all of Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense. 

It wasn’t a conscious homage or anything. I didn’t even think of Gao at all when I was writing that novel. It was more like, I didn’t think writing Under the Trees, Eaten in the present tense was a big deal. The style just seemed normal to me.

• • •

I also now understand how incredibly different it must be to engage with Soul Mountain in the original Chinese, if only because I’ve read about how experimental it is with the Chinese language itself.

Gao wrote in colloquial Han Chinese, as well as in the dialects of ethnic minorities in Sichuan, and in classical dialects and registers. Its explicitly political content in this case – how the Chinese state suppressed the cultural traditions of ethnic minorities – becomes clear in the very words of the novel.

Many of the later chapters I didn’t really like when I first read it because they seemed focussed on folk singers and old men from traditions I didn’t understand. I wanted to see more perspectival gymnastics when I was 17.

A priest of the religion common to the
ethnic minorities of Yunnan, China, which
Gao observed throughout his long walk in
the 1980s.

But now, my sensibility has changed. I can more easily see the real human tragedy in stories like Gao’s encounter with an old folk singer who used to perform religious rituals before the government cracked down on local worship.

Gao goes with the old man on a comically long journey down narrowing, increasingly decrepit roads until they reach his village in the middle of the night. The old man's demonstrations of the old rituals draws a crowd until his performance for the sake of a visitor depending to be an anthropologist is another ritual. The community comes together again.

And then the town’s government and army representative comes to shut down the performance because the old man never got the proper permit to perform the ritual. On top of that, the singer suffers one last indignity – the officer is his oldest son.

I think I’ve become a better reader, writer, and person for knowing to engage with these stories of lost and oppressed cultures instead.