You Come to Swell the Numbers, Advocate, 26/02/2018

I’m not going to write about philosophy today. One is that most of the philosophy I read this weekend was for a book review I have to write, so I’m not going to throw it out on the blog.

I started work on a new novel manuscript this weekend too, but I only just finished the prologue. On to page three! Yeah, not much to say here.

But I’m coming to protest on Saturday. It’ll be a good protest, a damn fun protest, a beautiful protest, and a necessary protest. The rage will be necessary, and channelled through the power of a group.

So this Saturday, there’ll be a Justice for Tina Fontaine protest, and yeah of course I’m fucking going.

There are two arguments that I can imagine getting trotted out about this. One is the legalist’s, the other is the quietist’s.

To Mr Legalist

The lawyer’s argument is the most insulting to me, because it’s so reductive. These are the people who say that Jian Ghomeshi deserves his job and office back at CBC because the criminal trial found him not-guilty. Who reduce all truth to the verdict of a jury.

Rather, they expand what was designed to be a narrow, difficult standard of proof to stand for the entire truth of the matter. Yes, a jury decided that Ray Cormier’s drunken ramblings weren’t sufficient grounds for criminal conviction. Would “Justice for Tina Fontaine” really be complete if this one evil jackass went to prison for 25 years?

I don’t even believe in the sufficiency of retributive justice as an individual, and I came to that decision as a Westerner. Indigenous Canadian cultures lived under justice institutions – the customs and methods of redressing crimes – whose grounding principles were restorative, communitarian values. Centuries of cultural continuity.

Do you seriously think Indigenous Canadians would have only the punishment of a perpetrator in mind when they chant “Justice for Tina Fontaine”?

To Ms Quietist

I understand the centrepiece of this argument, I truly do. But you can’t just say that this is only for Indigenous people and cluck sadly as white extremist opposition goes unchallenged.

Remember what I said about the communitarian values at the centre of justice questions larger in scope than “Who did it?”

Tina Fontaine – and everyone else who’s met an untimely death after a life of neglect, suffering, and marginalization – doesn’t achieve justice when a jail cell closes. Because people still live as neglected as Tina Fontaine was.

Many of the causes and conditions of that neglect are the structure and operation of Canada’s government institutions. It may not be the residential schools anymore, but the child welfare agencies in some regions are very effective with the spin they’ve put on the basic process.

As a person who lives in Canada, I’m enmeshed in the same institutions, the same cultural currents as everyone else in this country. If our institutions and cultural beliefs, common sense, and habits are set up in such a way that many people needlessly suffer neglect and indignity, we all have to work together to change them.

When you’re suffering, you need to know that you have friends. That minimal level of friendship – respect and solidarity – is the relationship that constitutes community.

I’m not going to be some presumptuous ass trying to speak for Indigenous people. I haven’t gone through any experience like they have. But if anyone needs to know that they have friends, at least I’ll be there.

Swell the numbers until everyone joins.

Real Revolution Is With Thought, A History Boy, 10/11/2015

SPOILERS

first and foremost, as I’m leaping into some discussion of the last Doctor Who storyline to make a point about my own political philosophy.

When I wrote yesterday’s review of The Zygon Inver(a)sion, I felt like it didn’t quite reach a point that it should have. It never got to what Bonnie the Zygon actually did when she turned away from revolution and became a new Osgood. 

Bonnie never turned away from revolution to stand her rebellion down and become a peacemaker. The words of the Doctor made it clear: the real revolution is turning away from violence and retribution as a go-to response to injustice. 

Osgood started as a joke character for the 50th Anniversary
episode in 2013, but Peter Harness made her one of the
most philosophically interesting characters of the whole
Peter Capaldi era. She embodies progress, newness, and
divergence in so many ways. She's beyond conventional
concepts of identity, species, individuality, politics, and
ethics. Quite impressive.

Bonnie started The Zygon Inva(er)sion as just another fighter. She ended The Zygon Inver(a)sion as a true revolutionary because she fundamentally changed her values. 

Yesterday, I spoke about the message of peace in The Zygon Inver(a)sion, how the leader of a violent rebellion can be forgiven. She was violent without a doubt, a radical in every sense of the word. 

She led a retaliatory massacre of all the humans in her new hometown in America, killed several UNIT troopers and kidnapped enough to infiltrate the organization with duplicates, and worst of all, victimized an innocent Zygon who wanted nothing to do with her insurgency to make him a catalyst for spreading fear and violence between humans and Zygons.

Any peace settlement would require her punishment. Bonnie even says at one point that she can’t endorse peace, because she’d never be allowed to live if she surrendered. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if people call for the death of an insurgent leader who acted with such brutality. It’s a popular idea in the West to execute terrorist leaders without trial, including even their families in drone bombings. 

It’s similarly popular to imprison terrorists without trial and torture them. Even with a trial, they’re usually put in solitary confinement for life, tortured for decades by locking them away from any human contact. 

It’s a popular law in my country of Canada to strip those who’ve been convicted of terrorist crimes of their Canadian citizenship, and deport them to whatever country still holds their alternative citizenship. Even if they’ve served their time. 

Though Justin Trudeau won his majority government
with the banner and hashtag of #RealChange, he and
his party embody a politics of draping the imagery of
progress over the status quo and pandering to the
worst instincts of Canada's population.

When Saad Gaya is released from prison, as the law still stands, he’ll be stripped of Canadian citizenship and deported to Pakistan, a country where he’s never lived. No matter how much he may genuinely regret and renounce his actions as a terrorist plotter. The Harper government wrote this law; the current Trudeau government was critical of this when they were in opposition, but supported many other invasive and dangerous anti-terror laws.

We kill, maim, torture, and imprison terrorists, their families, and their supporters because we believe it is right to punish people for their crimes. We think it’s appropriate, moral, and just to bring equal or greater violence on the perpetrators of violence. Retribution is the most popular model of justice in the world.

It’s wrong. That simple. Retribution is wrong.

It perpetuates the cycle of violence that the Doctor denounces in The Zygon Inver(a)sion, but humanity’s desire for retribution also does much worse to humanity itself. It makes us think that it’s moral to bring violence on people. 

We often think of morality as a set of rules endorsed by authority. This is the vision of morality in most mainstream religions. God is the ultimate authority who polices us with divine punishment through the afterlife or karmic misfortune. God’s rules for our action are morality, for no other reason than the authority of God.

This is what lies behind the popular belief that atheists can have no moral centre. This is why people hate atheists: they believe that because an atheist doesn’t believe in a God who will punish them for breaking moral rules, they’ll do whatever violence they can get away with because they don’t believe in moral right or wrong at all.

Part of what I've come to love in
Doctor Who since understanding this
idea is that the Doctor's ethics
largely correspond to the progressive
conception of Nietzsche's thought.

There are atheists who believe this, but not many. They aren’t real atheists at all; they’re nihilists, believing that without the traditional ground of authority, there’s no motivation to be moral.

But being ethical has nothing to do with morality. This is the fundamental insight of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a further expression of Doctor Who’s Nietzschean character. Bonnie has given up her moral values that would answer violence with greater violence. Having sincerely done that, she’s forgiven.

That forgiveness of her crimes gives her the space to become a peacemaker, managing and negotiating conflicts that arise among her people and between her people and their majority community, humanity. 

The real revolution was this ethical transformation: she’s changed the whole mission of her life. The immediate metaphor was in changing her form to become a twin Osgood. But her transformation was ethical. She changed her entire purpose in life from revenge, retribution, and punishment to repair, healing, and peace-building.

Any revolutionary movement that doesn’t have this model doesn’t deserve the name.

A Real Spectre IV: Justice That Isn’t Revenge But Utopia, Research Time, 11/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . So after all this preamble and pre-ambling,* it’s time I finally said something about the idea of justice in Jacques Derrida’s late-period work, and why I find it so interesting for the Utopias manuscript, and in general. 

* Hyphenated word Derrida joke.

What fascinates Derrida throughout his career – and the main concept that the people who he’s influenced in cultural studies – is the slippage between our ideas and reality.** Most of the time, this slippage destabilizes a common-sense presumption, leaves us adrift. This supplies the punk, aggressive energy of Derrida’s 1960s-70s period.

We can still achieve justice for those who live. Part of
this comes through simply doing what we physically
can. It includes running a festival of Syria-related film
and contributing to refugee charities.

** Notice that I didn’t say différance. This is a technical term that you’ll understand if you read his stuff from the 1960s and 70s attentively. But if you read those books explicitly trying to figure out what différance means, it’ll only confuse you, because you’ll miss the forest examining a single tree. 

But by the 1980s, Derrida focussed on the same slippage between concept and reality in ethics and justice. We relate to other people all the time in daily life. We try to do right by them, and fairly serve our moral and social obligations. 

That’s the intuitive conception of justice – do right by people, and give them what they deserve. If someone does something good, return the favour. If someone does evil, wrong, or harm, then punish them. This is retributive justice. 

I’ve written before about why I think retributive justice is inadequate to a lot of political problems. Any fundamentally systematic injustice, really. Because members of an oppressor / privileged group can be implicated in a systematic injustice without intentionally doing any single wrong action. 

Having not done an intentional wrong action as an individual, it’s perverse to punish someone. So if you think the only kind of justice is retributive, you’ll fear that you’ll be punished for a systematic harm that you didn’t personally do. 

I think this lies behind a lot of the white fear of Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and similar groups. White people who personally have nothing to do with police violence or systematic oppression will believe that the minority movement wants to harm them in return. So you need a restorative or reparative approach to systematic justice.

He was always a man who liked to challenge people.

Derrida goes beyond even this, saying that true justice is impossible. Not impossible in the sense that we should give up on it, but in the sense that justice will always call to us. I haven’t come close to finishing the book yet, but essentially, this is about the ghost, the spectre.

The image that Spectres of Marx refers to, again and again, is from literature. Hamlet sees the ghost of his murdered father, and that encounter is a call for him to repair his society and family, returning a broken system to a more just path. And, whether he does or not, he can.

We can too. We can see, for example, the millions of refugees fleeing the Syrian war and welcome them to our countries, setting them up as citizens to begin new lives here. Their social energy will energize our own societies and economies, becoming a new force of labour, business, and people power. 

Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Egyptian, and Libyan refugees in Europe, America, and Canada can lead a new wave of work and dedication that will make our countries great. My grandparents’ generation did the same when they fled the wars and mass poverty of Europe for North America.

But there will always be a break, a slippage, a schiz between our idea of justice and what reality can accomplish. The Kurdi family, and countless others, are still dead on the beaches and bottom of the Mediterranean. Countless more died in the war itself, blown apart by rockets and barrel bombs. Countless more will die in slavery. 

For Derrida himself, the French-Algerian Jew, there were the countless ashen dead throughout Poland, Russia, and Romania. No matter what systematic repair has been made to the relationship of European Gentile and Jew, ghosts still scream from the railways.

The idea – the ideal – of justice is that all these are saved. The reality is that our powers are limited. The ones that are impossible to save are the ghosts that always make true justice impossible. 

From the gap between the ideal and the real comes a howl.

Another New Feminist Revolution III: Because She's a Great Philosopher, Composing, 15/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . Maybe now you can see why Laurie Penny’s ideas have so quickly become so important to my own projects. From my own position as a blogger with a small following, respectable pageview numbers, and a couple of books either out or on the way out, I’m trying to help change the world through my ideas. 

I’m not as successful as Penny, of course, because I spent my 20s in graduate school and she spent it hustling journalism. Also, I don’t think I would have done as well as she has, or even been able to formulate the ideas I have if I hadn’t taken the path that I did. 

I'm calling it right now: Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir,
Steinem, Cixous, Penny. She goes on the list.

I started my life as a pretty blinkered guy who thought that status quo was generally alright, and I’m becoming increasingly radical in my political beliefs as I get older. It’s supposed to run in the opposite direction, with youthful, naive radicalism calming down into an oppressive conservatism. The voice that asks contemptuously why you weren’t able to buy a house when you were 25 because I did in 1974.

But if we think that’s the voice of everyone in the previous generation, then we’re just playing into the hands of people who want to profit from the destruction of welfare state institutions. If a young person struggling with debt and wages they can barely live on sees a senior in poverty and spits in their face, “Now you know what it feels like, old man!” . . . Well, I don’t want to become that person.

I don’t want to become that person for the same reason I couldn’t let myself become a man who hates women and thinks that feminists want to torture men. Not just because it’s based on a lie, but because giving in to spite, anger, and revenge is the expression of weakness. 

It’s easy to deal with difficulties by hating the ones who had it easier than you did. The most difficult path of understanding and empathy is the more noble one, and it says a lot about humanity that we’re so hateful and resentful a species. It’s in this sense that I think Penny is very Nietzschean:* she understands that attitudes of resentment and hatred hold us back from progress as societies and as souls. 

* Do ignore Nietzsche’s intense sexism. I do. Nietzsche himself tells you to ignore his sexism, as he sets off those passages in Beyond Good and Evil with an introduction that essentially says that his sexist beliefs are the most contemptible, resentful parts of his own personality, part of what makes him less than the ethical nobility he aspired to be. Would that we could all be so honest with and about ourselves.

A dress that's making a new
activist in New Brunswick
every day. So some very
beneficial outrage for us all.

And as I’ve said, Penny understands the limits of anger. So much of the horrors in the everyday moments of modern life, especially the modern lives of women, find their genesis in systematic causes. When a harm is born from an intention, and the intention was itself the spontaneous genesis of the harm, then we have a reason for anger, revenge, and punishment. 

But patriarchy is a concept which distills a massive system of gendered oppression of both women and men. Women are oppressed in all the ways that we now know are obvious: they are objectified into things whose only value is in how they please others, particularly men. Men are oppressed in being twisted into hateful, raging, abusive, violent beasts, taught to blame women for the violence of their own desires, which only makes them even more violent toward women. 

A morality of retribution, of punishment for wrongs committed, is not appropriate to deal with patriarchy in this sense. We are all complicit in the socialization of gendered oppression, and we can’t punish everyone in society. Fighting systematic injustice requires healing, not punishment and revenge. When you have to heal the entire world, only restorative and reparative models of justice will work.

Advocating for the reality of systemic causation is the ontological and epistemological aspect of the current fight against new liberal ideology. My own government in Canada, the Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, is the most pure embodiment of new liberal thinking I’ve ever seen, and that I think the world has ever seen.

The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs recently said in Parliament, completely believing his own words, that when an Aboriginal woman is murdered, it is simply an isolated crime, and that when an Aboriginal teenager commits suicide, it is simply an isolated failure of a single family. This is an example of the refusal to see systemic causation. 

The politics of restoration, healing, and love as community organizing within flexible social networks is the endpoint of my giant work of political philosophy in progress, the Utopias project. It’s the set of principles that we have to pick up going forward if we’re going to fight and defeat the injustices of our own era. 

And I’m not delivering this from some lofty position. Then I’d just be one more cis-gendered straight white man with an awesome beard authoritatively telling people how to fight authority. 

I really would like to see some future Doctor Who lead
actress influenced by Penny's style for her costume. It
would be perfect for the aesthetic Doctor Who will
likely try to go for in the 2020s and 30s, when the
current largely female fanbase starts working in
television production, just as Davies' and Moffat's
generation of fandom did.

Laurie Penny has arrived at the same organized anarchism of healing in love through the mess of her own experiences as a journalist and activist, wandering like a vagabond Doctor through the marginalized places of our society and describing them to the safely housed masses. 

That she and I have come to such similar ideas through our very different paths and methods is a sign that my own thinking and writing can, in some small way, help articulate a revolutionary idea that is already in the popular consciousness. Maybe I can wake a few people up, or at least nudge them a little bit more, into changing how they conceive themselves and their lives, and changing how they live and treat people accordingly. 

That is what philosophy is for. I find it a little awkward writing about my contemporary as a research source. My education was in philosophy, a tradition of old white dudes stretching back centuries. But philosophy at its best has this uncanny power to change the world through thinking and writing, the influence of ideas to enlighten. In speaking with this highest power, Laurie Penny has shown herself to be a great philosopher.

There Should Be a Jailbreak II: Freedom as a Trap, Research Time, 27/08/2014

Continued from previous. . . . If she was going to stick only to the Nietzschean analysis of our drive to punishment that reveals its underlying desire for revenge, then her ideas would only be that of Nietzsche himself turned activist. The transition to political activism would itself be incomplete if a person stuck only to a Nietzschean framework for thinking. To put radically creative ideas into practice through political organizing, risking the corruption of your ideas in the ongoing whisper game of human society, you need fire.

Emma Goldman’s fire, and that of many other anarchist activists with whom she worked and who she followed, was born in the immense physical poverty of so many people. The state, police, and the classes of elite businessmen (and they were always men) who called the shots of government in her era made sure the mass of America’s population stayed poor, and were unable to lift themselves out of poverty even through starting businesses. And even though their material choices were always heavily constrained by all the circumstances and social frameworks that keep poor people poor, their poverty was always held to be their own responsibility.

This is a moment where metaphysics, which is normally a dry and serene tradition of largely useless contemplation of truths and questions that are taken to be fundamental, gains a ruthless political power. Much of Goldman’s argument in her essay on the injustice of the prison system focusses on how most crimes are crimes of necessity: the paradigm example is someone who is driven to a career as a thief or a drug dealer because no other viable options are available to him in his community, and he can find no employment elsewhere because of stigma about people from his community.

The answer to such crimes is not to punish the individual who commits them, but to ameliorate the economic and social conditions in which the individual lives, so that there are material opportunities for an honest living and an end to the prejudices in wider society that prevents people from disadvantaged communities from fully integrating with the whole country.

Namond Brice was one of the kids on The Wire who faced
a choice without freedom, locked in a community so
damaged that even his mother wanted him to deal drugs for
a living.

Very few people understand this, both in Goldman’s time and today. Instead, too many people see crime as an individual decision. If you’re a drug dealer, then it’s because you chose to be a drug dealer. It’s always your free choice. Goldman correctly identifies this as an ontological point, an idea about the fundamental nature of existence itself, given a horribly destructive political articulation. Each human being has free will: every human action is that individual’s own choice. Because we are all metaphysically free in this sense, each of us is wholly and completely responsible for our actions.

If we understand moral sanction in this way, then poverty and racial or religious discrimination is never a cause of evil activity: only the individual who commits a crime is responsible. Punishment is therefore the response to evil actions. Any recourse to environmental factors like a poverty-stricken lifestyle, discriminatory social norms, a non-existent legitimate economy, are seen as excuses. The free choice is always to do good or evil.

“You sell drugs and rob people for your living. That’s evil! You will be punished!”

“But there’s nothing else for me in my neighbourhood. Everyone I’ve ever known was either a drug dealer or a thief. My teachers never cared about our education and never even disciplined us in class. My father was killed by a police officer when I was five years old. My mother used to spend all the money she got from the government to feed me on drugs for herself. Even the nearest convenience store is two miles from my home. What else could I do but starve?”

“You always have a choice to do good or evil. You have free will. Because you did evil, you should be punished.”

“Should I let myself starve?”

Metaphysical freedom, the ostensible free will of the self-aware person, can’t trump someone’s lack of material freedom. 

There Should Be a Jailbreak I: Prison as Vengeance, Research Time, 26/08/2014

Moving forward by a few decades in my exploratory journey through the great figures of the anarchist tradition, I’ve hit across Emma Goldman, particular the book of essays she published in 1910. Anarchism as a political movement in Europe and America had taken a particularly violent turn by that point, articulating itself most notably as a series of assassinations. Self-identified anarchists had, by the time this book was released, successfully killed Czar Alexander II of Russia, King Umberto I of Italy, and American President William McKinley.

Goldman herself was hounded by the law enforcement agencies of the United States for this last assassination, even though McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, had no material connection with her. This circumstance of an intellectual leader in a movement persecuted for terrorist activities in which that leader played no part would repeat in the case of Antonio Negri’s being declared responsible for the murder of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro nearly eight decades after the McKinley assassination.

Emma Goldman, one of America's most
prominent anarchist activists, a woman who
should be properly legendary.

While I am thinking further about the identification of the anarchist movement with violence, and how this continued, I’d prefer to talk about another curious kind of historical repetition I found in her work. One of the essays in the collection I’m reading is about the serious need for prison reform. Goldman is intensely concerned that the prisons of America are becoming overpopulated, fed a steady diet of people who are so badly mistreated during incarceration, all in the name of punishment, that their recidivism is inevitable.

Goldman is incensed that prisoners are made to perform forced labour for which they are pathetically reimbursed, for the benefit of a corrupt collusion of state governments and contracting private enterprises. She is also extremely concerned that the state is spending such a terrible amount of money on prisons every year, a sign that the priorities of the government are severely schizophrenic at best, and outright hostile to the people it ostensibly serves at worst. The annual expenditure that worries her is $1-billion per year.

It is, to make the biggest understatement that I think I possibly could in the circumstance, a sad state of affairs that nothing has changed regarding the pathetic nature of American imprisonment. In fact, the problem has grown so terrible that it is an objective worry that the United States has become a police state in some regions, with 1% of its population currently living in prison. The problem has grown worse, but the majority still believe that incarceration is necessary.

More than this depressing analysis of a state of society that has only grown to more catastrophic proportions since then, Goldman makes a philosophical analysis as well. I’m quite impressed with how she has combined philosophical analysis with the blistering language of modern polemic. It’s a style that I think most philosophers who are interested in the political effects of their concepts should develop.

The heart of her analysis of why we all believe so deeply in the necessity of prisons lies in our need for revenge. She shares this notion with Friedrich Nietzsche, and has in other places mentioned her debt to his philosophical mind. But Goldman, whether rhetorically or sincerely, says that most people in our society have lost the nerve and fortitude to carry out an act of violent revenge ourselves. So we entrust the state to do it on our behalf, rationalizing its behaviour through the impersonal machinery of law and the excuses provided by philosophical argument.

Robert Nozick once argued that Nietzsche’s idea made little sense because one could build a concept of retributive justice that could stand on its own without having to be justified by virile desires for revenge. However, this was precisely not the point. Nietzsche’s and Goldman’s arguments are not about what can be justified. Goldman herself mocks the notion that retributive justice has its own argumentative justification as precisely missing the point about the ubiquity of the need for punishment in our own justice system.

Clayton Lockett's execution in Oklahoma unfortunately let
spectators see how much he suffered as he died. Like
cowards, we were appalled at his pain.

You can use the mechanical arguments of philosophy to justify any moral or political position. What matters politically is what actually lies at the heart of the motivation to punish. Revenge is the essence of the punishing soul which dry philosophical arguments for the rightness of retributive models of justice coldly permit. Just as most of us no longer have the stomach to pull the trigger of the gun that blows a hole in the head of the man who murdered our spouse,* most of us can no longer face that, despite all philosophical chicanery, the visceral motive of retribution and punishment is that we crave vengeance and blood.

* And we are even so squeamish that we no longer allow death penalties by firing squad or other bloody methods, but use poison gas or injections so the dying man appears more peaceful and we can believe the lie that he’s dying painlessly. That way, we can feel sanctimoniously merciful as we condone the state-sanctioned killing of a fellow citizen.

As well, Goldman identifies an aspect of the philosophical arguments and concepts that justify retributive justice that I find similarly disgusting. . . . To Be Continued.