It Makes No Sense to Call Us Liberals, Jamming, 22/05/2018

Carrying on with another short reflection about liberalism. I went to the Andrea Horwath rally up in Brampton today. It seemed like the most exciting thing to happen in Brampton in years, though in this context, we are dealing with a pretty low bar.

As I work more in the different vectors of resisting oligarchy and nationalism in North America, one thing annoys me. It’s just a contingent little quirk of the rhetoric,* but it just plain bugs me.

* And if you want to get a little too poetic about the whole mess, aren’t we all, really?

Why do nationalists keep calling us liberals?

I mean, in a way, I’m happy to be misidentified by the people with large private arsenals of weapons. They might not be the most accurate in tracking us down, so they’ll kill some of their own when they invade the cities to end the liberal slime once and for all.

I hope it's at least recognized that my side of politics recognizes
liberalism for the inadequate model of thinking it is.
I snapped the photo myself after her speech in Brampton's Bombay
Hall yesterday afternoon. Stood on a chair. I think that's a cute
moment – I love photos of photos.

Conservatives and nationalists that don’t have large arsenals of weapons? Them I’m okay with. We can talk, even if I find some of them jerks.

The Dershowitz Problem I talked about yesterday is the perfect example of this. Paul Patton explores more of this idea in one of the most interesting passages of his book on Deleuze and Guattari’s political thinking.

See, liberal philosophy** is fundamentally about identifying and protecting rights against state violation – a boundary of personal sovereignty around yourself that every other personal also shares.

** I’m distinguishing the singular character of the philosophy from a lot of the ways liberal politics have been done over the years. All political projects end up including aspects of every relevant philosophical concept that it interacts with as it develops. But the concepts themselves are pure structures.

Liberalism’s essence as a philosophy is the civil right – the negative right to be free from interference in expressing yourself. That’s why liberalism is such a great philosophy for protecting people from privacy violations or defending them from state intimidation and power.

But it’s awful for protecting you against the corruption of your economic system. It won’t protect you against the oligarch, the robber baron, the pirate hedge fund. They won’t steal from you specifically, but they’ll change the conditions under which you can earn your keep. Yet there’s no liability on liberal principles because the zone of personal sovereignty only regards direct, personal violations.

If you aren’t directly and intentionally seeking to cause some particular harm in your actions, you aren’t responsible in a pure liberalism. Even if you’re looting the public treasury with tax breaks and industrial contract giveaways, defunding to dysfunction a state institution that people rely on isn’t a harm.

Because there are no responsibilities in a pure liberalism to each other beyond leaving each other alone. So you’re free to do what you want, no matter the indirect harms your actions cause. You only have your civil rights.

Civil rights definitely can’t be dispensed with. But in terms of what we need to live well, civil rights are incomplete.

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.

Rights Are What We Give – Not What We Take, Research Time, 10/01/2017

Been going through an old essay of Immanuel Kant lately that doesn’t get much attention among the basic intros to his work. Like a lot of sentences Kant writes, the title is very long: “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It Is of No Use in Practice.”

It’s taught enough in introductions to Kant’s political and moral thought that it’s included in the Cambridge Practical Philosophy collection of his work. But it’s definitely outside the usual Kant undergrad canon of the first two Critiques and the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals.

Part of what inspired me to write this post was reading about the
harassment journalist Lauren Duca recently endured from the famous
pharma troll Martin Shkreli, who plastered his Twitter account with
images like this one – of his head photoshopped onto Duca's husband
– when she told him to get fucked after he asked her to be his date to
Donald Trump's inauguration party. Shkreli ended up banned (at least
for now) from Twitter over what he called "just a collage."

Hell, in my experience, I consider myself lucky to have even been offered to read the Critique of Practical Reason in my own undergrad years.

But “Correct in Theory” has some very useful ideas for today’s increasingly extreme politics. Particularly the contemporary defence of bullying and harassment as free speech.

I'm not going to pussyfoot around my own stance on the issue. The notion that all speech – including harassment mobs, threats, and cyberstalking like doxxing – is protected by our values of free expression is a perversion of the entire liberal tradition.

This concept of freedom of speech as the entitlement to say whatever you want to whoever you want, with any attempt to make you go away as an act of censorship, is a distinctly contemporary creation. And it’s a creation of bubbles of self-entitled jerks in toxic online communities like particular Reddit boards, decent chunks of 4Chan, and pretty much all of 8Chan.

As a concept, it’s the notion that a freedom is a personal empowerment. That a right is a protection for the exercise of your power, whose only restraints are what you choose to impose on yourself. It’s a purely individualist way of thinking about rights – my right to do this.

So here’s an old, authoritative, dead white man for the misogynist mobs of the internet to deal with. Immanuel Kant writes,

“Right is the limitation of the freedom of each to the condition of its harmony with the freedom of everyone.”

Right, in other words, is bound up with limits. Despite the fantasies of the most individualistic minds and philosophies, humans are social creatures.

Once again, I turn to the words of Larry David and the voice of George
Costanza for the wisdom that so many of us so often forget.

We are living in a society. So the freedoms we need also come with obligations. Our freedom to speak our minds and opinions has to be tempered with the need for social harmony – not to harm our fellow people, whether by insult, violation of privacy, or disturbing harassment.

Yet that twinning of right and obligation doesn’t even get Kant’s idea quite right. He doesn’t say our rights should be limited by our obligations to our fellows – he says our rights are those limitations.

Our rights don’t come from our assertion as individuals. They are our stepping back from other individuals so that they have the space to live freely themselves.

We don’t create spheres of personal freedom with loud, bold assertions. We don’t beat on our chests like a stereotypical ape to make our rights clear. Our rights only come into being when we let other exercise their rights.

So the goal of political morality in this perspective isn’t encouraging loud, grandstanding, chest-puffing, “I do this to you because I have the right!” Right is the creation and maintenance of social harmony through each of our conscience and choice.

A society of free people is therefore a society of people who look out for each other, who run our institutions and act in everyday life to safeguard the freedom of everyone else.

I shouldn’t have to argue this like it’s some radical new idea. That quote came from an essay that is literally 224 years old!

Yet in our bubbles of self-entitlement, we’ve forgotten this powerful idea.

Dictating Freedom II: The Apprentice Citizen, Research Time, 26/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . So in this post, I want to get more into the hypocrisy of citizenship. Because all of Etienne Balibar’s essays on nationalism include different angles and approaches on the same underlying idea – that a society can’t be genuinely democratic while its institutions still rely on border controls.

This is a pretty radical policy idea and philosophical concept. Because it kind of undermines the concept of sovereignty. You know, the concept on which all of existing international law depends. And the institutional setup of states themselves. 

Canadians of my generation grew up being told how
welcoming, open, and multicultural our country is. But
there are always complicated factors, like the existence
of territorial borders themselves.

No one ever said freedom would be easy, I guess. And when you take Balibar’s analyses seriously, it marks a pretty intense challenge to the institution of the state and our entire international legal framework. 

Take nothing for granted, nothing as obvious. That’s supposed to be the fundamental starting point of philosophical thinking.*

* Though I actually saw this attitude pretty rarely among philosophers working in the Academy when I was there. Regardless of sub-discipline or camp. But that’s a History Boy post for another day.

Balibar isn’t the first to discuss a fundamental anti-democracy in the imposition of borders and border controls. One of Canada’s most impactful historians, Harold Troper, has said the same. Even after Canada’s explicitly and purposely racist immigration policies were stripped away, the author of None Is Too Many still points out that our laws treat Canadian citizenship as a privilege to bestow on an elite few.

Some of my good friends are immigrants to Canada, and it’s quite a long and involved process. It involves evaluations of your potential economic productivity, assessments of your personal and political history, and even tests of your knowledge of Canadian history and law. 

The refugee application involves even more screening, assessment, evaluation. This for someone fleeing from the devastation of a war, persecution, or ecological catastrophe.

Application processes for citizenship function as a reward for behaviour. And Balibar makes a solid argument that such behaviour is a supplication. A prostration before the culture and values that the state laws articulate as the majority stance. 

You submit to state authorities and enter a state of tutelage. You become a student of your new country’s history and values. And your prize on graduation is the guarantee that you can live inside the borders of the country with a promise that the state will protect and not itself act against your rights. 

The next post in this series will go into more detail on
the ethical and political travesty of Canada's
Temporary Foreign Workers Program. Ultimately, it's
the most egregious and visible demonstration of the
anti-democratic nature of border control, a law that
empowers authorities to make blatant class
distinctions about who even has the right to apply
for permanent Canadian citizenship.

Until you’re awarded citizenship, your rights aren’t guaranteed. Canada, generally speaking, will still respect your rights in the abstract. Even though you won’t hold all the civil and legal protections of a citizen, the state won’t arbitrarily violate non-citizens.**

** Anymore. For the most part.

But the guarantee only comes (for a migrant) after this submission to state authority. The guarantee includes the right to stay on the territory inside the border for as long as you want. 

Even in largely (or at least officially) post-national countries like Canada, which has decoupled its identity from a specific cultural, religious, or ethnic heritage, this minimal assimilation remains. 

Now, assimilation is different from cultural change. All cultures and people change over time, whether or not you want to admit it. Assimilation is when a relation of dominance and submission drives a person’s or a community’s cultural change – when a minority becomes majoritarian, when difference collapses into conformity.

But for a democracy (an all-the-way-down, every-vector-of-human-existence democracy), the only conformity should be conformity to ideologies and moralities that encourage the proliferation of difference. Because democracy is freedom in its political context. And freedom is, in an ontological context, the proliferation of difference.

So when you look at the philosophical and ethical problems that immigration raises, here’s how they test your commitment to democracy. Ask yourself – Does my period of tutelage, my country’s apprentice citizenship, encourage the proliferation of difference? 

If it does, then you’re at least on a democratic track. Well, you’re on a democratic track within your borders. Because there are a lot of social and economic pressures that the institution of borders exacerbate, worsen, and turn into sites of violence and abjection. 

Canadian civic studies tests in our citizenship applications are the least of the indignities millions suffer in their migrations for a better life. . . . To Be Continued

Save Us V: The World Is Lost But I’m Found, Research Time, 16/12/2015

Well, that turned into a couple of nice false starts. But here we are at the actual start of what I wanted to say about Hobbes when I was writing my follow-up to the Only a God post.

What Leo Strauss has to say about Hobbes is rooted in Strauss' own attitude about truth. The problem of truth – particularly the natural universal rights of man als Männer – is the conceptual core of Natural Right and History.

Here's the pragmatist answer to the problem of
relativism. Many truths doesn't mean there are no truths.
Each truth is partial, limited to a particular unique
domain or set of concerns, and only God knows the
totality of all that truth. But God isn't exactly
forthcoming with the answers, so we have to figure
all this out on our own.

Okay, so what makes truth a problem? 

See, Strauss is a textbook example of someone who thinks that saying “There’s no one absolute eternal truth about X" is the same as saying “There’s no truth at all about X, and you can believe whatever you want about X.” When X is the list of human rights, shit gets serious.

It’s the fear of moral relativism, but in a context where anything that falls short of moral absolutism is total relativism. And Strauss’ analysis of Hobbes is how he roots moral relativism in thinking that goes back well further than the usual suspects like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The real relativist, as far as he's concerned, is Hobbes. The reason is intriguing, though. It has to do with the implications of a thorough mechanism for knowledge in Hobbes’ thinking.

Before I lay this out, I want to say that these aren't my views at all. I’m walking you through how I understand Strauss’ argument. I think that argument is fascinating as a set of ideas and inferences, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

If everything that exists is a mechanism, then humanity has no powers to progress beyond what we can already do. That includes our thinking. We can only think, plan, and act in a way that’s peculiar to human existence alone. So we can only understand the world in human terms.

If we want to understand everything in the world (the ostensible goal of scientific inquiry), we’d have to understand everything in the world on its own terms. But we only have human knowledge frameworks to work with, so can’t know the world in itself. 

So humans gaining knowledge of truths beyond human experience or thinking is impossible. Reason is impotent. But action isn’t. Mathematics is a human way of knowing, but it does allow us to study how mechanisms work and manipulate them.

The heavily oversignified central illustration of
Hobbes' Leviathan.

Non-human mechanisms are permanently alienated from humanity. But we can use our knowledge of mechanism in the abstract (mathematics and the derived applied sciences) to wrench those alien bodies to behave according to human possibilities.

This is the mind-set of Modernity.* The book of nature is in a language we can never know. But we can burn its pages and remake the world in the human image. Strauss thinks this is a disastrous path, and so have many environmentalists over the years.**

* The epoch, that is. 

** Further notions that environmentalism should properly be a conservative dogma, as it was back when it was called conservationism, and resulted in the creation of America's national park system. But in the 1960s, the movement became critical of big business because of pesticides and pollution, so became the province of hippies. Environmental consciousness still hasn’t recovered the same political power it had in John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's day, and I don't know that it ever will.

If humanity is so lost in the world that we can only find ourselves, then we'll make sure we can be found everywhere by steamrolling our nature, our character, our way over everything. That’s modernity, says Strauss. 

So we have to figure out a return to the pre-modern mind-set when we rooted philosophical thinking and argument in real endpoints: the actual, absolute, universal answers to our questions.

Hoo boy. To Be Continued . . .

A Science of Humanity II: Living Without Purpose, Research Time, 26/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So there’s something weird about this idea that all natural motion is a strict mechanism. Yes, it’s wrong. But it was still pervasive in the culture, since mechanism – A causes B always and forever – was the dominant way of thinking about scientific law in the 19th century.

Probability was an innovative concept, and really weird to people. Normally, we only see one event at a time, so we think of the bat hitting the ball in a particular way that the ball has this arc. Only when that event repeats itself a few hundred times can its variations become visible. Our perception doesn’t really work that way.*

Leo Strauss and a lot of others who distrust modern
science never understood the revolution in scientific
thinking where we realized that probability and
variation weren't failures of knowledge, but the way
the world really works. Every pitch is unique.

* A note on my sci-fi ideas. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there were some creature that did see every motion unfolding in its actuality and its possibility at once? That would be a weird kind of creature to describe. Very difficult to imagine their thoughts.

Mechanism had an incredibly easy metaphor that anyone could easily turn to. Clocks. Each part of the universe fits together as if it were the gear of a clock, and we each move with complete necessity and rigidity.

Leo Strauss clearly thought about science this way. Because he describes the social sciences as describing humanity in a totally unfree way. The sociologist’s guiding presumption was that every aspect of human society and thought could be explained with mathematical laws of the same necessity as a clock’s gears.

If you want to read more on how the 19th century prominence of the clockwork metaphor messed with people’s attitudes about knowledge, go read The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking. I don’t really have much more to say that isn’t just a riff on that.

What he pulls out of that image of man as pure mechanism more interesting. The idea that the social sciences all presume that Man is not free.** A science of humanity means complete mechanistic knowledge of humanity. 

** I hate these old-fashioned, patriarcho-normative turns of speech. But it’s good to remind ourselves that they were common currency in intellectual circles not too long ago. It’s also a good marker for a perspective I find obsolete.

Plenty about humanity is mechanistic. But our knowledge
of our mechanisms is power over them.

So if all of reality – even human existence and thought – runs according to a mechanism, then we have no responsibility for our actions. This is true whether we’re individuals or the whole cosmos. 

In philosophy, the individual scale of this idea is the moral argument against determinism. Because a totally mechanistic humanity would make morality nonsense, it can’t be true. 

But Strauss is looking at this conclusion from the cosmos, and seeing more cosmic meaning in it. If everything in the universe is a mechanism, then the universe – humans included – has no purpose. It’s simply a mechanism that runs as it does because there’s no other way to move. 

The universe, being entirely a mechanism, has no inherent purpose. Nothing in it has any inherent purpose either, including humanity. We’re all just mechanisms, after all. So there’s no true right or wrong – no natural human rights, no should, must, or ought. Only mechanistic machinery moving as it must.

Must and is become the same thing.

This is what Strauss believes science does. He’s not the only one. He’s the tail end of a long tradition of people who think scientific knowledge narrows the sphere of morality until it winks out of existence. Again, read The Taming of Chance. But follow his false belief to get to the heart of this argument against the benefit or truth of social science.

Human reason needs some minimal amount of purpose to the universe, something that escapes blind mechanism deceiving itself with delusions of grandeur. Human reason’s moral investigations are about discovering natural human rights, the universal and necessary political rights for human societies. 

If no such rights exist, then all moral thinking is absurd, meaningless, nonsense. Strauss thinks that a science(s) of humanity would narrow the field of human thinking to nothing by making all human thought and action a product of mechanism. Without choice and agency, there can be no rights, no good, and no justice. Only stuff that happens.

But that’s not the only reason why Strauss hates the social sciences. And so it’s not the only reason floating around modern conservative politics why sociology has become something you commit like a crime.

There’s also the matter of history. . . . To Be Continued.

Unseen Theology II: The Ghost of an Image, Research Time, 07/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So what does this mean? That the animating spirit of W-era neoconservatism was Christian supremacy in disguise?

It's a pretty heavy and simple statement to say about a writer whose ideas and works are as complex as Georg Hegel's. But because Fukuyama takes up an oversimplified version of his ideas, I suppose that can be my playing field.

You could say that this is the most powerful face in the
Arab world: Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who's
become the de-factor ruler of Saudi Arabia, thanks to
the dementia and possible Alzheimer's of King Salman.

Fukuyama pitches his idea – history bends toward capitalist liberal democracy – as having universal scope. He gives a brief dismissal of Muslim cultures from being part of this trajectory. Oil wealth, he says, perverts the natural character of their societies so much that the supposedly universal yearning for democracy and freedom fades away.

Fukuyama dismisses the Muslim world too quickly. Quickly enough that probing why can reveal a very deep problem with his program.

His philosophical roots in Hegel inadvertently – and invisibly, even to Fukuyama himself – cut not only the Muslim world, but the entire non-Western or non-Christian world out of consideration. 

When I read Philosophy of History, I found an important limitation of the book was that the progress of human history culminated in Europe, in the West. Typical for the early 19th century in Europe. But that story of humanity can't work in an era after colonialism, when we can't really hide anymore from what European colonialism really was.

Any philosophical conception of humanity's history has to account for our plurality, our diversity. Go ahead and think messianically about the history and development of human civilization. The notion that human freedom will have a single, unified form is a deservedly tough sell these days.

You know what’s an even tougher sell? That the single, unified form of human freedom is fundamentally Christian. In the peculiarly Christian idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, Hegel saw the culmination of human politics. It’s the restoration of paradise, where everyone is equal in status and lives in harmony.

When I worked full-time in academia, I rarely found
authors or colleagues who took Fukuyama seriously
as a political philosopher. We really should, if only
because of how effective his ideas were.

European humanity becomes God by building a system of civil government where everyone in society perfectly and mutually recognizes each other’s equal dignity and rights. 

When I think about how Derrida described Hegel, I see parallels to my discussions over this Winter with Steve Fuller about his book Knowledge. 

There, we talked about how a very peculiar theological conception of humanity as being "in the image of God” sparked a revolution in our knowledge institutions. We started learning about the world because that knowledge brought us in tune with God, more like God. For Christians, humanity and God share a common nature.

God and Christianity doesn't figure in Fukuyama’s messianic vision of a planet full of capitalist liberal democratic regimes. Globally omnipresent democracy would be the paradise in which everyone recognized each other's inherent dignity and inalienable rights. 

These dignity and rights are grounded in human nature alone. Nothing about the image of God here. Fukuyama has, to his credit, learned the post-colonial lesson: We shouldn’t fit all peoples into a world-view that’s the product of only one culture.

But his break isn’t clean enough. Fukuyama still relies on Hegel for the framework of his political thinking. And Hegel's philosophy is so firmly rooted in Christian culture that, long after the ideology of Man as the Image of God faded from Europe’s scientific culture, he’s still riffing on it. 

You could also say that this dead fruit salesman is
the most powerful face in the Arab world. It's
a case I could certainly feel safe making.

Fukuyama’s entire conception of this universal yearning of humanity as human bends all the peoples of the world to a Western cultural narrative. His supposed liberation in Western democracy is an imperialist ideology in its heart.

This is Jacques Derrida's basic criticism of The End of History in chapter two of Spectres of Marx.

And you think it’s over. You think Derrida, the established philosophical genius so famous as to have an adjective made of his name, would have schooled this right-wing upstart. Fukuyama's just a booster for capitalism, after all.

Then came Bouazizi and the revolution.

Human Rights Were a Wonderful Dream, Jamming, 16/03/2015

A couple of years ago, one of my old professors came to McMaster to give a public lecture in the philosophy department’s weekly guest speaker series. She gave a fascinating talk about theories of human rights, and I asked something during question period about which we had a solid conversation both during and after the formal discussion.

I couldn't say what Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro is doing that's much
worse than what many close political
allies of the United States do.

The question has gnawed at me for a long time before that talk, and ever since. I was reminded of it when I was reading about the new international trade sanctions that the United States has levied at Venezuela. Ostensibly, it’s because of the Venezuelan government’s human rights abuses, particularly violence and police repression of anti-government politicians and activists. 

But Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept makes an interesting and disturbing point, writing about the Venezuelan sanctions. The United States counts among its important allies regimes that practice terrible human rights abuses. His main example in that article is Saudi Arabia, a monarchy that uses its police services to torture and suppress dissidents, the most famous example at the moment being Raif Badawi, the liberal blogger who was sentenced to ten years in prison and a total of 1000 lashes. Saudi Arabia also carries out violent suppression of the country’s Shia minority.

Greenwald’s rhetorical point: If the United States government and leaders really cared about human rights above all, they’d be smacking sanctions on Saudi Arabia, instead of considering it a central ally in the Middle East. 

As I see it from my own philosophical perspective, it’s hypocritical to talk about the importance of universal human rights when you actually only enforce them against their violators when it doesn’t suit your interest to befriend them. Other examples: Communist China, Sisi’s Egypt, Putin’s Russia when he was invading Georgia (but not Ukraine), Pinochet’s Chile, Pakistan.

Human rights today have a worse rap than even their hypocritically inconsistent standards of enforcement. I asked my old professor whether the entire concept of human rights was even useful politically anymore, now that George W Bush has so publicly used them to justify his invasion of Iraq.

The effect of this war on the global cultural consciousness was so enormous that large swaths of Earth’s population no longer trusted Western leaders when they began military actions against some foreign power in the name of human rights. This was one of the main reasons, to my understanding, why the modern regime of human rights exists.

The United Nations was once considered the
international beacon of human progress.

After the Second World War with its industrialized death camps, soul-crushing totalitarianism, mass bombings, and the use of nuclear weapons, the United Nations was formed as a means to settle global conflicts. The centrepiece of international law that emerged with the United Nations was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I grew up from childhood being taught that this was the moral focus of all international politics. 

Reading back through some of the important works of Hannah Arendt, a major influence on my old professor, impressed upon me the strength of that concept of human rights. Human rights theory is also a major branch of contemporary Western philosophy. New books and articles on human rights are published all the time. The scholarship on the implications of different human rights, their metaphysical nature, their scope, and hierarchy, is immense.

But that scholarship, to my knowledge at least, isn’t catching up to this latest challenge to the global legitimacy of the concept of human rights at all. Maybe there are some illuminating essays about this latest challenge behind some academic journal paywalls. If there are, I hope some of my readers who still have direct access to the latest top academic philosophy journals will pass me some pdfs. 

After the horrors of the Second World War, the leaders of the Earth’s major human powers built the United Nations and the body of international law surrounding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights so that there would be a legitimate order to relations among the world’s governments other than blowing each other up. In a world of nuclear weapons, literally nothing else would survive it.

Yet I’m existentially frustrated with the state of global politics, where human rights have become nothing more than an excuse for the same destructive, chaotic realpolitik that has characterized human conflict all our lives. 

Angry PostHumanism III: “How Dare I Eat Meat?! I Almost Cried,” Research Time, 01/12/2014

Those of you who remember Scrubs will know that the
person usually in charge of bioethical decisions in
practice rarely prioritizes purely moral motives.

Continued from previous . . . The longest essay in Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? collection is a complicated critique of bioethics philosophy. I’ve heard plenty of critiques of bioethics, both as philosophy and as practice. 

The practice criticism is fairly simple: a hospital bioethicist has been trained in a philosophical context of dense arguments and to act as an emotional caregiver to families and friends of patients going through intense life or death issues, but the biggest pressure on their jobs is often handling situations such that the hospital avoids liability.

Wolfe’s essay on the subject, “Flesh and Finitude,” concentrates on the philosophical critique, being a philosopher. It’s a sprawl of an essay, and I think it suffers from that sprawl, setting up a problem in one context but never really returning to it by the end of its conceptual journey. It begins with the subject of bioethics and drifting away to consider how more fundamental aspects of human subjectivity impact how we think of our rights. 

It can be difficult to critique the language of rights, practically speaking, because almost all civil, criminal, and international law is conceived in terms of rights. The entire institution of tort law, for example, depends on a person’s claim to standing against another to make an accusation for redress. So much of our moral thinking is about the nature and reach of our rights to make claims against each other. 

Animals are often cut out of this, intuitively speaking, because they physiologically can’t speak to make claims upon their rights. Even Bruno Latour, a thinker who’s often considered a radical post-humanist and whose writings on science are nefarious in some circles for destabilizing public faith in the infallibility of scientific knowledge,* has written that there can only be a just relationship of humans and non-humans when scientific instruments have enabled non-humans to express their interests linguistically. This is the key idea behind his parliament of all species in The Politics of Nature.

* Latour himself now belongs in that camp. Over the last ten years, as he has engaged with the politics of climate change deniers, he has openly expressed regret that he carried out any of the anthropological studies of scientists and scientific institutions that defined his early career. Even though his research showed the humanity of science as an institution, he now wishes that he could convince people that scientists were infallible possessors of pure and perfect truths about the world again, because it would cut off the viral skepticism that drives the popular denial of climate change.

The language of rights in our culture has a powerful gravity. Even writers who have tried to theorize ways to conceive of animal ethics beyond the old-fashioned scope of civil rights and standing end up just creating more lists of demands and claims that basically are rights, but under a different name. One of Wolfe’s central examples of this is Martha Nussbaum’s list of animal capabilities: she pitches it as having moved beyond the rights-based approach of cataloguing standings and demands, but it practically amounts to a list of standings and demands that a wider range of organisms can claim.

The approach of creating lists of claims based on some clear criteria (rights, capabilities, or some other) is an approach to philosophy that sees its goal as crafting specific problems to deal with well-defined issues by producing definitive answers that ends the inquiry. I’ve never liked this approach to philosophy precisely because it tries to settle problems that motivate countless writers across the world and across centuries in neat little packages. It treats difficult questions as if they had easy answers. 

Wolfe considers literature better suited to engaging with the core issues of what our attitudes should be to the animals on which we depend to live. Literature depicts difficult situations, undecidable moments, suspension in an existentially powerful tension. He refers to J. M. Coetzee, who has written about the existential terror of realizing that we must consume creatures with which we’re evolutionarily continuous. 

By showing how the problems of rights and standing to make claims against those who harm them can apply to the situations of animals, Wolfe tries to problematize the bioethics of hospital practice. When not only humans, but many kinds of life, can provoke the ethical unsettling of an existentially problematic encounter, a lot of the core presumptions that ground our everyday moral practice are shaken along with ourselves.