Each of Us Is Nothing If We’re Alone, Research Time, 26/09/2017

Now and then, I’ve wandered around Reddit having conversations about philosophical ideas. I had interesting conversations, but few of them were all that pretty. One that stuck with me – which I realized informs so much of radical far-right youth culture today – was about morality.

Someone told me in all seriousness that all forms of moral obligation were oppression. Because any means by which another person seeks to control my actions oppresses my individual liberty.

That’s really messed up. And I thought it was just the ravings of a messed up Reddit freak. But reading Robert Nozick’s radio show argument, I realized that this idea had real pedigree.

You can make an idol of Les Stroud the Survivor Man, but remember
this very simple fact. We'd never know about his incredible skills at
disappearing from civilization and living in the wilderness if he
didn't bring an Outdoor Life Network camera crew with him and
broadcast all his adventures on cable television to a nationwide
and global audience.

Now, Nozick was ostensibly writing about the free rider argument. He was arguing that it was morally acceptable to be a free rider on a system designed for the common good because a fundamental element of individual liberty is the freedom not to do something despite others pressuring you.

But look at what that argument actually says. The free rider problem is typically posed, literally, as taking a free ride – its typical example is hopping on a public bus without paying for it.

Nozick pumps a different example for the free rider problem and ends up in much more horrifying territory. Instead of a bus system, he describes a community entertainment program that you’ve already promised to contribute to. And he says you still have the right to back out, no questions asked.

He meant to talk about the free rider problem, but he’s argued that each of us has the right to break promises.

Having the right to break promises also means that you have the right to step away from your whole society. Because if you capitalize on your right to break all your promises, then you shout to the world that no one need ever trust you again. If you’re enthusiastic about doubling down on your freedom to break promises, no one ever will trust you again.

Your liberty is the freedom to turn your back. Let's admit that we all have this freedom. Now let’s also examine the consequences.

True isolation destroys your humanity. As an inherently social species,
we have to compromise our desires if we want to complete
ourselves as people.

Even though Hannah Arendt wrote The Human Condition 20 years before Nozick published Anarchy State and Utopia, she made one important point about the terror that results from Nozick’s idea. And I mean it when I say terror.

Turning your back on society literally means becoming a totally private person, a hermit. In the cartoon version of libertarianism, this is how the most extreme folks live. Move out to a cabin in the middle of the woods, disconnect from everything,* grow a vegetable garden, and hunt deer with your own increasingly massive weapons arsenal.

* Unless you keep the internet to stay on Reddit and 4Chan, catch up on Breitbart, follow your favourite youtubers, and watch @realDonaldTrump.

I’m being extremely sarcastic, but I’m also making a larger point about what disconnecting from society really means. You really do kind of have to become a cartoon radical libertarian to make a truly clean break – to live without the oppression of being bound by promises.

Being in Paris this week, where Arendt herself spent a good chunk of her philosophically fertile years, reminds me of the influence of old ideas, ancient concepts, on our contemporary thinking. She writes about the Polis Greek meaning of the word ‘private,’ to describe the private realm – the Greeks thought of it literally as the realm of privation.

Appearance is an essential aspect of reality, and to flee from
appearance is to fly into a shadow existence, to become a shade
instead of a person.

Someone whose entire life is relegated to the private realm is deprived. He’s a pathetic figure.** The libertarian desire for freedom – as the radio show problem and moral obligation as oppression expresses – creates a deprived human personality.

** And I feel safe saying that it’s often a he.

When someone defines their life according to such a desire, they fly away from society and human connection. All attempts at social relationships are rejected. The goal becomes isolation – isolation as the only space that can be truly free.

Arendt writes, “The private man does not appear, and therefore is as though he did not exist.” If you don’t enter society, then you don’t really exist as a person. At least, you aren’t a complete person. Your existence as a human is damaged, withered. You’ve purposely broken parts of yourself.

Those broken parts of the totally free person (on this libertarian model) are the means by which we compromise our will. I can’t just demand food for free from a restaurant, break all my promises to my friends, betray my wife, and abandon my children. All these are constraints on our freedom, when freedom is conceived as total escape from obligation.

But to cut yourself away from all those obligations makes you literally inhuman.

The Impotent Liberal V: A Society of Becoming, Composing, 03/01/2017

Continued from previous post . . . Liberalism’s public image has been twisted away from its best ideal. The politicians and intellectuals – journalists, activists, think tank researchers – believe today in a different liberalism than the philosophy that made democracy possible for a society of millions.

Liberalism was the first modern utopia without content.

I haven’t really gone into a lot of detail about what exactly that means. So here’s my first real pass.

Speaker of the USA's House of Representatives Paul Ryan is probably
the most powerful advocate today of libertarian ideas about how we
should structure society. He makes a better photo for it than Hayek
and Mises, because at least he's an attractive wealthy man, and not
a withered old dead man like them.

Contrast what a liberal in the era of Mt Pelerin would say is the core of the philosophy. Liberal thinking understands freedom as freedom from coercion, that a free society is where everyone is left alone to do whatever they wish short of coercing or harming others.

What does this mean when it’s turned into policy? Well, the principle can support a lot of different policy directions.

In our timeline,* that means striving for zero to few taxes, and a world where most if not all provisions of life – commerce for goods, services, income, and labour – organize themselves on market principles. Fair prices in a dynamic economy, governed only by its individuals, not a government planning power.

* The darkest timeline? Pretty dark, but I shouldn’t be presumptuous. At the least, it would be rude of me.

In real action, the growing concentration of wealth and power. When riches already give you a lot more material freedom than most people, you end up accumulating a lot more power to avoid coercion and push others around.

Being the strongest hand in any negotiation doesn’t make the other person less free, in this view, since bargaining is always man-to-man, not man-to-state.

Yet one of the core philosophers of libertarianism can see the utopianism that’s still in liberal thinking. Robert Nozick wrote that the utopia of liberal philosophy was a society where everyone could live according to the principles and values they believed in, as long as those moralities never tried to snuff out another’s existence.

Believing you're in the darkest timeline is
presumptuous, but useful. It's easy to shrug
off the injustices around you if you think to
yourself, "Well, it could always get worse."

He described it as a free market of societies – these societies could have had only a single person, but they were still societies. A market of moralities – values on which you could shape a society. That was the “Utopia” third of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Adopting or developing a morality often implies that you want to force that morality on others. We typically – in both popular thinking and academic philosophy – understand a moral principle to have universal scope. There’s no statute of limitations or jurisdiction on a moral ought.

But Nozick remembered that at the core of liberalism is that notion of moral freedom. Liberalism isn’t simply about the freedom to do whatever you want. That’s the simplified understanding of it that you find on FOX News, in a more refined form at the Mises or Fraser Institutes.

The moral freedom of liberalism is the real power of the individual in society to develop her values as a person, and test them out in the world. To experiment with values and see if they will really build a better society – one more prosperous, joyful, and caring – than our own situation.

That’s what it means for a utopia to have no content. Its content (so-called) is the space for creativity, development, and experimentation in values.

Yet such a society has a terrible vulnerability – its experimental perspective itself. It can all too easily imply that such a contentless utopia should be open to all comers. That there is literally no value too perverse or twisted or strange to be turned away from the testing grounds of moral evolution.

What does a liberal society do with those whose freely developed values lead them to reject the rights of others to freely develop their values?

If you ask Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, what you have to do is make an enemy of such people. They’ve already made an enemy of you . . . To be continued

Democratic Spirit's Strength, Advocate, 18/10/2015

I finished Fukuyama’s The End of History yesterday. It was an interesting read. As a book with such a major (and horrifying) real-world influence, what’s most striking is the incredible tone of optimism almost to the end. 

Even those final chapters about what could cause a liberal democratic regime to collapse aren’t pessimistic about problems of democracy or capitalism. He wonders if the human urge to dominate through violence will become strong enough again to overthrow the peaceful, sedate society of democracies. 

Something else that you've probably figured out from my
social media is that I support the New Democrats this
election. And even though I may criticize them on some
things, they fit my political beliefs about what a state
should do.

But the way Fukuyama discussed that peaceful, sedate society that democratic institutions forge started me steaming a little. He spoke so naïvely about democracy, as if its ideal was something that just happened once we had the right institutions and basic liberties. Like we didn’t have to work for it, or that our democracy and prosperity wasn’t so fragile.

I’ve lived in Canada over the last decade of Stephen Harper’s leadership. I can’t be naïve about this. 

You can tell from my Twitter feed and some of my posts over the last year that I’m not exactly a Harper fan. This post will clearly explain why. 

If Harper loses, which is likely, this will be my political obituary for him. If he wins, this will be a scream of rage to help give us enough energy to keep fighting him for another four years if need be.

The legacy of the Harper decade in Canada, and Harperism generally, will be given in the history books. But telling the story event by event won’t be enough to tell the whole story. 

What’s He Done?

The events are easy enough. Tax slashing that strains public services to the breaking point. Hobbling the government’s power to learn about its population, so we won’t even know where and how to provide services or what service is necessary. 

I actually supported Nathan Cullen for the NDP's
leadership, because his political history comes from
work with the environmentalist and indigenous justice
movements of northern BC. Social movements are the
real expression of democratic civilization. The people
organize themselves for action to change society.

A view of the law that’s all about punishing criminals, but no justice. The refusal to perceive how our institutions and cultural attitudes make indigenous people suffer.

Cronyist favouritism to the oil industry far beyond its overall importance to the economy. Equally cronyist concessions to Chinese companies in our resource sector. Trade, immigration, and labour policies that force working people into increasing desperation, newcomer and old stock alike.

Treating the population as suckers to be tricked and manipulated with the harshest message and communication controls in the country. The corruption. The concentration of power. The lies.

Master and Servant

A frequent term for a politician is “public servant.” It sounds quaint, but it actually means something. The essential idea of democracy is that leaders are accountable to the people they lead, first, foremost, and finally. 

That the people are the masters of the state is the slow-burning revolution of democracy as it developed in the modern West. Our principles of government revolve around transparency and accountability. 

If you want control of a machine as powerful as the Canadian (or any) state, you have to ask for it. And if you want to maintain it legitimately, you have to keep that deferent attitude toward the people.

States that suppress social movements, as Harper did with
Bill C51, are tamping down the democratic impulse.
Democracy's purest expression is people organizing
themselves to demand a better world. They call
attention to injustices that have been invisible, and
teach people the new ways of perceiving and
understanding the world that will show them how
to repair that injustice.

Harper, the Harper Government™, the whole political philosophy of Harperism is about leaving that deferent attitude behind. The government for Harperism isn’t about serving the people. 

Harperism’s main priority, when taking control of such a government, is doing everything circumstances allow to hobble, shrink, and maim the powers of government to serve almost any need of the people.

At the same time, the Harper government justified what it was doing to the Canadian people. But it used such comprehensive message control that its justifications became propaganda for its own ideology. 

Victorious Ideas

The mainstream media – our television and print/online news media – were, for the most part, allies in this process. 

Not by any direct control of the media from the government. But because the culture of the media’s management class and the culture of the mainstream political class (in both the Conservative and Liberal parties) was shaped by our right-wing think tank networks. 

If you want to know the philosophical reasons why the Harper Government™ does what it does, and so many large media outlets are pretty much okay with it, look to the Fraser and MacDonald-Laurier Institutes. And the National Citizens’ Coalition, of which Harper was president before becoming an electoral politician.

They’re the Canadian leaders among the network of think tanks that spread from Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman’s Mt. Pelerin Society. These anti-socialist advocacy and research groups have spread throughout Europe and North America since the 1950s.

When you understand the world only as disconnected
individuals, you blind yourself to many indirect and
systemic ways to understand the world and how our
responsibilities break down. Friedrich Hayek, co-founder
of the Mt Pelerin Society, meets Ronald Reagan.

They’re the intellectual vanguard of the current mainstream in Western politics, liberalism taken to its most terrifying extreme.

How Freedom Becomes Cruelty

You might find my choice of words strange, since liberal values are at the heart of our democratic freedoms. That’s true. The liberal philosophy that’s the conceptual framework of our democratic institutions and values is fundamentally about freedom.

Individual freedom is when each of us can live our life as we choose, within our physical circumstances. Liberal thinking makes this securing this freedom the essential value and purpose of politics. This idea was genuinely revolutionary.

But that individualism must always be tempered by other concerns: care and respect for others, and virtues like the humility of openness to change your views and attitudes. Otherwise, protecting your individual freedoms and their expressions can sanction terrible cruelty.

It’s the cruelty of the social media bully who refuses to stop harassing women in his interest community (gamers, sci-fi fans, whatever) who want to exercise their freedoms to support art from minority perspectives. His freedom means the freedom to shout you into silence.

It’s the cruelty of the man in Robert Nozick’s radio show story, who refuses to do for everyone else what everyone else in his community has done for him, simply because he chooses not to. His freedom means the freedom to turn his back on everyone else.

It’s the cruelty of a man who hates paying taxes for public health care or housing projects because he doesn’t consider it his problem if someone else is too poor to afford to buy a home or a medical test. His freedom means the freedom to let another rot because he’s indifferent to whether they live or die.

Harper's political philosophy is fundamentally cruel: the
core principle expressed whatever the scale on which
the state acts, is that our freedom means that we have no
obligations to each other.

The core principle of liberal politics is protecting each individual’s freedom. Freedom from tyranny is a constructive position: it clears the social space for people to determine their lives as best they can. But that isn’t enough to build a just society. It’s the bare minimum for a society of devils to live peacefully (and maybe not even that much).

Justice must combine individual freedoms with moral obligations. We must all strive for the strength of character to give of ourselves so that we can live in peace and security. Democratic justice doesn’t only require the bare minimum of restraint to keep devils in peace. It requires us to work toward being better than humanity.

Why I Fight Harper

The core principle of Stephen Harper, the Harper Government™, and Harperism is that cruelty: the cruelty of such indifference to the concerns and needs of others that it becomes hostility.

I don’t want to live in a world that runs on those principles, even though in so many parts of our economy, our politics, and our societies, they’re more and more powerful. In my weakest moments, I think that way myself. But only when I’m at my weakest.

They are the values of weak people. People like Stephen Harper and Doug Ford will tell you that they’re the values of strength: strength to assert myself, to force my freedom on the world, to build a society where only people who have the power to take from others can have anything at all.

Don’t let anyone tell you this is a strong society. It’s the character of a starving jackal killing whatever other desperate creature it can find to last another day.

I want to help build a society of people who have the strength of character to recognize others as their friends and family. People who have the strength of mind to understand the systematic nature of so many of the causes and conditions that bind us together. People who have the strength of will to care for more than just themselves.

That’s real strength.

The Society of the Selfish Bastard, Research Time, 09/10/2015

Of all the right-wing thinkers I’ve read so far for the Utopias project, Fukuyama is the closest I have to a real favourite. His arguments aren't nearly so rigorous as Robert Nozick’s. Unlike Friedrich Hayek’s deep knowledge of economics, his grounding in science is virtually non-existent.

Unlike Ayn Rand, he isn't a megalomaniac who’s inspired some of the most hilariously insufferable politicians in recent American history. 

What do I like about Francis Fukuyama? He's weird. He's an anti-Marx Marxist. A Hegelian revivalist in one of the most anti-intellectual social movements in North America. He thinks capitalism is a foundation of freedom, but The End of History oozes with contempt for capitalists.

Now, I have no idea how credible, in all the academic literature, Fukuyama’s reading of Hegel is here. My Utopias book project is unusual in philosophy writing in that I’m not really concerned whether Fukuyama ever gets Hegel “right” to some minimal degree. I just don't find that kind of argument very interesting, and I don't think many other folks outside the disciplinary academy do either.

Traditional liberal virtues understand Jordan Belfort an
example of humanity's essence. You can see why I have
a problem with traditional liberal virtues. We are better
for trying to be more ethical than a mercenary. 

What's interesting about Fukuyama, and the rest of the Big Four thinkers of new liberalism and new conservatism, is their real influence on American and global politics. More than any of the others, Fukuyama’s thinking reveals serious flaws in the general new conservative vision for society.

I’m mostly thinking about the bourgeois. The word isn’t used too frequently anymore, to the point where I've sometimes wondered whether such a class exists anymore. But they do. We just don’t call them that anymore.

Liberal political philosophy, at least in its traditional form, aims to be the framework by which a society of devils would be peaceful and fair with each other. Those devils are the bourgeois. Fukuyama gives a very good definition of such a person.

He’s the fundamentally selfish man. Liberal political principles are meant to produce harmony from the tensions between people struggling against each other to enrich themselves. Everyone is out for themselves, ready to take from others whenever it will benefit them. The only motivator in their lives is money. Homo Economicus.

So . . . assholes. 

And this vision of humanity is held up in so much of contemporary conservative thought as a model of virtue. Think back to the 2012 Presidential election in America. One of the Romney campaign's main messages was that his ability to run large, profitable companies qualified him as a virtuous political leader.

But Bain Capital's business model was stripping companies for their parts like a stolen Chevy in a chop shop. And it never really occurred to these Republicans that people would find this fact distasteful.

Acceptance of selfishness as a sacred attitude in liberal philosophy shows up in the theoretical end of modern conservatism. Remember Nozick’s radio show allegory. In a community where every member takes a turn each week producing a radio show that everyone listens to, I’d face social pressure to take my turn.

But Nozick says that our liberty is the essential human right. We must always be free to act without constraint, or at least with as few constraints as possible. So I can walk away from my radio show. Nozick even goes farther, claiming that social obligations are violent restraints on our liberty.

Fukuyama won’t stand for this, and returns to Hegel as his successor because he wants to restore some nobility to liberalism. He wants to build a liberal politics that has higher aspirations than constantly acquiring personal wealth. He wants a liberalism that cares just as much for virtue and strength of character as for material success.

So freedom for Fukuyama is more than just the absence of constraints. Authoritarian government oppression isn't terrible only because it restricts your movements and choices. The centrepiece of virtue is our dignity. Democracy is the best political structure for a society because it guards our dignity. 

It Is Accomplished IV: Tying Myself Up in Red Tape, Research Time, 29/09/2015

Continued from last post . . . See, this is what frustrates me about having political conversations sometimes, that a lot of the time, people think I’m one type of person when really I’m another. 

This was clearest in conversations with my old libertarian friends. I would say I’m a person of the left, and they’d talk to me as if I was a doctrinaire, state-centric socialist. But I actually think that kind of government is ridiculous. 

It stifles economic sectors that are more productive and ethical in competition under state ownership. It enables mass corruption, since the state becomes a universal monopoly that people game to advance in society. 

Brazil depicted a central character who was stuck in a
world of bureaucratic conformity, but who dreamed
of being absolutely unique.

The tradition of art from Franz Kafka’s The Castle to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil helped me form a lot of my political sensibility. I saw clear expressions of the economic and political flaws of state socialism when I studied the history of North America and Europe, and clear expressions of state socialism’s ethical flaws in films like Brazil.

So when I say that I think the post-Reagan political order needs some serious structural change if we’re really going to lift millions out of poverty (again) and start repairing our immense ecological harm (for the first time fucking ever), state-centric communism won’t be an answer.

Fukuyama makes that much clear. Mind you, he emphasizes what I think is ridiculous because he believes it and makes it the centrepiece of his conception of economic progress. Fukuyama says that human mastery over nature – his core principle of science’s unity and progress – ensures our prosperity.

This was an important element of Marx’s philosophy too. Science progresses by growing humanity’s mastery over nature, so we produce more and more from the Earth. He just considers communism the best political system for fairly distributing the bounty from our authority and control of nature.

Environmentalism – and ecological thinking more generally – shows us how dunder-headed this way of thinking really is. The last 200 years of humanity understanding “mastery” of nature as our ability to exploit it with increasingly efficient rapaciousness* hasn’t made us more powerful at all. Instead, we’re the engines of Earth’s sixth Great Extinction.

Because humanity-enabled atmospheric changes have
dried out so much of what was once lush land that
huge swaths of forest are burning down and will likely
become desert in decades. I mean, holy fuck.

* My ecological perspective (which you can read about here) is what makes reading about Fukuyama’s virtue of insatiable desire so off-putting. I’m too accustomed to the idea, which should be MORE taken for granted today, that insatiable desire is terribly destructive.

Humans need a government that guards their freedom. Democracy generally does that best. Or at least, it has the best potential. Where I differ from a liberal is how.

Robert Nozick struck such a chord in traditionalist liberal thinking because he situated his philosophy in a long-established liberal premise: people fundamentally need physical security above all else. So the primary (and it turns out, only) legitimate function of the state is to provide physical security: national military defence and domestic police. 

If the politics of my own time, the early 21st century, demonstrate anything on this matter, they at least call it into question. You can’t take seriously mass-scale domestic espionage and the inevitable disaster of anti-terrorist intervention with a military built to fight states, and say there might not be an essential problem with a state monopoly on our physical security.

Folks who worry about state socialism say that a political institution shouldn’t have a monopoly on all industry and employment. This is true. But not enough people worry about the political institutions that hold a monopoly on the use of lethal weapons and the prison system. 

I’m not going full libertarian here, but Latin Americans – even more than the most paranoid North Americans – have lived through generations of military men who think their power over the guns and prisons gives them more right to rule than civil servants and elected officials. 

The scary part for the liberal tradition – from Hobbes to Nozick – is that this conclusion can follow from having made physical security the primary purpose of the state.

Where I fall for an alternative is with social democracy. But it’s a form of social democracy that keeps the state and the military in a very subservient role. It’s my humbly radical utopia. . . . To be continued.

Land of a Thousand Dreams, Research Time, 02/09/2015

I finished reading Frederic Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future last night, which had some fascinating ideas, as you can tell from the last few weeks of me writing about it now and then. I found one confrontation in the book that I was hoping I’d see from the time I started it: Jameson the dedicated left-winger confronts the concept of utopia developed by Robert Nozick, a foundational philosopher of libertarian politics.

Jameson would be reluctant, I
think, to call a right-wing thinker
a utopian, but I think we have to
take that possibility of thought
seriously.

I wrote about Nozick quite a bit when I was reading his most famous and influential book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia last October. The last part has a very curious argument. Essentially, he describes a world where every community is organized according to its own ideal concept. 

Some are pure state communisms, some towns full of mercenary capitalist shysters, some Christian fundamentalists, some feudal states of lords and vassals, some anarchist communes where no money as such even functions. Everyone is free to live in whatever community suits their inclinations. 

Some communities will grow, some will shrink and whither away. The communities that thrive will be the styles of living best suited to human life and desires. That's utopia for Nozick.

It’s not only about the styles of ideal community that would emerge from this long-term self-selection experiment, but the ability to choose what ideal you want your life to embody in the first place. It’s also the seduction of free-market propaganda: only in a totally free market can you be totally free yourself.

Jameson puts his finger on precisely why free-market propaganda is as seductive as it is. There's a small kernel of truth to it. Being able to live as you want, exchanging in trades and contracts with other individuals on equal footing who themselves wouldn’t mess with your life, would actually be a paradise. 

The problem with this ideal is that everyone needs to be on equal footing, and stay there, for this utopia not to implode almost immediately. As it is, the global inequalities of wealth – comparing on individual, community, and national scales – are too massive for exploitation, intimidation, and domination not to be the name of the game. 

But the core of the idea remains a good one. For each person, each personality, each style of life, there will be an ideal society. And we should be able to explore those ideals to know which one we'd want most to live in. 

And in the modern nature of politics, this ability to pick and choose your utopia pragmatically matters more than ever. All people today have multiple identities, or at least are more conscious of their own multifaceted nature than they've ever been.

I think the multiple nature of human identity is another
reason why Rawls' thought experiment of the original
condition can't quite work. Emphasize some aspects of
my identity, and I'll get the fairest shake in one kind of
society. Emphasize some others, and I'll have the best
deal in different kinds of society. Those kinds of
society may not have enough in common to become
real at the same time.

I’m a white cis male working-class well-educated slightly-indebted Anglophone Canadian. This helps determine how I can act in political and social contexts. Socially conservatives today might decry this as a move toward identity politics, but who and what we are is actually the most important political question we can ask.

I can’t network in particular circles of rich folk at country clubs, for example, because I can't afford the cover. I can only take direct part in societies and discussions where the majority language is English, which is an advantage today, but can't get me everywhere. 

I can go safely to places where sexual harassment is frequent because I’m a man, so I'm not sexually harassed to any problematic frequency. I can interact fairly safely with police, and in fact, I know I won't interact with police very often at all, because I'm white and won't be singled out as a minority would. 

Who we are determines the limits of what we can do, and there are many different identities for each of us that condition all those limits. Each of those identities will have a different social and economic context where they’ll work best. 

That’s why the ability to choose your utopia based on what needs action now is so important. No utopia will ever be permanent, even for an individual.

Why Futurism Matters Today IV: Why Imagine At All? Composing, 31/07/2015

Continued from last post . . . The utopian thinkers – whether they use that term or something like it or generally imagine or work toward a vision of a better society – all have a kind of optimism. Minimally, a utopian believes that human nature can be changed for the better. 

This is why transhumanists are usually thought of as utopians. This is why Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a utopian book. It's why philosophy, when it's carried out as a creative art, is an essentially utopian discipline. It’s an activity that tries to change human nature for the better. 

Modern utopia lies in the visions of networked social
movements, as in this moment from a Black Lives
Matter protest in north Toronto this week.

I’ve sometimes heard rhetorical talk about libertarian utopias, usually as a means of dismissing libertarians as cranks and crazies. Utopian visionaries are often considered kind of crazy in a lot of popular discourse, mostly because the term can all too often evoke images of madmen in a desert or a forest calling their followers to build a new society in the wilderness. 

All too often, these kinds of visionaries are would-be prophets whose megalomania has interfered with their planning faculties. Quite regularly, ordinary office workers quit their unfulfilling jobs to build a self-sufficient community in the wilderness, where they'll commune with nature, a utopia that escapes the evils of technology. However, with no scientific or practical knowledge of farming, plumbing, or any basic survival skills, most of these communities end up collapsing. 

Yet Henri Bergson took seriously the concept of prophesy as a progressive force for humanity and human nature. An engagement with his Two Sources of Morality and Religion will be a centrepiece of the Utopias manuscript. 

The last third of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia describes a utopian community where everyone is free or organize along their own vision of perfection a society of themselves and whoever agrees with that vision. He calls freedom to choose and experiment with different ways of life to see what works and what doesn’t is a large-scale argument for the libertarian way of life. If freedom to choose is paradise, then restricting that freedom is to fall.

This give and take between a movement pushing for social progress and the ethical necessity of freedom is a significant aspect of modern politics. You can see it in the social media discussions that define so much of the politics of our era. On one side, you have the social justice warriors, whose campaigns call attention to dangerous, violent, and vile inequities of class, gender, and race in our society, and push for material change in our institutions and in our cultures and minds to address those inequities in profound ways. 

As with every discussion of politics lately, it comes
back again to Donald Trump.

On the other side,* you have the conservatives who wish to preserve their freedom to think in the racist, sexist, and uncritically capitalistic ways that are simultaneously embodied in the greasy jackassery of both Donald Trump and Travis Kalanick.

* Where I am manifestly not, as you can probably tell by now.

The libertarian critique of modern movement-based progressivism is that they accuse the social justice warrior of wishing to use the state to force their ideas on everyone with or without consent or deliberation. 

This manifestly isn’t true, because the essential framework of social movement activism is about changing minds. You expose people to different lives and experiences, talk with them about the systematic causes of the injustices in those experiences, and build solidarity to change the destructive relationships we’re all caught in. 

Some of those exposures are confrontational, but movement politics ultimately has to understand that every encounter is an opportunity for education, for changing minds.

But progressive politics is always going to be subject to this fear of the libertarians until we can acknowledge that, in figures like Marinetti and Italian Futurism most intensely and purely, the engine of progress is the tyranny of the state crushing all resistance to the new program of a perfect society. That’s what my Utopias project is all about.

Ultimately, I think my conclusion will be that progressive politics can only avoid the hypocrisy of tyranny and violence when it learns what Hayek and his new liberal followers get right: avoid the state and top-down enforcement of ideology as an engine of the social progress we want. 

My libertarian friend G once asked me why I believed that it was possible to improve humanity. “Don’t you believe in human nature?” he asked. I wanted to know what he meant, and he told me that humans were essentially self-interested, egotistical creatures who cared only about themselves and would be inherently violent to each other.

That was the root of our disagreement. I believe that people can change, and change for the better, if they open their minds to the possibility of difference and a systematic view of the world. That’s why I still write philosophy. It’s the tradition of developing new concepts, and those concepts can, conversation by conversation, change the world.

All Humanity Is One Process II: Deliver Me Into This Will, Jamming, 06/07/2015

Continued from Friday . . . When you read Hayek’s ideas, especially the popularly-aimed works like Road to Serfdom that were his main vehicles of direct political influence on people’s minds, you find some interesting paradoxes.* The most interesting one, given the Greek referendum’s uprising against the impositions of austerity, is the tension of individualism and market forces.

At some point, when you can't take it anymore, you just
have to say no.

* I don't like to say contradictions, because I don’t want to sound too Hegelian or Marxist. Talk of contradiction in philosophical discussions of economic and political issues can trap you analyzing a problem as the collision of opposites, and real problems are usually more complex than that.

New liberalism is an individualist doctrine, to its core and essence. It’s the economic and political philosophy that's been promoted through the think tanks who grew from Friedrich Hayek’s first cadre of intellectual activists in the Mt. Pelerin Society. They were fervent anti-communists who understood themselves as fighting social movements around the world and in their own countries, which would push society in totalitarian directions.

Those movements, the push down the slippery slope toward communist totalitarianism, included any style of politics that organized people as collectives, or in which the government controlled an industry either through outright nationalization or a regulatory regime. Collective politics included any union movement. 

Robert Nozick would pick this up in some of his arguments surrounding Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The bond of an employment contract is between two equal people, the employer and the employee. Unions would overpower the employer in that contract. This, however, ignores the material fact that an employer is rarely an equal to each of his workers, especially if they employer is a large, complex corporation with decentralized and bureaucratic authority structures over its human resources concerns.

That workers’ unions and government regulations are the start of a process of building totalitarian politics sounds absolutely ridiculous to write, like some piece of hyperbole that you laugh at when Michael Palin says it in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or when Dave Foley delivers his classic “Poor Little Russia!” monologue on Kids in the Hall. But Hayek and the others who founded his think tank network lived in an era when totalitarianism was an ordinary political option.

We think of Dave Foley's insane rant about Russia
circa 1991 as a sample of absurd insanity, but fear
of a violent state forcing collective governance on
its entire population was a genuine fear for a long
time, and that fear shaped our modern politics.

Hayek was at the forefront of the new liberal political movement, where all forms of freedom were individual freedom from government control or similar subsumption into a collective. Subsuming all individuality into the development of a collective identity was a vision that many people understood as human progress.

Yet Hayek acknowledged that individuality was dwarfed by forces beyond its control. These weren't the cultural unity of a collectivizing politics, but the impersonal forces of economics. No matter what individual governments did, the tension of supply and demand, playing out among all goods and services, its medium the value of a country's currency itself, were forces to which an individual could only submit.

In Road to Serfdom, Hayek describes how an economic depression will likely follow the government-amped increase in manufacturing during the Second World War. Even though nearly three decades of domestic manufacturing booms followed the war, Hayek said these could not last forever, and some economic slowdown would have to happen simply because a permanent war footing is impossible to maintain. Wages would fall, industries would shutter, and many people would lose their jobs. The population would be in poverty until the cost of goods adjusted again to what people could afford to buy.

What was his solution to this looming economic disaster, the slow stagnation of the Dollarama economy? Deal with it. You can't control economic forces, not as a person and not as a government. Just shut up and starve, because life is hard and unfair.

Filippo Marinetti dreamed that the global-scale forces of an industrializing world would dwarf individuality. He embraced that transformation of humanity from conceiving of themselves as individuals to become parts of a larger machine of the nation. He saw global prosperity in the infinite expansion of military might around the world, a planet whose rule was colonialism and war.

The ideologies that shape our world originated in the global battle for and against state totalitarianism. As we struggle to escape subjugation to the powerful and the impersonal, we yearn for a perfect society where these oppressive forces don't exist. Yet we also yearn for an end to the struggle, even if that end comes in giving yourself over to the forces and institutions that would crush you. At least then, you’re part of something.

That’s what my Utopias project is basically all about. . . . To be continued.

Why People Wear Masks, Jamming, 04/12/2014

I find it strangely fitting that Phil Sandifer’s chapter on the legendary V for Vendetta in his Last War in Albion project on the British Invasion of the American comics industry dropped this Tuesday. V for Vendetta is a work that created the most notable imagery of protest in our era, the Guy Fawkes mask that conceals your identity so you can speak your mind freely. Phil’s country, the United States of America, is having yet another revolutionary moment of its own, not only through the continuing protests and public outrage against the shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and the failure to indict the police officer who shot him to have even a public trial. 

Wednesday saw a New York grand jury decline to bring any charges against police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who personally choked a middle-aged black man named Eric Garner to death on a sidewalk where he and several other officers attempted to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes. Unlike the sketchy and mutually contradictory eyewitness accounts of Brown’s murder, a witness named Ramsey Orta, Garner’s friend, actually filmed the entire incident on his phone. It’s right here.

The civil unrest that has understandably followed the major events of the Brown case, and has already arisen over Garner’s murder, expresses the rage that many Americans rightfully feel against a system that is openly prejudiced against a significantly large and increasingly vocal minority. I’m glad that some resistance to the racial injustices in Western societies are getting some popular press through social media, thanks to campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter and #CrimingWhileWhite.

And the intellectual left in online circles rightly identifies that there are systemic causes that need to be changed. One of the bravest articles on the post-Ferguson landscape of thought about racial politics was a piece published in Jacobin Magazine a few days before the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted. Mariame Koba asked her readers to “indict the system.” 

Understanding the systemic causes of institutionalized racism and its material injustices is very difficult for humanity to do. Humans typically understand direct causation, when someone physically acts. And we typically understand indirect causation, when an action one person takes causes someone else to act in a particular way. 

Eric Garner seems to have been a very nice man.
Nonetheless, because he was killed by police officers,
many people speak very arrogantly on the internet as if
he was a criminal to deserved to be choked to death. Not
only is this callous and cruel, but it voices a terrifying
underlying presumption: that if a police officer kills you,
then it was right that you were killed.

But systemic causation is literally causation without agency, the causation of conditioning, tendencies, and likelihoods of what actions at the individual level will emerge from a complex set of relations. This is why it’s so difficult for so many people, like the Chief Justice of the United States' Supreme Court, to notice racism without racists. We can easily understand what it means for an individual to hold racist beliefs and treat people in discriminatorily violent ways. 

Yet it’s hard for us to assign moral blame and shame to, for example, an individual white police officer who has best friends who are Hispanic, friendly neighbours who are Arab-American, and an African-American wife, but who also stops and frisks any black or Latino male walking down the street who’s lost some weight lately and is wearing old pants that are slipping. Because he’s part of an institution that has trained him in certain modes of behaviour, he himself isn’t a racist, but still behaves in racist ways because of his institutional function and training. 

That's why indictments and criminal justice procedures centred on punishment aren't even really the correct means to fight the social problems we face today. Identifying the responsible party for a specific wrong act and punishing them works fine for incidents of direct and indirect causation. But the true triggerman in cases of racist police violence is the institutional system itself. Where causation is systematic, the instantiation at the individual scale is a matter of chance. Darren Wilson happened to see Michael Brown one day carrying a fistful of shoplifted cigarillos. That this was the act was bad luck. That there would be an act eventually was inevitable. 

The only way to repair wrongs that occur at the systemic level is to change the actual system. This isn't a matter of retribution and punishment, but of large-scale reform, repair, and social and institutional transformation. Systematic injustice requires not retributive, but reparative justice.

That this film and this novel should turn into Alan Moore's
most visible legacy in the human race speaks to its
incredible power and its core lesson. That even if we must
be anonymous to do it, we must not let our leaders and
institutions believe that they control society simply
because of their role in institutions. The police work for
us, and they ultimately must take our orders, not we theirs.

The dangerous part of Western institutional systems in this case is that we give a portion of our population the power of the legitimate use of violence against all other citizens and regular access to many kinds of weaponry. Too many of us trust these people instinctively, even though such trustworthiness should never be taken for granted. My old friend Sheena, a journalist with Sun Media, tweeted an article about the Pantaleo non-indictment which had a disturbing comment section, even by the standard of internet comment threads, that terribly unnerved her.

Those commenters illustrated what I think is a terrible tendency of thought. The most important common element that I saw among all the commenters was universal trust in the judgment of police officers. If a police officer was attacking you, then you did something wrong, because police officers only attack criminals. The default attitude of these commenters is to trust without criticism or a second thought the group of people who are institutionally empowered to do armed violence to the populace.

I found the same frustration reading Robert Nozick, if for an entirely different reason. He follows a tradition in Anglo-American political philosophy of reasoning through a society’s essential political relations in the abstract argument of a social contract thought experiment. And because the abstract terms of his argument define security through a monopoly on protective services as the only legitimate function of the state, the police and the military become the only legitimate state functionaries.

Because Nozick’s work lies at the foundation of modern libertarianism, these principled individualists who stand against government violence interfering with personal liberty see more violence in a state health insurance plan or environmental regulations than in battalions of armed civil servants with the power to kill and imprison citizens with regular impunity and, at best, personal inconvenience. Libertarians should be the natural enemies of state-sanctioned violence, but I’ve met too many who show the same blind trust in the police as the poor fools I linked above.

We’ve institutionalized both racist norms and a capacity for unchecked violence in the institutional authorities we invest with the power of violence. This is a recipe for disaster and I’m glad that, as a society, we’re coming to clear grips with that. Too bad it took generations of disasters.

Mates of State of Nature I: Linking Concepts, Composing, 20/10/2014

I’ve followed up my reading of Robert Nozick with a little research into the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So I thought, with this short entry, I’d discuss some of my composition methods as I feel around the concepts that will motivate the third third of my Utopias manuscript. 

Bear in mind, this is an extremely amorphous document right now. It consists entirely of a notebook full of, well, notes, my past blog entries discussing it, a word processing file with a rough breakdown of the chapters and most of the component arguments of the first two thirds, and stacks of mostly primary research material on my own physical shelves and in electronic formats. I probably won’t have a manuscript for a few years, which is a reasonable thing to say for a non-fiction philosophical manuscript of this sort.

So here is how I’m structuring my research, at least insofar as it reflects how I’ll plot the argument. Utopias is a work of philosophy, which I consider different from a work on philosophy. Most philosophical books that are produced today, and really most philosophical books that have been produced for some time, are books on philosophy. Books on philosophy examine and critique key arguments and texts of a particular figure or movement in the history of philosophy or a contemporary sub-discipline. You could consider it, though it doesn’t isomorphically map onto, secondary material.

Then there are books of philosophy, creative works which vary in scope and ambition. Most books of philosophy would examine and venture some contribution to an ongoing debate in contemporary professional literature in a particular sub-discipline. I distinguish these from debates over historical figures and movements, because those are largely interpretive, trying to divine a clear right answer about what movement X or thinker Y was all about.* A book of philosophy has some ambition to progress behind it. If the aim of a book on philosophy is improving our understanding of the past, a book of philosophy has the aim of creating future knowledge. 

Part of what I admire about Deleuze is the
ambition with which he always approached his
writing. He never settled for an ordinary work.

* The pressure to carve a niche for oneself in a historical specialty in academic philosophy results in some conceptual gymnastics that I’m not entirely sure are all the productive. The first example that comes to my mind is Daniel Smith’s strange reading of Gilles Deleuze as a closet Kantian. Although there are elements of Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly regarding the importance of conditions over causes traditionally conceived, that make such a reading sensible, I’m just not sure what to do with it. Deleuze’s thought is ground-breaking and foundational on its own; saddling him with a label like that distorts the traditional short-hand of the description ‘Kantian’ and, in parallel, eliding the originality of Deleuze’s corpus to trivialize it.

The scope of a book of philosophy is a matter of its ambition. With nothing to lose, I decided to craft a very ambitious text with Utopias. It was always going to be an ambitious project, even under my original plans of writing it from a university post. Working outside that institution, I’ll be free to experiment with my writing. Hence this length prelude to a short idea.

I started thinking about the concept of the social contract when I saw what Robert Nozick did with it in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I came to Nozick in the first place once I understood that the denouement to my own Utopias would involve an engagement with libertarian philosophy, and Nozick’s work was philosophically the most intense and rigorous treatment of the core ideas. If I was going to go to any classical source for reading after Nozick, it should be John Locke, whose work I have on my shelves. Nozick explicitly identifies all the organizing principles of his own conception of the state of nature in Locke’s work. 

But instead, I’m going to Rousseau, particularly Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Rousseau’s political philosophy, as expressed in a recent translation of an old course outline he produced on the subject for a 1959 class. This early text understands Rousseau’s conception of the state of nature very differently than typical interpretations do (more on that tomorrow). 

Deleuze’s thinking about the key concept underlying the purpose and implications of social contract theory helps undercut the more conventional way Nozick uses it, as an abstract counterfactual to illustrate a particular standard of historical justice and political right. So I go to Deleuze-on-Rousseau after reading Nozick to understand one possible element of the skeleton of the argument. 

The concepts themselves guide me through the research. More conventional uses of philosophical research, like using books and articles on philosophy to bulk up my accounts of the primary thinkers involved in my arguments, are for later in the research process. It makes most sense to go to these smaller works to supply the detail work after the broader points are established. 

I haven’t at all decided what role social contract theory would play in the argument of Utopias, so it’s only when I’m sure exactly how I’ll use the concept, which models of it will dominate my own argument, and how it relates to other elements in the plot, that I’ll explore those supplementary works for context. If I start on that route now, I’ll find myself distracted from the central goal early in a project of figuring out the basic structure of the argument itself. To Be Continued . . .

Why a State II: Institutionalizing Violence and Exclusion, Not Taxation, Research Time, 17/10/2014

Hail the conquering despot and his institutions of
social control!

Continued from last post . . . It’s strange for me to admit it, but in a sense, I do agree with Nozick. The nation-state as it emerged from the political movements and contexts of modern Europe is a profoundly unjust institution. They were established in the first place through the organized violence of military force crushing the free cities that were run on principles more akin to network politics. 

After the self-organizing networks were crushed by increasingly powerful state armies, which, thanks to the influx of colonialist cash, expanded into biopolitical aspects of people’s lives that government had never touched before, the state became taken for granted as the only possible means of a people’s governance. 

All the philosophical arguments for the legitimacy of the state that arose during and after this period of the military centralization of political power (such as Robert Filmer’s divine right of kings, Thomas Hobbes’ social contract of the sovereign, John Locke’s social contract of free labourers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract constitutive of the general will, Georg Hegel’s conception of the state as embodying reason itself) all amount to just-so stories that overwrite and obscure the reality of this violent history. 

Robert Nozick offers several more just-so stories. The Demoktesis chapter describes a couple of them. And he openly admits that they serve a rhetorical philosophical purpose: demonstrating, though multiple examples, that there is no possible way that a state could come about with powers beyond his minimal level that does not employ violence, coercion, or slavery. 

Nozick continually talks about the violence inherent in the structure of the contemporary nation-state. But the violence he discusses is the violence, for example, of garnishing wages for taxation, conceiving of it as indirectly enslaving a person to the government through co-opting the hours he works for purposes to which he hasn’t consented. It’s the violence, for another example, of using a taxation regime to coerce a person to support social welfare or infrastructure programs that he personally doesn’t support. 

Over the last few months on the blog, I’ve discussed some of the classical writers in the anarchist tradition, and a couple who are allied to that tradition: Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Antonio Gramsci, Colin Ward. All of their opposition to the state as an institution was based in its historical and continual use as a violent power. For all the good that police and law enforcement agencies can do in the context of sex crimes, fraud, and traffic control, the police still have powers like New York’s Stop-and-Frisk laws, and can descend on towns Ferguson with the military equipment of a small country and respond to protests against police power with massive, community-shattering force.

The police are not always rationally justified in their actions,
even though a strong tradition in social contract theory
considers them essential to maintaining the security of
their society.

Nozick is a different beast than these anarchists in his opposition to the state, and how he understands the roots of a state’s justice. His early chapters tell a just-so story about the emergence of state infrastructure for maintaining security of person and property and punishing offenders of people’s liberty through the growth and consolidation of protection associations into a single dominant such organization for an entire territory. Because he can tell a story of such a state emerging from non-coerced decisions of free people, he believes that it justifies such a state.

Yet such a story, abstract as it is from the circumstances of real politics and history, justifies the state only in terms of its security and military apparatus because these institutions’ purpose is to protect the citizens from internal and external dangers. For Nozick, only the protective functions of a state are legitimate because they’re the only functions that can emerge from non-coerced contracts among free people. 

The police and military are, in real life, the most dangerous institutions a state can have. It's a different situation here where I live in Canada, because our armed forces and police have a strong culture of deference to civilian authority. In places like Latin America, southeast Asia, or Turkey, for example, the public tend to have a much more skeptical attitude of the armed forces, since violent military coups are in the living memory of most adults. 

Military and police are organizations of armed people marching among the citizenry. Far from being self-evidently legitimate, they must be kept on the tightest leash possible because their powers are the most directly violent and destructive to citizens of any state institution, at least potentially. Abstracting from real history into the abstract retro-historical justification of the state of nature model of philosophy blinds Nozick to what, today, is a self-evident truth.