Feeding Off Its Own Destruction, Research Time, 19/03/2018

I live in Toronto. It’s a vibrant economy and culture, but there’s plenty of simmering conflict here. The tech, finance, and film/tv industry are the major drivers of the city’s economy, but there are plenty of people left behind.

Rent control and housing affordability is a crushing pressure on people all over the city. There’s pressure on the middle classes. People now able to afford a condo’s mortgage are locked out of a townhouse market with not enough supply, and a detached home market whose value has ballooned ridiculously.

I have plenty of bias – my New Democrat affiliation is in my Twitter
bio. What amazed me was, when my part association posted this
image, how quickly we got our first racist comment about Muslims.
Far from our last, too. The real irony is that, the more shit-posters
we get on this image – and the comment thread is ridiculously long
without my having to do a thing – the more visible Facebook's
algorithm will make it in news feeds all over the networks of the
commenters.

There’s pressure on the lower classes. High demand entices building owners and property managers to raise rents beyond what many in already run-down buildings can afford. Elected political leaders in city and provincial offices are no longer interested in subsidizing low-income housing directly, which pushes more disadvantaged people out of housing and into cars or parking garages with few security cameras.

Both Ford brothers – alive and dead – have given lip service to affordable housing. Former mayor Rob would visit the city’s public housing to highlight its unsavoury character.

For the most part, the Ford brother who has a good chance of becoming Ontario’s next premier has taken a Not-In-My-Neighbourhood attitude toward disadvantaged people.
• • •
Toronto’s housing pressure is a function of a very basic process of capitalism, one Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in Anti-Œdipus. It’s a social / economic system that’s remarkably durable, which is strange.

There have been plenty of economic crises in capitalism – 47 major recessions in the history of the United States alone. The system was unstable enough that a union activist turned social scientist could write an analysis of capitalist economics describing it as a system heading inevitably for self-destruction.

The contemporary left doesn’t take Marx’s ideas at face value anymore. At least the intelligent ones don’t. Anti-Œdipus was another generation’s updating the basic idea of Capital to unexpected, contingent, new conditions.

Parkdale has been a source of artistic creativity in Toronto for a while,
and a big part of that was how many affordable – if kind of scuzzy –
homes were available in the region. It's been a poor neighbourhood
for a while, which means artists and new Canadians often end up
living here. The Tibean and Roma communities have made serious
impacts here for a while. But they're also squeezed by condo
developers putting pressure on property owners to seek bigger
profits. All those poor and weird people who made the place
interesting and drew people to the area will have to leave so the
boring people with fat wallets can live in this interesting place.

Capitalism’s promise is prosperity and freedom – growth of the whole economy is good for everyone.* But capitalist economic systems drive these cycles of expansion and collapse. Usually, a key commodity’s value is inflated beyond sustainable price ranges by wider economic conditions, and there’s a lot of direct and collateral financial damage in the crash.

* As long as the size of some people’s shares of the pie grows at a greater rate than the size of the pie. That’s how an oligarch’s class is created.
• • •
Toronto’s high-pressure real estate market is one of those systems squeezed by affordability crunches. Profiteering people and organizations – property owners, investors in new condo developments – build these massive structures for middle class and professional class renters and homeowners.

Protests of these developments happen when people worry that they’ll be squeezed out of their homes – squeezed out of any homes at all – by the pressure of ubiquitous development that leaves them behind. That’s the injustice of property development – growing supply of middle class housing can stabilize the pressurized prices, but force those of more modest means away.

Gentrification’s irony. We all know it. A neighbourhood is filled with people of modest means who are all somehow marginalized from the mainstream. Working class. Artists. New immigrants. Marginalized people, whether by ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or some other racial or caste marker. Home of the minorities of a society.

Even the far-right nutters who think Trudeau and Bill Morneau are
communists just help drive our messaging to more people. Don't
tell them that. Hell, even if you do, they'll probably just keep trying
to start flame wars to own us socialists and libtards. Resentment and
cruelty seem to be the only things keeping North America's
conservative coalitions together these days.

Minorities in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception. People whose existence, identity, way of life separates them from the mainstream, others them. Their central example was Franz Kafka – a Czech man working and writing in German; an intellectual, curious, deeply spiritual Jew living in a Christian, rather anti-Semitic culture. It often puts them at a disadvantage.

Contemporary Toronto has its equivalents. Refugees from all over the world live in the Toronto area, as well as immigrants who come to Canada having to rebuild their entire lives. They’re the disadvantaged of our economic system, where we most value people who are already rich.

Yet a culture of entirely rich people is boring. It’s dull. It’s creatively dead. All this class knows how to do is commodify – invest for a higher return. But if you need sources outside your own class to invest in, you need to find difference-makers – new trends, new businesses, new ideas.

The minorities of our societies are the creative classes – they’re already mixing and realigning cultural codes and traditions in their own identities as they adapt to their new social worlds. Capitalism as a social system needs such people – hustlers, artists, new people – because the elite of a capitalist system don’t have the capacity to think anymore.

The margins of a society bring the energy to the next growth and creative process in a capitalist economy. Yet the very success of those processes force marginalized people out of a society, since the prosperity of an unrestrained capitalist system tends to cluster in oligarchical shapes.

Oligarchs hate those filthy poor people, and they aren’t smart of worldly enough to know how profoundly they depend on them.

Reaching for Respectability, Jamming, 08/02/2018

Sociology and I have an interesting relationship. Aside from the fact that two of my oldest friends are a husband-and-wife sociologist team, I’ve relied on sociological studies for a good number of empirical sources in my own work.

Sociological theory is also a pretty fertile ground for philosophical creativity too. Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, Randall Collins, Claude Lévi-Strauss are just a few sociological theorists who have been influential in philosophical circles.* I’ve gone to the work of these and other folks for my own research.

One of those artistically-rendered maps of the internet, allegedly
composed from every individual IP address.

* And departments, which overlap far too often.

Niklas Luhmann gets listed as a sociologist and social theorist – grappling with the concepts of his systems theory of communication and meaning takes up most of a chapter of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

Jürgen Habermas’ communicative action theories has influenced huge swaths of sociological and human rights theory. Bruno Latour is a philosopher whose actor-network ontology of social relations was so influential that he’s taught as if he were a sociologist.

I’m no stranger to this discipline. It’s my main transdisciplinary direction when I take a flight.

But some sociologists are dangerous. They’re shunned. Or at least considered creative thinkers whose strange directions were never worth following empirically. Gabriel Tarde seems to be one of them.

The essay about him in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage is pretty fascinating. Éric Alliez wrote it, and I’ve loved his essays on Deleuze whenever I’ve come across them. I’d describe his writing style as the most artful lack of restraint. So here’s the short version of what Deleuze saw in Gabriel Tarde.

An implicit theme of this book is to show the depth of Deleuze’s debt to Gottfried Leibniz as a thinker – aside from the essay on Leibniz himself, there’s Wronski and Tarde, identified as Leibnizian thinkers in their own spheres.

So when Deleuze was hunting for concepts of existence as fundamentally heterogeneous, he stalks through a shadowy Leibnizian tradition. What made Tarde’s ideas Leibnizian?

Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde developed a model of sociological thinking that preserved psychological dimensions of human life at that macro level. I’ve just terrified every sociologist in the room.

The first thing about sociology you learn – seems to be in all the introductory courses – is that its founding principle was that the social was its own set of causes. The social was a level of existence with its own governing laws and principles that could never reduce to psychology.

It almost sounds like sociology is justifying its existence – which was actually the founding process of sociology.

Alliez explained this in his essay – Tarde and Émile Durkheim were contemporaries. Tarde was a marginal figure, who made his name developing criminology. That work eventually got him appointed to a professorship at the Collège de France, the platform for his critiques of Durkheim.

Durkheim was at the centre of important intellectual networks in Europe – building the first French university department of sociology at University of Bordeaux, then joining the Sorbonne.

That institutional role as the leader of sociology’s installation in the French research university saw Durkheim in a curious intellectual pressure. Sociology was caught between a firm division – too empirical and mathematical for the humanities, too humanistic for the sciences.

Durkheim, in laying out the core principles of sociology, did so to make sure it would be recognized as a science. He worked to build a consensus in the French academic world for the reality of the social as a plane of existence with its own rules and composition processes.

In this context, Tarde’s theory was very dangerous – especially given the awful 19th century European tendency to see all causal connection as reduction. Tarde’s theory was that built the social and all its processes emerge from the collision of huge numbers of individuals.

Today, we understand that theory as emergence. But 19th century thinkers didn’t understand emergence at all – they only understood reduction. So if one process comes from another, you don’t need to understand the resulting process in itself – only its components.

That attitude would have led people to think that the social was unreal because it was a product of individual interactions. So Durkheim suppressed it.

Yet Tarde – and that underground lineage of thinkers that Deleuze drew so much from – seem to have won out. Our universe is heterogeneous, a world of changes, where was emerges can be radically different from what was.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives I: Change Must Come, Research Time, 22/01/2018

One of my favourite images in Gilles Deleuze’s work is that of the detective. By the end of his life, writing What Is Philosophy?, he’d given such images a different name – conceptual personae.

A conceptual persona is a style of thinking, but understood as the model for the thinker herself to follow. It's the shape you settle into as you fly along the narrative, making it up as you go along – in this particular case – thinking as a detective.

Seeing through chaos. Returning to old models, but offering new
paths to explore. Gilles Deleuze called philosophy catching hold of
chaos in thought. But would an empiricist philosophical practice be
able to catch hold of chaos in the physical world of everyday life,
make a new kind of sense out of what was only confusing,
disorienting, and mysterious before?

Detective philosophers are empiricists – their primary questions are about understanding, in Deleuze’s words, “what happened.” Such an empiricism brings philosophical thinking – whose peculiar styles Deleuze describes as "catching hold of chaos" – with cultural theory and the social sciences.

I think that's a great idea. Philosophical thinking is about the careful creation of new concepts, the analysis of their components, and their relationships with each other. Bringing that conceptual engineering to the empirical research programs of cultural studies and the many branches of sociology can create a powerful new research program – even a revolutionary way of thinking.

Naturally, there are a lot of factors in the way of such a development. One is that it’s – in Deleuze’s words – a minoritarian intellectual movement. It’s a rebellion against the mainstream institutional norms of scholarship – disciplines fragment, but rarely unite.

Academia is an institution whose growth engine is schism, division, breaks, fragmentation into isolated silos of discourse. Create a new journal with an even narrower research constituency. Start creating new departments and hire more contingent adjunct professors to teach their courses.

Doesn’t matter that fewer universities can subscribe to all those new journals, since no journal ever lowers its subscription price in this supply-crowded market. Doesn't matter that new departments will compete with each other and older disciplines for limited pools of research, teaching funding, and student pools. Doesn’t matter that the system is perverse and devouring itself.

Academia needs people to open paths of rebellion and revolution against its vicious incentives. We have a piece going up at SERRC tomorrow discussing this exact need to demolish the most destructive institutional habits of humanities scholarship. So I have this on the mind.

Our images of detectives in popular culture have plenty of
complications – colonialist, racist, sexist, classist. The
implications are everywhere – the detective is, after all, a
police officer. The endpoint of a detective narrative is when
someone goes to prison. The question is how to become a
detective in your thinking that opens a liberatory path.

But I’ve been thinking recently that such a radical change is necessary. Consider this notion. I describe to a friend the idea to combine philosophical conceptual and critical techniques with the historical and sociological methods of cultural studies and the different social sciences.

My friend’s reaction: “That sounds like an amazing inter-disciplinary field!” We apply for research grants, build up a few major methodological works and studies, set up a few offices, start a journal, develop a graduate (and then an undergraduate) curriculum. We’ve ended up creating our own fragmented silo of a narrow discipline.

This is the institutional tragedy of what’s typically called interdisciplinary studies. You first approach the problem wanting a vector that Deleuze and Félix Guattari called trans-disciplinary – a new direction of thinking, writing, and research that explores entirely new territory with an entirely new structure than the academy.

You ended up with another academic department. Shit. It makes you think you might have to leave the university institutions behind to have any real success with these creative new directions. Or at least head out to its limits while still being able to access some of its funding and office space.*

* Or at least office supplies.

What would such a new kind of empiricist philosophy look like? Well, I can start with a brief thought about the institutions. Unfortunately, that thought is that I have no idea what those institutions would look like at all.

Such a research program would have to rely largely on universities for funding. Even if funding could be taken care of independently, the program would still need existing bodies of actual research. There would probably be a lot of online organizing among participants, making it potentially a global enterprise.

But that’s all I’ve got right now. So what would the actual research and writing practice be?

Getting Old and Feeling Surly, Research Time, 25/11/2017

Right now, I’m working on a short article for the Reply Collective. If I’m going to solicit contributors as Digital Editor, I may as well contribute some content myself. Especially since I’ve been a regular contributor since the place started up.

Recently, we published two articles that pick up a conversation which began last summer. I mean, there was a pretty big gap between instalments, but the conversation was pretty linear. It’s a discussion of John Searle’s theories of human rights.

John Searle's aggressive, unsubtle style of writing
turned out to be very influential throughout
analytic philosophy during the 1980s, and continues
to shape the approach of many philosophers in North
America. I consider that a damn shame, because
Searle first became prominent as one of the thinkers
bringing metaphysical and ontological issues back
into the analytic tradition.

I’m not going to link every single one individually, but you can start from the most recent two, by Gregory Lobo and J Angelo Corlett. You can also look through Raimo Tuomela’s recent piece, because the whole chain started from a review of his book Social Ontology, that SERRC published last year.

That’s what I love about this platform.

Anyway, there are some ideas in this debate that are good food for thought in my own research on utopian drives and concepts in contemporary ideologies. Now that I had the chance to engage with the exchange a little more closely, I could see some interesting convergences with my own work.

So this week, I’m drafting a more formally-written contribution to the discussion. And I’m going to sort out some of the ideas in it here.

Here’s what I latched onto in the discussion. The ideas and concepts floating around make for good elements in a non-reductive materialist conception of how human society works. Let me lay that out for you.

Materialist – Generally,* you don't think any supernatural substance or being is needed to explain things like life, consciousness, human intelligence, or the conditions of the universe’s existence (questions like, ‘What caused the beginning of the universe?’).

* And I’m talking extremely generally.

Non-reductive – You don’t think being a materialist about reality means you have to explain away some aspect of human experience, ability, spirituality, or identity.

As I looked into Searle's late-period social-political thinking, I saw what was in many ways kind of an inadequate system. A few years after Searle’s first book on this project, The Construction of Social Reality, Neil Gross wrote a pretty solid essay showing how wrong-headed the project was because of what it ignored.

I think Gross’ conclusion can apply to the later Searle material that focusses more directly on questions of human rights as well. It’s because Searle’s major creative philosophical works all fit together as a continuous development of a single grand theory.

The return of metaphysics to analytic philosophy had the potential
to create beautifully weird and creative ways of thinking and
writing in that tradition. Instead, such  fantastically strange thinkers
as Saul Kripke and David Lewis became outliers in an increasingly
stagnant stylistic field.

The concepts he developed during his first creative works carrying forward John Austin’s analyses of speech acts were a foundation for his arguments about the nature of mind and intentionality, how people direct their action in the world.

The decades he spent developing those theories laid a groundwork for his account of the social world as shaped by collective and shared intentions. The conception of shared intentions as the atoms of society became the basis for his theory of human rights.

Here are the problems I have with this, which Gross helped me put a finger on.

Problem one – Searle’s insularity. Remember, Searle developed all this theoretical machinery largely as building blocks from his own older work. He’d established his theoretical system, and like the old system-builders, he expanded those concepts and theories to apply to new areas, eventually to give an account of all human phenomena.

So he didn’t think he had an incentive to read the works of other authors as equals. In response to critics – well-versed in social and sociological theory – who said Searle’s ideas didn’t go much beyond what Emile Durkheim developed a century ago, Searle said that he didn’t really read much of Durkheim.

Why? Because what little he’d read of Durkheim convinced him that one of the founders of the entire discipline of sociology didn’t make much sense. No attempt to understand Durkheim’s very different intellectual world or priorities. No attempt to understand why he wrote the way he did. Because Durkheim didn’t write like a doctrinaire analytic philosopher, he didn’t make sense. That’s it.

Which brings me to problem two – Searle’s arrogance and hypocrisy. Searle is infamous for having convinced pretty much everyone in analytic philosophy that everything influenced by Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, or any other philosopher from continental Europe’s traditions is empty charlatanism.

Because those ideas, even though they were sometimes
written in very strange ways, turned out to be very
useful to the social sciences. It was almost as if the
hermeneutic and post/structuralist theories were
philosophies of the social sciences, waiting for the
social scientists to catch up a bit. Just a thought.

The obvious arrogance is in the conclusion that, because I don’t understand something, it’s nonsense. In his exchange with Jacques Derrida, they both talked past each other to epic intensities.

Searle was convinced that Derrida spoke nothing but nonsense. Derrida was convinced that Searle was an arrogant hypocrite who made no effort to understand the vulnerabilities and blindnesses of his own position and thought.

When I read Gross’ critique of Searle’s social theory, I understood how these two threads – his insularity in his own corpus, and his arrogant, dismissive attitude to ideas and styles he didn’t immediately understand – connected.

The ideas that were at the forefront of social theory for sociologists come from hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, and philosophy of the intensive sciences. The schools of philosophy that Searle has aggressively dismissed as nonsense and fraud for literally decades.

By this late state in his career – when he had also become more untouchable than Harvey Weinstein for his sexual exploitation of young, female students – Searle had become incapable of the humility required to catch up on social theory. He would have likely seen what trends had influenced contemporary sociology and dismissed it all as nonsense without bothering to read any of it.

So he’s a fellow traveller in giving a materialist theory of human thought, society, and institutions. But his arrogance and self-certainty keeps Searle from having anything useful to say to anyone else.

I doubt he’d care. If they think differently from him, he’d likely say they were all simply wrong.

Replicating Glory I: Knowing What Kind of War You’re In, Research Time, 02/08/2017

So, like I said I would on Monday,* on to a few more words about Gramsci. It’s so nice to explore these ideas. It’s not a matter of my political sympathies alone, at least not in terms of making it only personal.

* I meant to post this yesterday, but it was actually a super-tiring day with other stuff that I had to do. By the time I was able to sit down with the blog, I was too tired to think.

Italians really know how to throw a communist party.

There’s a greater insight in a minor perspective than a majority’s. You learn more from a perspective that’s under the boot of power than you do from the ones who wear the boots or cut the leather. The ones who have to be wily are more creative, less predictable.

They twist major language and culture to make a hidden space. Call it a safe space. Or not, because the life of the strange is always a little dangerous. This is one of my personal favourites of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts – the minor.

I’m twisting it when I use it to talk about Gramsci, but I think – when I sit down and write Utopias – I’ll weave together some of what Deleuze and Guattari wrote about the literary voice of the minor cultural perspective with the position of Gramsci as a political prisoner and maybe even as a Sardinian.

What’s nice about reading Perry Anderson’s books about the history of Western marxism, is that he emphasizes the ideas in Gramsci that were immediately important to the community of communist activists and marxist academics. So the ideas that gained Gramsci his quickest fame were his arguments on strategy for revolution.

There’s a dualism at the heart of this strategy – war of maneuver and war of position. When Antonio Gramsci was a young man building the Italian Communist Party in the aftermath of the First World War, communists all over Europe looked to the Russian revolution of 1917 as a model for victory.

As you know, that didn’t really work out. Gramsci learned the hard way that it wasn’t going to work out. Italy was the first of the major European powers to install a reactionary conservative government after the war. Mussolini’s ideology and propaganda literally invented fascism. The left-wingers never stood a chance.

One of the famous images of Vladimir Lenin during his ultimately
victorious revolution of 1917. Look at the size of that crowd, then
understand that Lenin is trying to make himself heard over that
entire square. There is no microphone. He's just standing on some
rickety stage screaming as loud as he can.

The short version of that story is that Gramsci spent just over a decade of his life in prison, until it ended. Both the prison sentence and his life, in 1937 at the age of 46.

Communist revolutionaries, high on Lenin’s victory in St Petersburg, thought they would replicate that victory in exactly the same way. The Bolsheviks mounted a blitz against their own government when all the state institutions were wracked by the most intense crisis in the history of Russia as an empire.

It almost seems like common sense to me that such remarkable circumstances weren’t going to happen in the rest of Europe. Russia was a very different country than the other major European powers. Russia’s culture and political society was still dominated by the monarchy and the aristocracy that surrounded it. And there was no moment as singularly intense as the height of the First World War.**

** With so many themes from the First World War appearing in my research for Utopias, I feel like one basic idea in my own book will be putting the terror of that war at the forefront of political thinking. Hitler’s war, as horrifying as it was, was a creature of the epoch that the imperialists’ war began.

European powers like Germany, France, Spain, Britain, and Italy all had well-developed, complex class structures. It amounted to a redundancy in the society itself. A resistance to overthrow. So what’s a revolutionary going to do?

To Be Continued . . . 

A Simple and Inescapable Blindness, Research Time, 28/07/2017

Yesterday’s post was an attempt to express an idea that I’ve been jamming through my head whenever I read modern conservative thought. Right now, there’s a strong racist nationalism in American conservatism, one of many ideological strains.

My question, when I consider these texts and ideas, is how much that racism slides into those other ideologies. Racism appears in the online communities most frequently, especially in the cesspools of anonymous meme exchange. “God Bless George Zimmerman” and all.

There’s enough plausible deniability in the philosophical writing that you can say that the racism is incidental. Yet it remains so ubiquitous – awful shit about black, Hispanic, Muslim, and Asian people is everywhere in these conversations.

That doesn’t even mention the terrible shit people in conservative circles say about women, non-straight people, and trans people. But I want to keep this one short, and since I’m writing this at the end of yesterday, I don’t want to go to bed feeling depressed.

"I don't see race. I don't see colour. I hate everyone equally, so when I
discover that someone is from a marginalized group, it just gives me
more ways to hurt them."

Milton Friedman – writing Capitalism and Freedom in the early 1960s – doesn’t say anything openly racist. What he says is no more problematic than any of the things said about black people by any old men you might know who’ve never known a black person in their lives. Occasionally awkward as hell, but his heart’s in the right place.

Some more examples I took a couple of notes on from chapter seven. Friedman speaks totally ahistorically about racism. Even a few days of history doesn’t enter his thinking. He discusses racism only in terms of isolated acts – a word spits out, one customer is turned away, one unlawful arrest.

Never in a context of a society’s own history. Not even really in the context of an individual’s own biography. Not even in terms of aggregate effects.

Friedman says that there should be no preference of race given in the classic scenario: Two job applicants, a white man and a black woman, are equally qualified. He brings up this exact example – typical in the diversity hiring clause of many company policies and collective agreements. Including one negotiated by my own mother.

Milton Friedman says that you’re being just as racist when you hire the black woman because of ethnicity or gender, as when you hire the white woman because of ethnicity or gender. We will stop discrimination on the basis of race when we stop discriminating on the basis of race.

The reason you push to hire the black woman in that scenario is to create aggregate effects that only become visible at the societal scale. By encouraging more companies to hire someone from a marginalized or racialized group when considering equally qualified job applicants, you change the overall diversity of that rank of position in your whole society.

They’re inconsequential acts when made, and often look like the fabled “reverse racism” to some. But their purpose appears on a macro scale while it’s still invisible to our micro scale of one individual job.

It’s a profound irony I find in a lot of the model libertarian economists. Their entire science largely depends on statistical mathematics. But when they talk philosophy, they can never conceive of any purpose beyond the individual scale.

Original Inequality IV: Gotham's Greed, Research Time, 07/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So what I want to do with these looks back through the classics of political philosophy is build my conceptual toolbox to analyze contemporary political issues and the role utopian thinking can play in the 21st century.

It’s also about writing a book that explicitly contributes to a particular tradition within the whole history of Western philosophy.* That tradition is a democratic materialism or radical democracy. It starts with Niccolo Machiavelli’s civic republican thought.

* Western philosophy = A particular tradition of developing concepts to understand and analyze the universe, which began in the Greek network of city-states and Mediterranean colonies, spread through the Roman, then Arab empires, blending with Christian theology, diversifying and fragmenting through the development of modern science, nestling in the university sector by the 19th century.

Foucault himself doesn't play a big role in this post. I just like using this
image of him, for obvious reasons.

From there, it gets its metaphysical content from Benedict Spinoza’s work,** blooms again in Karl Marx’s empiricism of ideology, disappeared as marxism was warped by totalitarian Stalinist influence, then surging once more in the new radical democratic thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Bifo, and Antonio Negri.

** Why isn’t Thomas Hobbes part of this tradition? Well, he may be an imperialist, but he’s no democrat.

At our current crisis point for the West – both for philosophy as a discipline*** and our broader political culture – we need radical gestures of peace and diversity. A refusal to give in to nationalism or pressure for conformity of any kind.

*** The disciplinary crisis of philosophy being encased entirely in a university institution, and that institution’s increasingly powerful disincentives from producing any work that could ever be considered primary material – only commentaries and esoteric or technical debates.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I now know Rousseau’s thought fits snugly and dementedly into that tradition of democratic materialism. Any philosopher worth reading is, after all, at least a little demented.

Here’s another example of Rousseau’s thoroughly materialist approach to political thinking. He considers the roots of greed. Writing in 1755 Switzerland, I feel safe assuming that the popular culture of Europe considered human greed rooted in our soul.

Original sin is, in a Christian community, the foundational principle of human corruption. It’s a primal rupture in what should have been a harmonious relationship with God – a spiritual rupture.

Rousseau? The roots of greed lie in our social networks. Here’s the short version of his argument, which is pretty efficient as it is in The Origin of Inequality.

As society becomes more complex, human needs grow more complex. So we can no longer be self-sufficient, and need to co-operate to live well. At a low level of complexity, we can get by with contingent deals and contracts. But as life gets more complicated, we need to build institutions to rely on.

These relationships of mutual reliance and need are the foundation of social solidarity, which is good, because it builds community in practical reciprocal benefits.

As well as the need for cooperation and investment, the size of a social
network is a factor in enabling greed and cheating. If you interact with
people casually, you won't have the same force of solidarity as with
your close friends and family. So you don't feel as bad about swindling
those casual acquaintances who mean little to nothing to you.

But all these cooperative plans and activities require us to accumulate beyond our immediate needs. We have to prepare to invest in long-term strategies for community and personal survival – to invest in cooperative ventures.

Our institutions need to collect taxes and user fees to continue supplying the goods and services they do. Our cooperative plans like charities, businesses, and deals of all kinds likewise need investments and resources to get started.

If we start to accumulate with regard to the future, inequality will start to appear in society. Accumulation is a set of skills, and some will be better or worse than others. Those skills are different depending on how you accumulate your wealth, but luck and talent will result in different rates of accumulation for different people.

You’ll end up with a society of rich and poor. Perhaps where people become so rich that they forget about the human need to rely on others for our well-being – able to buy and sell anyone, you can easily think real solidarity is a fiction. Perhaps where people become so poor than they’re consumed by resentment and depression – unable to build any beneficial relationships at all anymore.

An entirely material root for greed, resentment, hopelessness. A politics with no God and no spirit, only human short-sightedness and selfishness as the root of evil.

For the mid-1700s, and maybe even for the early 21st century, truly radical. . . . To be continued

Hating Democracy IV: End Your Traditions, Research Time, 24/10/2016

I haven’t gotten my hands on the first episode of Class by Sunday night, so the first post in that series will come on Tuesday. That’ll be my discussion of the first episode “For Tonight We Might Die.” The post on the second episode, “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo,” will likely go up Friday – But Patreon backers will get to see it a day earlier.

Posts on Class will probably appear each Tuesday after that. This will probably be how the Doctor Who posts end up going as well.

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Continued from last post . . . You can say democracy is a lot of things. It’s not exactly a simple concept. But here’s what democracy is on today’s post. 

Democracy leaves ever aspect of a community’s social order up for grabs in every moment. It’s the fundamental opposition to social conservatism at all times. 

The unity of a culture is built from the ground up, from such ordinary
things as brief television commercials about noteworthy moments in
your country's history. Like when Drake took those baskets back to save
the Raptors from the Halifax Explosion at the conference to choose the
design of the new Canadian flag. At least that's how I remember it.

This is another part of Jacques Rancière’s account of the democratic attitude, democratic life. If I can name it a little more poetically, it’s the fundamental human yearning for freedom.

I sometimes feel as though a lot of popular political discourse in the West has lost this more profound conception of freedom. Too many of us think freedom is a matter of “money talks.” The kind of freedom that means we shouldn’t care how much a company pollutes if people still love their products because the market will guide our reason. 

The kind of freedom that means I can say whatever I want, even if it’s horrible and racist, because my fundamental freedom is freedom to be a jackass. That freedom is nothing more than the absence of coercion. Or sometimes even the absence of resistance.

In many ways, that kind of very individualist libertarianism doesn’t go far enough. It sticks with the perspective of an individual’s freedom as an isolated unit. But it doesn’t consider how deeply integrated each of us as individuals are with so many others. 

This doesn’t make individuality disappear into some amorphous blob of a society. For one thing, actual societies are way more complicated than that. Nations and communities aren’t homogeneous unities, no matter how many ancient* sociological theories treated them that way. 

* And undeniably fucked up . . . 

Societies don't really have any essence – no identity like an individual. They’re collections of many different individuals. These individuals all affect each other in complex networks. Think of how many different people you interact with half-frequently in a week. Or a month.

Co-workers, neighbours, friends, family members, casual acquaintances, occasional clients, people you see often enough at the grocery store that you remember their faces, that street musician with the steel drums and the cool hat. Now think about all the networks each of those people have. And all the networks that flow out from each person in those networks.

These networks aren't evenly distributed all over the world. They don’t have boundaries, per se, but there are hubs, as well as general tendencies to link in some ways and not in others. 

Though I'd like to meet some people from Kyrgyzstan. It seems like a
really cool place.

I don’t know personally anyone in Kyrgyzstan, for example. Because it’s far away, I’ve never been there, I don’t know any Kyrgyz myself in the city where I live, and I don’t even speak Kyrgyz, Russian, or Uzbek, the country’s most common languages. Physical, social, and institutional obstacles prevent me from direct connections to the networks of people in Kyrgyzstan.

But you could find a path through the networks of my networks (and all their networks) that would eventually lead to Kyrgyzstan. Because I live in immigrant-heavy Toronto, it probably wouldn’t take as long either. 

This is the reality of society. We’re not cells in some kind of big, giant person called Canada. We’re networks of individuals. But all these people affect each other – some a little, some a lot, and some in very subtle ways. Ideas, beliefs, and ways of acting all drift through these networks. 

So the individual people in those networks might share some tendencies, across the population when you survey it. Many of them may share tastes in food, or a peculiar rudeness in the behaviour of a city’s bad drivers. That’s where cultures come from: the integration of networks of individuals.

We’re not made by some omnipowerful essence called our nation. We’re individuals who all affect each other – and have some mild power over each other, in tension with each other. Most of the time, the people who are networked together benefit each other. 

We all do our jobs, keep our city’s infrastructure and businesses running, are generally nice to each other in the streets. But each of us, living our lives in pleasant, productive, peaceful ways, exercises their little bit of power to build and rebuild society every day.

Societies are not giant people who behave according to sarcastic
national stereotypes. But it would be funny if they were.

And that’s why you have no obligations to uphold your traditions if they stop working for you. If the world has changed so that something that you’ve always done before starts causing destructive effects, you can stop it. 

There’s no moral obligation to do something when it starts to hurt you instead of help you as it had for years or decades. Humans work best when we all strive to live so that we make each other’s lives better, or at least keep each other on the right track. The world is largely beyond our individual control, but we can adapt to a changing world.

Democracy is a politics that recognizes that fundamental human power over each other and over the world. It says to everyone who’s networked together and holds that little bit of power over everyone they’re fairly densely connected with: You have that power over each other, and an obligation to use it wisely for all our sakes. 

Democracy says: Each of us has a duty to help each other figure out the best way to survive and prosper. If that means overthrowing an old social habit or institution? If it looks like that’s the best route, heave ho.

Social conservatism in the face of destruction isn’t just foolhardy. It’s rude.

Who Can Determine a Whole Culture? Research Time, 29/10/2015

Let’s look at this problem of fate again. Who we are depends on where and when we were born and raised. It’s not controversial to say that a wealthy man from Kolkata will have a different personality (and positionality) than a poor woman from Namibia or a working-class trans man from Toronto.

The problem of fate for our moral thinking goes deeper than personality. Leo Strauss gets so steamed with the social sciences because he sees what its historicism implies for thinking. 

Our place in culture and history determines the limits of our cognition. They make up the horizon of what we can even conceive. Historicism, as he understands it, means that what each of us can think about coherently is beyond our control. 

Is a world without absolute universals really a world
with nothing to believe in? I don't think the contingency
of reality needs to make us nihilists.

Because our culture determines the horizon of our thinking without any input from us, Strauss worries that total cultural relativism about moral and political values will result. It’s a nihilist’s world.

But there’s a limit to Strauss’ influential conception of historicism. It comes out of his own writing – against what Strauss himself believes – when he starts a long discussion of Max Weber.

Weber is one of the Big Three of the foundation of sociology.* Strauss was delivering the lectures that became Natural Right and History in the 1950s. You engage the fundamentals of Weber’s thinking, it means you’re engaging the fundamentals of the whole social science field.

* Say it with me everybody: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber.

So Strauss talks about Weber’s key idea that social actions and changes are all constituted by individual agency alone. A society isn’t an entity with its own agency, but the accumulated acts of everyone in it.

Today, we know what that sounds like. It’s a chaotic system where a lot of individual units behave in ways that look unified, controlled as a whole. But they’re the much more complex causes of an aggregate.

When the whole is a culture, individuals determine what happens at the social level. Yet textbook cultural relativism implies that the society as a whole has all the agency over an individual. 

But this still works with Strauss’ worst notions of historicism, relativism, nihilism. Not some monolith like Society™, but all your ancestors’ and community members’ thoughts and actions make the fixed limit to your own thinking.

I’m not yet sure where Strauss is going with this. I’ve only read a little bit into this chapter so far, so I’m just explaining the idea and where I stand in relation to it. But this is how my ideas on it are shaping up. 

A philosophical inspiration to us all.

The real counterweight to this picture of historicism as nihilism comes from a simple fact. Social change is real. It takes time for the change to become comprehensive, but a culture’s attitudes and ideas change over time. If the horizons of our thinking are fixed by our ancestors and community, then each of us would be copies of the past. Social change would be impossible.

And social change clearly comes from individuals. Just roll with Weber’s idea that only individuals – acting in unplanned, messy aggregate – have agency in society. So individual activity prompts and leads social change. 

Each of us has the power, as individuals, to change how we think and understand the world. We can change those limits of our conception, figure out new possibilities for existence itself. 

Strauss says that philosophy is the search for wisdom, and he considers that wisdom the correct answers to universal metaphysical and moral questions. I say philosophy is the tradition of thinking of new ways to think. Social change in the mind before it proliferates through the world. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Our motivations for agitating for social change might include fidelity to some moral value you consider universal. It might not. Unlike what Strauss believes, you don’t need a universal truth to motivate changing your society in a more just direction.

The quest for justice comes from a realization that anyone can have at anytime. Something is wrong. Something has gone wrong. Something is not working. We must repair it.

A Science of Humanity III: Only the Eternal, Research Time, 27/10/2015

When I was a grad student, I'd meet people who thought
philosophers came up with trippy, strange ideas. That
we were essentially professionalized hippies who
could explore the astral plane in thought. They were
always a little disappointed when I'd tell them how
sober, technical, and reserved most writing in
academic philosophy was.

Continued from last post . . . What is truth? It’s a question that can only be taken seriously when you mock it. “What is truth, man?” he said between puffs on his joint. Ask this question in a serious tone and you don’t sound like a reasonable person. You sound like a pretentious philosophy student.

I say student because, as I worked my way through the academy of university philosophy, you never heard the experienced, long-tenured profs speak this way. Their questions were always about Thinker X’s conception of truth, or comparing different isms about the nature of truth. It was good scholarship, but not innovative philosophy.

The students were no better. I’m counting myself among them, the kids who asked profound questions that they didn’t even know how to think about. After ten years of studying the tradition and writing books and articles that contribute to this tradition, I’ve still only just figured out how to ask the question thoughtfully.

You’ve got to know your way around that question – What is truth? – if you want to understand the most profound way Strauss got his hate on for sociology. Same with the rest of modern conservatism. 

Theirs is a very old-fashioned concept of truth that roots the true in the eternal. If a principle is true, it must be true eternally. Or else it’s meaningless.

The question gets appropriately profound when Leo Strauss asks about the truth of political principles – questions of natural human rights. The first major chapter of his Natural Right and History confronts historicism about political rights. 

His description of historicism: Because different cultures and eras hold different political principles, there’s no true natural right aside from these contingent shared beliefs. No universal standard of human rights. 

“There cannot be natural rights if there are no immutable principles of justice, but history shows us that all principles of justice are mutable.”

Strauss doesn’t say their names, but it’s clear to someone who knows their ideas that when he’s talking about the endgame of historicism, he’s talking about existentialism.

If Martin Heidegger is one of your
philosophical enemies, then you have
good taste in villains.

Mostly Heidegger, because of the brutal results of having your existence entirely determined by a fate beyond your control. You can’t control where and when you pop into being. So you can’t control what culture you’ll have. 

If you can’t control what culture you’ll have, then you can’t control what rights and principles will be universal truths to you. There were only two possible reactions to realizing this fact of your existence.

1) Embrace your contingent, happenstance existence for all it’s worth and dive in to whatever set of ideas drives your culture in your era.

2) Fight against the happenstance nature of your life, and live in angst trying to find space for genuine, meaningful choice. Individually, maybe through trying to live your life on your own terms. As a group or a society, building networks and friendships that resist mainstream trends. 

Strauss mostly talks about option one. Martin Heidegger was his most profound opponent, philosophically. I’m not sure how much Jean-Paul Sartre, who gets the most credit for option two, figured on his radar.

Embracing your contingent fate means that you entirely give in to whatever beliefs about rights and justice your culture finds intuitive. You don’t believe in a standard of justice that transcends what a given culture finds instinctual at a given time. 

If you believe in a universal standard of justice at all, it’s because you’ve uncritically accepted your culture’s intuitive beliefs. If you’re lucky, as Heidegger believed himself to be, you’re born in a culture whose intuitive philosophical orientations let him conceive of the contingent nature of human fate at all. 

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to conceive of the emptiness of universal concepts of justice. Strauss won’t stand for this. He won’t give up on the philosophical tradition’s quest to discover universal standards of justice. 

It's not to Strauss' credit that he seems to ignore Jean-Paul
Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. Their existentialism
foregrounded human freedom and political action,
whether for his anti-capitalist social justice vision, or
her critical feminist priorities.

Existentialist philosophy is, for Strauss, only the most extreme and clear form of the historicist beliefs that dominated philosophy after Hegel and the social sciences that developed in the second half of the 19th century. The historicist frameworks of social sciences make them a factor that will inevitably obscure the search for universal justice.

But you don’t have to get stuck in the Strauss-Heidegger impasse. Believe in transcendent eternal truths of morality, justice, and politics. Believe in the historical contingency of all human existence, thought, and ideals. With all their problems. 

Or choose another way.

I think about the truths of justice ecologically instead of humanistically. We don’t need a set of rights that applies eternally, because no set of human rights claims will make sense in a world without humans. 

Human cultures have a lot of variant principles, and figuring out which principles of justice we should hold is a matter of figuring out which principles and demands for justice define our time. 

Underneath all that variation are some invariant truths about the human need to be happy, sheltered, joyful, and loved. In all the variety of human culture, we should strive to achieve that one common ground.

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.

A Science of Humanity I: In The Classical Era, Research Time, 23/10/2015

I’ve written before about the right-wing heritage of hating sociology. I’ve written about it coming from former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and from one of the ur-texts of modern conservatism, Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. 

The more I look into the roots of modern conservatism, the more evidence I find of how widespread this contempt, hatred, and fear of the social sciences was even then. It really makes me aware of the pickle that sociology as a discipline finds itself in.

Systematic knowledge is a more recent revolution in the
sciences that's taking unfortunate time to trickle into
accurate and clear popular imagery. I think one of
the epistemic goals I'm going to shoot for in Utopias
(or more likely a follow-up) is figuring out a good
popular metaphor for systemic causation.

One reason why hardcore conservatives today have a hate on for the social sciences is that these sciences usually uncover facts that are very inconvenient to the right-wing agenda. 

I mean evidence like the persistent poverty of many people, despite the certainty that free-market deregulation would improve their lives. Or evidence of how systematic racism and unconscious biases about people actually work. Or how disastrous public health trends result from an inaccessible medical system and environmental destruction.

All that is simple stuff. I’m more interested in the stranger ideas that are rooted in the historical influencers of modern conservatism. One argument came from Leo Strauss, a protozoan progenitor of the movement. He has very different philosophical priorities than my chosen Big Four, and his writing was never embraced by a wider population.

Strauss was a professor for his entire life, and engaged the philosophical tradition alone. He developed ideas that influenced many in the neoconservative movement. According to Wikipedia at least, Paul Wolfowitz attended some of his lectures when he was a student. But at best that’s an indirect effect on the new conservatives.

I’m turning to his work for this part of my Utopias project research because of his philosophical influence on the concept of human rights that inspires much of that movement. Liberty above all.

But you’ll always discover surprises. I didn’t expect to find such harsh remarks about social sciences. It makes my infamous ex-PM seem one prominent sign of a larger trend in the right wing. 

Talking about Leo Strauss may not be very visually
interesting. Old dusty academic dudes. Yet I can't just
write Strauss off as a pure Dead White Guy,™ because
he was a German Jew who left the country in 1932
and never returned. That positionality counts.

Actually, I found a couple of profound and weird ideas among this era of conservative thinking.* Strauss’ is that social science denies the freedom – and so the moral agency – of humanity.

* What should I call this group of thinkers that I’m looping together by my own priorities? I don’t want to give them some generic name like the classical pre-neocons. Too ordinary. Maybe conservatives in the shadow of Stalin and the Holocaust. Haunted conservatism. There’s a desperate terror to their fears. I remember that from reading Hayek.

So that’s a pretty intense idea. But it makes sense. It’s rooted in the popular intellectual conception of science that was pervasive in the 19th century: if science could deal with it, it was a deterministic mechanism. 

Statistical and probability science threw all ideas about strict mechanism out the window. But those ideas were so complicated, it’s taken decades to develop a good pop science set of metaphors to explain what they actually mean. 

So when Strauss saw a rapidly developing science of using mathematics to describe human behaviour, he thought it was about determining the unthinking mechanisms of humanity. They aimed to measure human thought and action with the same accuracy of falling balls in inertial physics. 

It sounds kind of ridiculous today, but outside the disciplines themselves, that was still the mainstream conception of what scientific knowledge was. Strauss was an academic philosopher, an interpreter of the classical works of Western political theory.

He had no idea what was going on in the real world. To Be Continued . . . 

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Editor’s Note. A quick thought about composing my Utopias book. I’ll probably include a passage about the roots of hating sociology, since I’ve found such ideas in two early influential Haunted Conservatives. Three fairly disconnected occurrences and it’ll definitely have a spot.