Here Let Me Give You an Example, Composing, 24/07/2017

So I've drafted an introduction and an outline to an essay I’ve been meaning to write for the SERRC since the end of May.

Between a busier than expected schedule at my new job, a documentary to arrange (and now finance), my work with the local New Democrats designing a policy survey for members, and actually being able to relax and have a life once in a while . . . I’m sorry, but what was I supposed to be doing again?

You get the idea. But I pitched an idea to Jim the coordinator of the SERRC, and he said bring it to me whenever you want. So I’m going to bring it to him by early August. Still less time for a response paper than the average academic journal would take to process.

I think the story of Rachel Dolezal blew up as big as it did because it
was a surreal, deranged kaleidoscope of fractal and fractured concepts
at the intersection of so many different contours of the most
polarizing ideas of our time. But it was so messed up that very few
people could actually understand it. Especially since the form of
most of our media means that people rarely get more than a sentence
at a time to argue for or against any idea or perspective at all.

So I’m writing a piece that responds to a short and fascinating essay Robert Frodeman published back in May. It probed, from another angle, the major theme in his work – the critique of disciplinary structures in the academic university system.

This time, he was looking at the tradition of philosophy, its academic and punk styles. There’s the tradition of Western philosophy – dominant in university circles – that it’s a knowledge discipline with particular ranges and subordinate ranges of expertise.

At the same time, there’s the conception of philosophy as a tradition of free-thinking rebels against the authoritarianism of thoughtless conformity. Think of the Sophists as the experts teaching lessons and Socrates as the freethinker critiquing all that received, common-sense wisdom.

The example that inspired him on this reflection was the dustup earlier this year over Rebecca Tuvel’s essay in Hypatia on the possibility of being transracial. Frodeman focussed on the aspect of the debate where everyone was fighting over who had the proper expertise to make the calls they did.

He was primarily concerned to fill in an alternate perspective on arguments like that. He asks whether philosophical knowledge can also be for provocation as well as instruction. For asking important and (therefore) uncomfortable questions as well as providing answers to inquiries.

My response to Frodeman will be, essentially, to tell him that there’s still more to be done – the duality of answers/expertise v questions/provocation isn’t enough to describe all that philosophy can do.

I wonder how many people who watched Eddie Murphy's old "Black
Like Me" sketch on Saturday Night Live understood that it was also
a brutal mockery of white fears of the black people who can pass as
white. I wonder how many of those people who didn't get it were
themselves white. You have to think of yourself as an identity to
conceive of your identity as under threat. Of course it's much more
fun to conceive of yourself as an identity and practice
miscegenation anyway. Miscegenation is fun, and the way of the
future.

I’ll do that with a deeper example of Tuvel’s essay. Oddly enough, reading it provoked a question in me that made me understand that her essay and the controversy surrounding it* as an even better example to show the transformation that our boring, decadent academic establishment needs.

* And surrounding Rachel Dolezal, the woman whose demented appearance in the spectacular freak show of Western media provoked a popular conversation about the nature of transracial identity in the first place.

See, unlike most of the critics of Rebecca Tuvel’s essay about transracial identity, I actually read the whole thing. And it was dry, turgid, uninteresting prose. It examined the arguments about the possibility and morality of transracial identity in a didactic tone, and from a perspective completely detached from the visceral nature of reality.

Tuvel’s essay did everything in an academician’s playbook to suck the vitality from an intense, multifaceted political conflict. I contrast this with the most illuminating piece of writing I’ve ever read on Dolezal and her perspective itself, Ijeoma Oluo’s article in The Stranger based on their conversation.

You could call it the difference between armchair and field philosophy, to run with another of Frodeman’s terms. Tuvel produced a bloodless, tone-deaf consideration of fiery concepts from a position of total abstraction. Oluo analyzed what concepts Dolezal’s own personality and sense of mission expressed.

Oluo was a truly empirical philosopher. My own creative argument flows from this point.

Anything more would be telling.

Socrates and All the Ladies, Jamming, 24/05/2017

Every now and then, I throw an article up on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. They’re a wonderful global community of social scientists and humanities researchers and writers, which I’m proud to have been part of since its early days in 2011.

I most often write book reviews. These like to get experimental. I most often do odd formal things. I reviewed an against-the-mainstream book about Plato’s political philosophy, in the style of a conversation between myself and Socrates. I think that could have gone through another draft before I submitted it.

Who could forget my review of a Steve Fuller’s book Knowledge a couple of years ago? A months-long chapter-by-chapter walkthrough running as long as a book itself, composed as a conversation with Fuller himself. Probably the most maximalist thing I’ll ever do, except maybe for Adam Writes Everything.

Sometimes it’s their content, like when I reviewed Phil Sandifer’s still-incubating Neoreaction: A Basilisk. That book has only gotten stranger since its publication. Its original draft was composed under the presumption that Donald Trump would lose. It’s apparently had to change radically now that we’re in a political era explicitly dominated by neoreaction.

I got a grey kitty, a white one, and a tabby too
And a big orange guy who puts snakes in my shoes
Mad MC skills, leave you struck
I roll with my kitties and I’m hard as fuck
I’m down with Plato and Socrates
And I love to get busy with all the ladies

So its finished form may eventually be so different from what I read that Phil may have made my review a Borgesian shadow, reviewing a book that not merely no longer exists, but has erased its own existence. Which means – Thank you so much for that, Phil, it’s genuinely awesome of you.

But then there are the replies. One article – either in Social Epistemology the journal or on the SERRC website itself – will spark a chain of replies, rebuttals, defences, addendums, and spiralling conversation. Often, they move too fast for me to throw my hat in the ring, even if I’d like to. The replies expand faster than I can think of my own response.

It’s why I don’t normally throw in, unless I have something of a curveball. Robert Frodeman – anarchist of the ivory tower’s disciplines that he is – is one of my favourite writers to follow in our circle. I have some pretty firm feelings about academia’s state of decadence, but Frodeman has done the empirical research for me to call it a conclusion.

When he writes an article about the lost influence of Socrates as the universal model of a philosopher, I’m going to read it. And be intrigued.

A Socratic thinker is a seeker of wisdom and a critic of false or inadequate pretences to knowledge. Such a thinker is a questioner, exploring and arguing over ideas to gain deeper understanding, but never expecting a univocal, straightforward, totally satisfying answer.

Yet most professional philosophers* are institutionally ratified experts. They have a disciplinarily-bound or influenced body of knowledge – the canon, the history, the primary texts, the current debates – and their job is to pass this knowledge to interested and paying students.

* University professors every one, as if that were the only place to create philosophy at all!

Philosophy, in other words, is now institutionalized as the domain of what Socrates would have called the sophist, the resident expert guide. Having those Socratic punks around is necessary – they provoke the discipline out of its doldrums.

There’s a third alternative, I think. The conceptual writer. For instance, what I did yesterday. You try to build – through argument, analysis and interpretation – a new concept that lets you understand the world differently than before. With this different understanding, you'll be able to act and think in ways you never thought would have been possible before – because you literally aren't able to conceive of it.

I’ll think on this a little more this post.

Free Speech Martyrs in History I: The Greek, Research Time, 08/02/2017

So what are the justifications of free speech, when you go back to John Stuart Mill himself?

You can start with the standard Mill that everybody gets in their undergrad classes. Freedom of opinion and its expression, even and especially when it’s unpopular, is necessary for a functional society for the following three reasons.

We learn about the heroes and martyrs of freedom and justice as if
freedom and justice were the same. While they go together, and each is
the condition of the other's possibility, they aren't the same. Here's
Nelson Mandela, one of the world's most famous rebels against
injustice.

1) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is actually the truth, and can correct a mistaken mainstream.

2) Some opinion contrary to the popular belief is false and the mainstream is true, but the challenge of those contrary ideas is needed to keep a popular truth from calcifying into an oppressive dogma.

3) Both the popular opinion and its challenger are true, and no one understands either well enough to see how they properly complement each other. But with enough work, determination, and hard public thought, the two sides of the issues can reach a new perspective where their alliance becomes natural.

Already, I’ve gone beyond the usual account of Mill’s justification of freedom of opinion. The textbooks* rarely go beyond Reason One: Some minority beliefs will turn out to be true after all.

* I really do think that humanities textbooks – the collections of excerpts and short essays, not the actual full books – are written under the presumption that students are stupid. This is why I never used a textbook in any low-level classes where I could make that call.

So this is the popular mainstream opinion about what Mill had to say about freedom of opinion. And it’s a pretty accurate view of the general popular dogma about freedom of opinion – don’t oppress my opinion, because it might turn out that you’re wrong, I’m right, and I’m entitled to my opinion anyway.

This is Kim Dae Jung in the 1970s, at a rally speaking against South
Korea's dictator Park Chung Hee. Kim spent his life as a crusader for
democracy in Korea, and went from serving several years as a
political prisoner to serving a five year term as President of the
Republic of Korea.

Except you aren’t entitled to it. Because only a few pages after going through these three reasons for freedom of opinion, Mill describes how you aren’t entitled to your opinion. It’s because every opinion should be open to critique, not just from other arguments and analyses, but from real facts that could disprove your opinion.

You’re free to form your own opinion, but you aren’t entitled never to have that opinion challenged or critiqued. That goes for mainstream popular opinion, and the opinions of isolated cranks and rebels.

But Mill is more often treated as a resource and a justification to shut down any oppression of opinion. On Liberty is, in many ways, an argument against silencing opinions. And there are many reasons why opinions can be silenced.

Mill lived in the 19th century, after all. There were plenty of dictatorships kicking around 1850s Europe – they were monarchies, but had either openly absolutist rulers or powerless parliaments. And there were plenty of oppressive theological disputes throughout Europe too.

So there were plenty of institutions and governments who were oppressing plenty of ostensibly free opinions. With all that in mind, who’s the first example Mill cites at length of a society harmed by the suppression of opinions critical to the mainstream?

A historically accurate depiction of Socrates.

The death of Socrates, the foundational story of Western philosophy. Mill depicts Socrates as the man who would have been a personal founder of a Greek Enlightenment, if the Athenian assembly hadn’t executed him for sedition against popular dogma.

The image of Socrates in the narratives of Plato – and the image that inspired the entire Western philosophical tradition – is the challenger of unquestioned dogma. And that dogma was false, or at least so simple as to become flimsy as moist tissue.

The least question could knock away the foundations of popular Greek moral dogmas. All it took was one reasonably insightful persistent critic – someone who wouldn’t give up pressing for deeper conceptions of what was taken for granted.

Socrates was a martyr for freedom of opinion in Mill’s telling. But look at the content of what he said and did. Socrates’ demand was that his society justify their moral beliefs – don’t just believe dogma because it’s given to you, because dogmatic belief leads to injustice. He was an advocate to build a more just, fair, enlightened society.

Which is different from freedom. Which is truth. . . . To be continued

Save Us I: Abject and Garbage, Research Time, 10/12/2015

Your political priorities have a lot to do with what you think of human nature. What we’re capable of, and what’s impossible for us to do. 

The message, common in American political discussions
after horrifying gun violence incidents, that the only
defence against a crazy person with a gun is your own,
preferably bigger, gun, has a genuinely interesting
philosophical idea behind it. It's that humanity can
never become mature enough to solve conflicts
without violence, and your only defence from
violence is your own readiness and ability to kill.

G the libertarian once wrote me, “Don’t you believe in human nature?” He implied that human nature was inherently violent, selfish, animalistic, cruel. That’s why governments could never be trusted to ensure people’s welfare or a fair society, because leaders and officials would abuse their power. That’s why people needed to stockpile as many guns as possible, to defend themselves against governments and other groups who’d suppress and destroy them.

Inherent. Think about what that means. Immutable. Essential. Unchanging. Unchangeable. That’s how we’ve historically thought about human nature. No matter what we think that nature is, it is what it is, was, and always will be.

It’s taking humanity a long time to understand that change is possible. Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze. Me. We still need to learn the message.

Different civilizations have had different conceptions of what human nature is. Reading Leo Strauss on human nature is pretty slippery, because Natural Right and History doesn’t quite take an explicit stand on the subject* once he gets into the different epochs of this concept.

* And this is weird. I started reading Strauss thinking he was going to be the centrepiece of modern neoconservatism, but his own writing seems quite detached from the politics of his time. I’ll have to get hold of some of Shadia Drury’s work about Strauss, as she’s the primary source for this argument.

It’s going to take us a while to get through this. But it’ll be interesting. 

So Strauss spends a chapter examining the ancient Greek concept of human nature, and its political implications. His sources are mainly the philosophical writings of Plato and Cicero. 

The short version of this whole argument, exegesis, interpretation, and riff of overlong sentences and dry language goes like this.

Many heroic Greek thinkers have a disturbing tendency
to get themselves killed by the local statesmen.

Ancient Greek culture’s predominant philosophy culminated in Stoicism, of which Cicero was the most famous and politically powerful.** Skepticism was at the heart of this philosophical tradition, but so was political engagement.

** That didn’t stop him from getting killed by the imperial army after falling foul of the rulers. Killing your opponents has a much longer history in politics than peaceful compromise. At least when states are involved.

Because Cicero’s Stoicism began with Socrates. Socrates was the ultimate negative philosopher, whose method – when he was alive – was assaulting people and their beliefs, so that they could be torn down. Socrates believed that real knowledge of political and moral truths would be invulnerable to his dialectical attacks. If they weren’t, well then watch your world burn.

Plato developed this basic idea in a more profound direction that wouldn’t necessarily make enemies of your entire community. In Plato’s hand (or rather his pen), Socrates’ aggressive skepticism became a philosophy of aporias. 

There’s still no answer to the problem of whether you have knowledge of the good, but at the end of any of Plato’s books, you understand the question much better. You remain perplexed about what’s right, but you're not confused anymore because you understand the concepts around the problem. 

Aporetic thinking had a huge resurgence in philosophy during the late 20th century, particularly with Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. But ancient Greek society developed aporetic thinking in the direction of Stoicism. 

I'm coming to the conclusion that this is probably a
better analogue in popular culture to what kind of
person Socrates was than I was ever taught in class.

In this model, so says Strauss, there is a form of perfect and true justice. But this genuine justice is strictly in the domain of the divine. Humans are corrupt and can’t access true justice.

Humans aren’t completely debased, though. Depending on how you interpret the idea, which for the Stoics was an open debate, humanity could achieve a diluted form of divine justice. The concept of human justice as a dilution of the divine was an acknowledgement of our essential corruption. Yes, it’s something like divine justice, but not. The best we can do.

Or perhaps it was a secondary form of justice, different in character from the divine, but related to it insofar as it was justice at all. The secondary form of justice has a purpose, however: uplift. 

Humanity could pursue justice, and in doing so, repair our corrupted nature. The pursuit of justice wasn’t a compromise, but a route to restore our lost divinity. To be continued. . . .