What In the World Will People Think?! Research Time, 04/02/2018

When I was reading through that book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, one name struck me for an odd reason – it was totally unfamiliar to me.

Who are some of these guys?

Josef-Maria Hoëne-Wronski. Who the hell was this guy? He got a brief mention in a small corner of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s most dense book. But I’ve never come across him in all my research into the corners of Napoleonic-period German philosophy.

Here was his major project, in a few paragraphs.

It’s the 1780s. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason drops, and blows a lot of the intellectual scene in Germany away. It broke with long-established ways of thinking about human nature and thought, but did so by explicitly engaging with its major problems and solving them.

Naturally, Kant's solutions set up an entirely new set of problems. Wronski was a major figure in Polish mathematics and physics, so he had the knowledge base to approach many of the problems Kant’s work posed for the foundational principles of physics.

Kant’s first revolutionary book described how the structures of the mind – frameworks as simple and built into our experience as space, time, number, causality – conditioned experience. Human reason alone – as in logical reasoning – had no power to reach any foundational principle for why the frameworks of our mind were as they were.

Now, Kant would ultimately centre those principles in ethics and morality – practical reason. Wronski would move in a totally different direction – physics, particularly calculus.
• • •
Quick jump out of this to talk history. At the undergraduate level, the history of Western philosophy is usually taught as though there are clear boundaries in its development – classical, medieval, modern, critical, contemporary. 

Steve and I disagree on a lot of substantial ontological and
epistemological issues and debates. But we always have very
fruitful – or at least very entertaining – engagements and
conversations.

All too often, those boundaries settle into researchers’ thinking as they progress as a scholar and specialize. That’s why philosophical work that shows the continuity through all these breaks – the little differences and influences across what we think are distinct periods – is the most valuable history of philosophy to me.

I’m indebted to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller for having written books that taught me so much about those continuities that our oversimplifying undergrad curriculum paints over and erases. Of all the mentors, teachers, and elders I’ve had over the years, he’s taught me the most about this.
• • •
The choice made sense to Wronski. He was a physicist who came from the German-Polish professional world, where you learned Leibniz’s calculus alongside his complex and imaginative ontologies. So intensely creative, ontologically fertile metaphysics was an ordinary part of mathematical thinking for him.

In most of our undergraduate educations in philosophy, we learn that no one thought this way after reading Kant’s Critiques. That was the long-term effect, but just because it’s happened by now, doesn’t mean that it never took a long time anyway.

Wronski may have thought little of bringing Leibniz’s multivector hybrid approaches to physics, mathematics, and ontology. But the presumption got him into trouble, costing him a job at the Marseille Observatory.

It turns out that it isn’t always acceptable to develop a complexly hybrid ontology of the origins of the universe when you’re supposed to be mapping star movements. At least not outside your lunch breaks anyway.

Who are these guys, Kemo Sabe? Another inadvisable direction.

Wronski eventually became most famous in the intellectual circles of his day as a bit of a crank. As people were abandoning the approaches of Leibniz, he was carrying them forward. As it became less acceptable to motivate philosophical and scientific work using religious and theological principles, he was discussing how mystical visions helped inspire his metaphysical work.

The first major product of this exploration was his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics and Algorithmic Science. It was a massive synthesis of Leibnizian ontologies of calculus with Pythagorean numerological mysticism, all tuned to the problems of post-Kantian philosophy.

His correspondences and friendships with major figures in European mathematics like Joseph-Louis Lagrange meant that this first book was reviewed in high-rolling circles. This quickly turned into a problem for Wronski, since IPMAS was universally panned, including in the review by Lagrange.

Eventually, Wronski’s own faith in the universality of algebra and calculus ended up just as limited as the Pythagorean faith in flat-planed geometry. After ambitious mathematical papers were likewise panned, he spent the last 30 years of his life in poverty. Still grinding away at epochally-ambitious philosophy and mathematics. But fruitlessly.

Wronski’s work turned out to be a dead end. So associating him with Deleuze becomes incredibly dangerous. The insults Wronski received on his way out of intellectual prominence – mystic spewing madness and nonsense – sound very similar to the insults academician analytic philosophers spew at post-structuralist thinkers like Deleuze.

So an essay talking about the influence of such a reviled figure as Wronski on Deleuze – who is widely reviled as a charlatan in many university circles – has to be careful not to associate them too much. Lest you justify the haters.

The Shock of Your Own Inadequacy, Research Time, 06/11/2017

No, this post isn’t about the first time you experienced erectile dysfunction and get your minds out of the gutter.

Really, I’m taking a second pass at the idea I was talking about earlier this weekend. That idea of alienation coming up in The Human Condition. It’s useful and intriguing, and I want to make sure I have a good handle on how to express it. I think I have a better grasp on the how right now.

When I was a young boy, I read Steven Hawking's A Brief History of
Time. There, I read that the ultimate goal of science was to develop
a theory of everything, a mathematical system that could explain
and predict every phenomenon in the universe in simple formulae.
Hawking should be ashamed of writing such propaganda.

Mathematics are, in some context, important to all sciences. Calculus, geometry, statistics, plain old arithmetic – whatever. If you want to give a quick and dirty one-sentence* definition of science, call it ‘Systematic knowledge emerging from understanding mathematical descriptions of things, systems, and processes.’

* Inevitably inadequate, but making an accurate-enough gesture for us to say that, yeah, it’s true I suppose.

Put that in your introductory-level philosophy of science textbook and smoke it.

Okay, that was the last joke. So Hannah Arendt tries to explain how a profound alienation from nature, the world, and our experience can arise from how central mathematics is to our knowledge.

The mathematical tools of the different sciences give us a better ability to understand natural processes – atomic energy fields, cellular and organic processes, ecological development, cosmological events – than we can get from our ordinary observation of the world.

Go to the typical grade school example – which I don’t think ever gets unpacked the way it really deserves – of geocentric vs heliocentric models of the solar system. We look up in the sky and we see the sun and other heavenly bodies circling us.

But describing their actual motion in our sky takes some convoluted math. So Copernicus, Erasmus, and others developed a heliocentric model with simpler math. It was always an as-if hypothesis just to ease up on the headaches astronomers suffered.

If I could focus on one of the many philosophical and metaphysical
screwups of Christian thought, it's that the common interpretation of
Noah's myth in this tradition is that creation exists for us as we are.
The meaning of the rainbow is that everything is illuminated already.
I much prefer the Jewish tradition, which is much more honest about
how we still have to work for our knowledge.

Mathematics is a technological creation – it’s a human tool, a complex assemblage of symbols and rules. So any knowledge that we produce with mathematical tools isn’t a direct encounter with the world – mathematics mediates our knowledge of the world.

That was fine when we were just coming up with imaginary models to simplify our models of a more complex world – the migraine-inducing calculations of planetary paths in the geocentric model. But then it turned out that the mediated abstract models of visceral experience were true, and our ordinary experience of the world distorted how nature really was.

Arendt talks about Galileo and the astronomical tradition that followed him, but Robert Boyle and the Royal Society’s development of the experimental laboratory was equally important. Mathematics was the symbolism, and the laboratory was the institution and site, of mediated knowledge.

Mediated knowledge was much more effective, more powerful, than knowledge through direct experience of the world. Necessary conditions of humanity’s industrial revolution included that mediated knowledge.

Our own tools, techniques, and technology were the medium of that knowledge. This was a profound cultural shock to the Europeans who developed the modern epoch of mathematics and the institution of the laboratory. My debt here is to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller’s philosophical history of knowledge.

The power of mediated knowledge over direct experience of the world
was such a shock to Medieval Christian European society that its
success felt like falling back into the Cave. A God whose nature
requires complex mathematics and wrangling results out of a
laboratory to understand isn't nearly as kind and close to us as
Medieval Christian thinking held. All the philosophical attempts
to overcome mediation in knowledge – I think of Hegel's Absolute
and popular evangelical literalist disdain for science – you can
understand as desperate refusals to accept a distant God.

Before this cultural realization of the power of mediated knowledge, Europeans had a view of the world in which every moment of ordinary wandering through the world brought you closer to God.

The medieval Christian conception of worldly knowledge was that our world was creation. Creation was God’s expression, and humanity was the element of creation who God made creation for.

Creation’s purpose was for humans to understand it and live harmoniously in nature. So the popular conception of nature in European Christian culture was as an open book. Creation was something through which we understood God and our relationship to Him. We’re built to understand creation intuitively because creation was made for us.

The success of mediated knowledge demonstrates that creation wasn’t made for us. The most accurate knowledge of the world emerges from using these complicated tools, technology that requires years of training and education to use properly. The world is much more opaque than an entire sub-continent’s culture of our ancestors understood.

People in Medieval Christian European culture thought of themselves as Fallen, that they had to work to understand God and creation again. The success of technology – mathematical symbols and the laboratory – in understanding the world demonstrates to a Medieval European Christian that we’re Fallen much farther than we thought.

We may as well have Fallen into hell.

Concepts Become Slogans Become Wriggling Globs of Pus, Composing, 27/07/2017

So I got some really good feedback on yesterday’s post from my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller. He identified a tension in my own approach to right-wing ideas.

I first became interested in learning more about right-wing philosophy when I reconnected with an old friend from middle and high school. Since that time, I’d gotten a PhD in philosophy and started working for an editing company.

Every photo I'm running with this post is a cheap shot. An
increasingly horrifying cheap shot. Here, we have a cheap shot
about the hypocrisy of affluent hipster libertarians that can also
function as a cautionary tale for how democracy sows the seeds
of its own destruction.

He'd become a radical libertarian. Collected guns, thought Barack Obama was a socialist, thought George Zimmerman was totally in the right to shoot that teenager. Every conversation we had carried this powerful, personal desire on his part to convert me to radical libertarianism.

They had swallowed the dogma, lived and breathed every witless aggressive meme like it was a hit of pure oxygen, swore they weren’t racist because black people had been bred into criminality and laziness from their generations-long dependence on government handouts.

So with the experience of this two years of online friendship with folks in this extremist society in mind, I sought out the classic popular outreach texts of the founders of modern libertarian philosophy.

I was also coming out of my first major research project, which became Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I was moving into a more explicitly political direction, thinking about the shape of a new book about the human drive for utopias.

When I consider how people think about and live their political ideals, I see this wrenching contrast, especially among the right wing, but it’s present in all political thinking. There really does seem to be a disconnect of the nuanced arguments in the core philosophical books of a tradition and the sloganeering bludgeons of too many popular activists.

Seriously, my libertarian friends G & C used to get so aggressive
arguing over George Zimmerman's legal right to shoot a teenager
in the chest, entirely talking about responsible gun ownership
and the right to self-defence. Yet you can't turn away from the
existence of jokes like this and what they imply. Don't think you
can write this off by saying, "It's just a joke."

Democracy is my ideal, but I want to figure out where the nuance of thought breaks down into a baseball bat. I’m looking at this most frequently at libertarianism and right-wing ideas because these are the ones that have been most successful in my generation, and are having the most destructive effects.

Here's what Steve had to say yesterday.

The problem with your argument comes at the final hurdle. Libertarians like Friedman aren't imagining the state playing any role in these decisions to sell -- or not -- to people of whatever race. So the totalizing conclusions you reach don't necessarily apply.
He's imagining that even if some sellers are racist, it will be to the advantage of others not to be racist because they'll get the discriminated people's custom. Yes, you might end up with a 'separate but equal' sort of society, which is 'racist' in the sense that not all vendors are available to all buyers. But there will be at least one vendor available to all buyers.
In fact, that one vendor could become quite rich, if the other vendors stick to their racist guns. The state simply observes all this stuff, but doesn't adopt an ideological position. I don't endorse this view, on either normative or practical grounds.
But it's more sophisticated than your cartoon version. Specifically, Friedman's point is that you would actually need the state to intervene in the market to bring about the sort of totalizing racism you're railing against. You should be thinking about arguing against a 'separate but equal' position, which is allowed by Friedman's thinking.

Yeah, because none of this is racist at all. Nope. Nothing to see here.

I have my own responses to some of these arguments.

One is about how a free market will prevent injustice from racial discrimination because some other business will serve the discriminated group. But that presumes that a totally free market is even possible. Frankly, I don’t think people’s self-interests are enlightened enough to provide the fully rational behaviour needed for a genuinely free market.

Even the free market solution of a ‘separate but equal’ economy isn’t a real solution to the problem of racism. The widespread social rejection that racializes a minority erodes any real equality that would have developed from that separate position. There’ll always be the sneers, the insults, the rocks thrown through windows, and the thickly humid atmosphere of popular disgust.

Despite those counter-arguments, there’s a lot of valuable ideas in these works that are so central to libertarian thinking. But there are also those passages that – like those context-free literally-understood passages from the Bible justifying a whole new regime of racializing discrimination – encourage an activist extremism that you can rightly call cartoonish.

Then they drop a piano on your head.

So What Is “Pragmatic Radicalism” Anyway? Composing, 03/08/2016

The wonderful photo SERRC published with my last piece.

Last week, I published a new essay at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I thought of the idea in response to an essay by my colleague and long-standing argument partner Steve Fuller, “Prolegomena to the Deep Sociology of Brexit.”

Now that I’ve returned from the wild woods of central Quebec,* I wanted to start the month with a breakdown of that essay – so you can see what I’m doing with it, and how that work expresses my newly-formulated mission statement as a writer and researcher.

* It was a very pleasant and necessary vacation, thank you, but I really am quite happy to be back in Toronto and returning to my work. More like my many works.

I’d say I learned two things from my time at this May’s Canadian Philosophical Association. 1) Progressive politics among academics lags far behind the actual activists developing new ideas, approaches, and outreach methods. This was more of a re-confirmation than a discovery. 

But most important was 2) There doesn’t really seem to be a place in the academic community for voices that aren’t affiliated with professorial positions in universities. I had a lot of very good conversations, but I was essentially an alien among this crowd. 

Even in seminars where my contributions went over well, some attendees appeared completely unable to process what I was – a researcher unaffiliated with a university who wasn’t at all jockeying for a university position anymore. Just someone here to share their research, able to write, publish, and speak on the same level as the university-based folk.

I had a guiding ideal of what I suppose
became pragmatic radicalism when
writing my last book, but I couldn't
get its publication out of academic
marginalization of high prices and
the catacombs of libraries.

So I’ve begun developing a brand for myself as a public intellectual whose institutional home is in activist communities and political parties. A blue-collar scholar, if you want to put it in a rap.** Part of that brand and identity is developing a philosophical language that addresses immediately relevant public issues while simultaneously crafting complex concepts.

** Please don’t do that. It would be terrible.

That’s what my “Pragmatic Radicalism” essay is. A work of philosophical creativity in response to an occasion. I mean ‘occasion’ in the sense of, “the event that occasioned this response.” An event in our public life of such a significance and complexity that it prompts a public work of philosophical reflection and creativity.

One thing that frustrated me about philosophy as a discipline, from the time I started work on the project that would be Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, was the disconnect of its creative thinking from the concerns of the world. 

In turbulent times like these, we need contributions to our politics that encourage thought – not thought instead of action, but thought that is one with action. Protest that generates policy. Creativity in harmony with activism.

I’m developing a new brand of blended philosophical research and creativity with worldly activism and social engagement. And my essay at the Reply Collective, “The Pragmatic Radicalism of the Multitude’s Power,” is both a sketch of what that writing style would be, as well as an example. 

How it’s an example I’ve already explained: a work of abstract philosophical creativity, produced on an occasion. But what’s the concept? What is pragmatic radicalism?

When I first floated the title to Fuller, he told me it sounded paradoxical. And that’s definitely part of its spark. A paradox – broadly speaking – is the juxtaposition of several ideas that don’t typically fit together. To me, there are two kinds of paradoxes. 

Vicious paradoxes confuse, frustrate, and arrest thought. But creative paradoxes let you work through a new way of thinking while you figure out the logic by which the juxtaposed ideas make sense together. A new harmony emerges from a dissonant collision.

Pragmatic radicalism is fundamentally about expanding
the realm of the conceivable in your society's public
conversations and thinking.

Pragmatic radicalism sounds paradoxical. Radicalism is a pure idealism, usually thought of as a refusal to compromise, the refusal to give up on anything but your opponents’ total capitulation. A radical’s hopes are usually so distant from the real world that their achievement seems impossible, but they’re committed to them totally anyway.

Pragmatism appears the precise opposite. You have ideals, but you’re prepared to accept compromise with opponents or askew allies – to make allies from opponents – to achieve some progress toward those ideals. Pragmatism is political realism, while radicalism is a refusal of the real’s resistance to your ideals.

Pragmatic radicalism embraces ideals, but also acknowledges and pushes against the resistance of the world as it is to achieve those ideals. It is the admission that practical achievement in politics can take other routes than compromise alone. 

Pragmatic radicalism is philosophical in that it develops new and revolutionarily different frameworks for our political and social institutions and relationships. It’s pragmatic in its resolute focus on material action to achieve those goals. Not compromise, but community organizing to bring these radical ideas to public discourse and make them seem ordinary.

Our current political climate is full of pragmatic radicalism, for both democratic and fascist ideals. One impressive achievement of the Trump campaign has been rapidly bringing ideals of white supremacism and strongman leadership to mainstream political discourse. Though it took much longer, UKIP has been successful in not only making Britain’s exit from the European Union popularly plausible, but apparently a coming reality.

More details at the website.

Thankfully, the Sanders campaign achieved a similar miracle in returning social democratic policy to America’s mainstream discourse – even embedding these ideas in the policy platform of the previously horrifyingly compromised Democratic Party. 

Most importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought its radical critique of America’s police, court, and prison systems to the realm of mainstream plausibility. BLM has launched several concrete policy platforms for institutional reform, first the policing reform packages of Campaign Zero, and recently the larger policy framework of Movement 4 Black Lives.

The Arab Spring – and its ripples throughout the Arab world, as well as the refugee movements from the Syrian Civil War and Iraq’s war against ISIS – was similarly a movement of pragmatic radicalism. An explosive moment of democracy’s becoming conceivable in the Middle East. 

Communication – networked community organizing and cultivating social media communities – is the essential medium of pragmatic radicalism’s transformation of political possibilities. Practicing that communication of simultaneous advocacy and philosophical creativity is the task of the contemporary public intellectual. 

Maybe it won’t be the university or the academy that will product these thought leaders. It seems there’s a wider community of well-educated activists and organizers driving this model of politics and social transformation.

Maybe the occasional blue-collar scholar.

Beyond the Academy's Style: An Outline, Composing, 18/07/2016

I’m about halfway through writing the draft of an article that will appear at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. It’s a reply to one of the many pieces analyzing the different aspects of Brexit that SERRC co-founder Steve Fuller has published and posted over the last few weeks.

Primarily, it’s a response to his most philosophical article in the bunch: his argument that the best theoretical system to make sense of the Brexit phenomenon is Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of politics as the circulation of elites. I pitched it to Steve and Jim Collier the other co-founder and chief editor, as a Negri-inspired response to his proposition.

At heart, there's a positive argument behind my critique. I don’t write critical essays unless there’s a really strong alternative way of thinking about the same event or idea. I never present it as an either/or. I’d never argue that Fuller is wrong about this, because I think he’s exactly right.

Steve Fuller in his video "What Is Brexit?"

But in terms of what we can learn philosophically, epistemologically, and politically from Brexit, Steve’s insights aren’t comprehensive of all that we can learn about it. When I bounce my own thoughts off his, the illumination makes them more clear. 

That – to me at least – has always been my preferred kind of criticism. In academic philosophy, we were socialized largely to argue against as a form of critique. Disprove. Attack. Tear down. Not my style.*

* ‘Then what were you doing studying and working in philosophy for so long?’ you might ask. It interested me because even though a lot of the journal articles being written and submitted were of that style, the primary texts that were the discipline’s real heritage were largely written in my style. Why join a field if you don’t aspire to the same greatness as its greats?

So what's the lesson I want to take away from Brexit, given the launchpad Fuller’s ideas gave me? My essay is going to explore the epistemic requirements of increasing democracy. 

It begins with my own take on stage setting, describing in my blog-honed tone of intelligent contempt the political movements and jockeying that resulted in Brexit. At the same time, I also give my major takeaways from Fuller’s Pareto-inspired analysis.

Then my interpretation of the rhetoric surrounding the referendum. My most important result is the paradox of considering the Brexit vote morally and politically binding when the UK’s constitution itself – parliamentary sovereignty – fences the referendum into a strictly advisory capacity. 

The reason for this moral/political power is that a referendum is a more democratic state activity than parliamentary sovereignty. The notion that parliament can be sovereign above citizens or residents causes weird paradoxes with democratic ideals. Antonio Negri demonstrates in Multitude that parliamentary representation isn’t really an expression of the general will. 

I very much hope David Cameron doesn't leave behind
a political dynasty. Still, if he did, you could only go up
from his achievements.

Instead, it creates a government of elites that churns more quickly than it used to. The elites now aren’t hereditary aristocrats, but political party operatives and candidates. And you still see the return of hereditary norms. Being Canadian, I’m no stranger to political dynasties of all stripes. 

Rousseau’s idea falls flat on its face once you put it into material practice. In actual parliaments – not just our imaginary and ideal ones – representation builds a barrier between people and their representative. Many layers of institutional mediation.

A referendum doesn’t have that same distance because it’s a direct expression of the will of a people. There are two problems with this. One is temporal, which is that any vote is the expression of a population’s political tendency at the precise time of the vote.

The most important is epistemic. A referendum is political campaign, subject to the same manipulations of public knowledge and the cultural imaginary as any election. And a referendum like Brexit with such high stakes meant that the side with the most desperate, committed partisans were willing to do absolutely anything to win.

That was the Leave campaign, by the way. It was the reason for all the lies about the true nature of EU regulation, single market access, and the mass mobilization of open, aggressive racism. 

Instead of informing and dialoguing with your public on a matter of immense importance, the sides of a referendum campaign have an incentive to become lying demagogues. An ostensibly (or ideally) more democratic route becomes even more corrupted than the creation of a parliamentary elite.

With referendums open to such terrible flaws, is there any democratic alternative for momentous, national-scale decision making? We don’t have one ready to pull out, fully formed, at a moment’s notice. But we can think of one. And I think I have a pretty good idea.

The full potential of political and community organizing.

Creative Miscellany: Reading Writing Replying Networking, Jamming, 14/07/2016

Just a general update today, since today turned out to be pretty eventful – in both a good and a less good way. Some projects have had some wonderful boosts, new opportunities for smaller works have come up, and one big project got a setback that I think could ultimately be for the best.

• • •

My first “LEAPing Beyond” workshop for the New Democratic Party went quite well, as you could probably tell from the last two posts. This weekend, I’ll be writing an official update on the first workshop to go up on official channels of Toronto’s NDP. 

I like the aesthetic of holding these workshops in parks,
islands in concrete that pretend to be wilderness. It
provokes the kind of juxtaposed thoughts that I want
to encourage with my words as well.

I’ll also make contact with riding associations presidents in the heart of Toronto, to promote the next workshop in early to mid August. I think Christie Pits park will probably be the best location. 

It’s less mainstream than Trinity-Bellwoods, and so offers a little more peace and quiet. I also like that Christie Pits is always within reach of road traffic – I think the urban oasis nature of most smaller city parks reminds us of the delicate relationship that a city must maintain with its green spaces.

• • •

I finished my first read of Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk, and secured a slot for a review of the book at the Reply Collective. I’ve already brought Sandifer to the hard drives of the Collective, as he was a significant interview for “Beyond the Academy.”

But this is the first time my American colleague’s work will have been brought for a review. Part of my mandate from the Collective’s Review’s editor – my old friend SD Card – is to keep the social epistemological parts of the book at the forefront.

That won't be hard. As I collect my thoughts and notes for the first pass at the review, quite a lot of what I’m thinking about revolves around ways of knowing. The book is, from the start, a critique of the traditional concept of rationalism from a variety of angles.

You wouldn’t think that was necessary anymore. But if you thought that, it was a sign that you’ve been reading too many progressive epistemology journals, and not enough neo-fascist pro-slavery blogs or anti-feminist Reddit or 4chan forums.

I'm also waiting for the supplementary material (thanks
to a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign),
especially Theses on Trump.

Now, I don't blame you for not reading these things. Part of what I find awe-inspiring about Phil and his work is his level of commitment. This man – with his deeply held political, moral, and ethical beliefs – sat down and read the neo-fascist pro-slavery rambling tangents of Mencius Moldbug. 

Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of words written by the most vile, self-absorbed, and unrestrained avatar of the genuinely neo-fascist pro-slavery software engineer Curtis Yarvin.

Phil has dived into something that most of us who thought that traditional conceptions of reason and rationality had been thrown on the dust-heap have ignored to our peril. This religion of pure reason exploding through right-wing online forums has become the dominant ideology of North America’s newest and most prominent reactionary social movement.

From Gamergate to the shock troops of the Trump campaign, the rank and file of American reaction in the 21st century have made a vision of purely objective rationality their sole epistemic yardstick. We have to grapple with this ideology, and that’s what I see Phil’s book as doing.

More details in a few weeks when the review actually goes up.

• • •

I’m working on another piece for the Reply Collective. This one is a reply to a recent piece by my favourite dialogue partner in the group, Steve Fuller. In this case, I want to write a response to his account of the Brexit phenomenon.

And Boris Johnson still won't go away.

Now, Steve has a few advantages over me on this. For one thing, he actually lives in Britain, and can see the media landscape daily through direct experience. I only see snippets and flashes from North America. So I don’t want to get into too many of the details.

Basically, I plan on responding to Steve’s perspective on the role of elites in political life, and whether the British constitution of parliamentary sovereignty has passed its sell-by date. It will come from the Negri-Foucault trajectory.

In short form, elite management of politics always risks disenfranchising or generally separating people from the institutions that hold incredible power over them. But contemporary communications technology and the political organizing it enables can bring that power to the people. Our era – thanks to our communications abilities – can open the most true and thorough democracy of all.

• • •

Finally, the partner I’d been working with on the development of You Were My Friend and I parted ways professionally yesterday. She’s still a fantastic actress, and I’ll probably still cast her in the same role she played in the theatre version. 

But I think our aesthetic instincts and priorities were a little too different for us to keep on the same page. Each of us had different ideas of what we thought were the most promising aspects of this story. I didn’t communicate my own such ideas clearly enough. And I still don’t quite understand what her own such ideas were.

So now I’m looking for a new director. And it has to be a woman. I need a female director so that the entire production can understand that You Were My Friend is a women’s story – with all that entails.

How Far Could Animal Rights Go Anyway? Jamming, 18/04/2016

The other day, I got a link to an essay by my friend, colleague, and long-form argument partner Steve Fuller, which he’d recently published in the journal Sociology of Science and Technology. It was quite interesting and provocative.

It does have Steve’s typical overstuffed style, which can be either a detriment or a benefit. I think it’s usually a benefit, though it can tip into detrimental at a moment’s notice. 

Fuller writes with such a density of knowledge on display that you can easily see real links that exist between some intuitively far-distant ideas. So reading his work is a good way to blow your typical intuitions about human knowledge to bits. But a reader can also be overwhelmed by all the parallelisms and connections that he can make between so many different domains of knowledge. 

Steve’s essay is called “Political and Legal Prolegomena to an Extended Republic of Humanity, or Transhumanity: Lessons from the Difficult History of Human Rights.” A bit of a long one. But it is a fascinating piece, and if you want a really trippy, densely packed long-read today, do check it out. 

I’m thinking of writing a longer-form reply at the SERRC later this Spring. But I’m still packed with deadlines and obligations. Here are some initial thoughts, jumbled and scrambled, after reading Steve’s essay over the weekend.

An uplift strategy for animals that humans have treated
as property – whether as pets, prey, or livestock – would
have some political consequences that, when uplift
advocates discuss them, I feel are not taken as seriously
as they should be. The entry into human political life
isn't relations of property rights or granting any
recognition. It's the demand itself for equality.

I’ve never really been a fan of what’s called “moral extension” in animal rights theory. I devote a few pages to mocking it and Peter Singer’s general perspective and politics in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. In a way, I think it doesn’t go far enough to build a truly ecologically sustainable, harmonious, and prosperous human civilization.

In another way, moral extension and the broader animal rights perspective go too far in the wrong direction. Steve is on target with his own critiques in this essay. I say so, because he seems to agree with my own point – there’s a frustrating category mistake in animal rights thinking.

In my own perspective, the whole point of building an ecologically-informed ethics (and any moral systems that develop out of that ethical foundation) is to create and share a self-conception of being integrated with the whole world. Being unable to separate yourself from any act of ecological destruction, absolve yourself of responsibility, and numb yourself to its pain.

Animal rights thinking, as Steve and I contend in our different ways in our different publications, tends to keep humanity and non-humans in categorically separate places. Animals remain our Other, segregated in their wilderness sanctuaries so they can live in peace. 

On top of that, animal rights philosophies make animals an inferior Other because we’re the only creatures capable of enough ethical thought and moral reflection to opt out of relationships of predation – ecological cruelty. We can’t make wolves and pigs into vegans, so we separate them from humanity in places where they can roam free and live according to their own natures. 

Steve also addresses the transhumanist approach to animal rights, centred around uplift – the cognitive enhancement of animals, whether through mechanical technology or genetic engineering. Uplifted animals can join the human community in a more active sense, and so we can extend humanity to a true confederation, of a sort. 

And I’ve never been too big on transhumanism either, for a wide variety of reasons that I don't really have the space to go into right now. But this question of animal rights and uplift makes the reasons very clear. Steve says so himself, which is another area were we agree.

Animal uplift is a kind of new cross-species imperialism. It’s the contention that you can only be intelligent or civilized in one very particular and singular way, and that all other forms of intelligence are inferior. Who says that in becoming more like humans, a creature is being “uplifted?” Well, humans do most of the time. Sounds a bit egotistical if you ask me.

So what might I do with these jumbled thoughts over the next couple of months? All I’d really want is to add another perspective to the mix. Animal rights theory and transhumanism are both very humanistic, and both are narratives of progress. 

I’d like to express some of the ideas that I brought up in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity to present a narrative of progress that’s decidedly not humanist, but that is thoroughly optimistic and hopeful. Mixing in all these ideas critiquing animal rights and transhumanism that I’ve brought up here.

It might be interesting to read. Which is the best any writer can do, really.

Pushing Past Neoliberalism, Jamming, 01/02/2016

I used to work in the university sector as a humanities researcher and writer. Now I work in the business sector, mainly in marketing, communications, and the arts. As a career, it looks like a solid break, like the two eras have nothing really to do with each other.

In many circumstances, they don’t. Academics are trained to write in very specific, technical ways whose habits are hard to break, and their only other skills are teaching (though many don’t even have teaching skills). 

But I kept writing in a lot of styles, writing short stories and even publishing a couple during my grad school years. Also, I was lucky to have had a supervisor who helped me develop a non-fiction writing style that combined trippy concepts with accessible prose. Blogging has only helped me improve that style of open, accessible weirdness.

As a result of all this, I’ve fairly easily transitioned between a career in the university sector and a career in the business world. But another kind of convergence between university and business sectors is much more controversial: the influence of corporate money and priorities on universities.

State University of Arizona, flashes of green in a desert.

There are plenty of things to criticize about this relationship. I’ve criticized quite a lot of it myself. But I want to write today about an attempt to situate the university as the forefront of scientific research. In the words of Arizona State University President Michael Crow, such a leadership role is how the modern university can “own the future.”

Take a few minutes and read the article Crow published on LinkedIn about Arizona State’s new Institute and School for the Future of Innovation in Society. I linked it in the quote, so take a moment and read it.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. What the fuck did those 500ish words of buzz-talk and empty PR even mean? Others have explained the basics of the Institute and School’s mission statement to me.

Basically, Crow’s vision is that the research and teaching of Arizona State take a lead in innovation, educating people to innovate, and developing a progressive vision for humanity’s future. Resurrecting the hopefulness of the Jet Age and Atomic Age in the Internet Age and the Holocene Extinction.

My friend, Social Epistemology colleague, and occasional Twitter sparring partner Steve Fuller has expanded on and critiqued aspects of Crow’s vision. Read his response at the SERRC here, because my own critical remarks are about to begin.

The ideological bugbear of the modern left is neoliberalism. And that’s for more than just – in Steve’s words – the left’s focus on the injustice, unfairness, and pain of who loses in a given economic and social framework. 

Neoliberalism is an ideology that praises uprooting, especially uprooting in the name of profit and economic growth, and that can be very dangerous. Communities are disrupted and destroyed, traditional labour arrangements are destroyed and people are left adrift. The extreme individualism of neoliberal ideology can shatter families and starve welfare states. 

Some of the best social media conversations I have are
with Steve Fuller.

Yet Steve sees benefits to neoliberalism as a philosophy of economics and society. And frankly, so do I. The benefits come out when you read authors like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. 

Some of their clearest political messages are about undermining and critiquing the power of the state. The state can be a terrifyingly powerful agent of control – it enforces nationalistic (and so fundamentally racializing and racist) cultural uniformity, conformity, submission to authority, and the steel fist of the police at their most pervasive and powerful.

All of this must be resisted, and the political philosophy of deterritorialization – Deleuze and Foucault’s – is about tearing down the power of the state to control people’s lives and bodies. Breaking down state power and processes is essentially neoliberal.

This is the heart of Daniel Zamora’s biting critique of Foucault that showed up in Jacobin Magazine just over a year ago. But the solution to the injustices of neoliberalism won’t be found in a return to the state. That just brings back the old authoritarian suppression of universalizing state control.

At the same time, as much as I sympathize with the liberatory aspects of neoliberalism (smash the state, end biopolitical police control), as a political and business philosophy, triumphal individualism has crested and left us with the exploitation of loneliness and despair.

I’d say the most oppressive characteristic of neoliberalism* is its presumption that relations between individuals are always fair, despite vast material differences. This is the sacredness of the contract, the fair agreement between a business owner and a businessman providing a service.

* I may say something else is the most oppressive another day, but this is today.

The caption on this photo literally describes this man as
picking up cupcakes and champagne to bring to a party
to celebrate someone's promotion. His income from a
day as a Tasker will probably work out to less than the
minimum wage in his state. Standard compensation for
workers in the most recent radical business innovation
to emerge from Silicon Valley: how to make millions
skirting laws that protect workers from exploitation.

Preserving the freedom to make contracts is the philosophical heart of neoliberal opposition to unions. A collective agreement is a negotiation that individuals didn’t necessarily sign on to, but that determines the conditions of their labour. They don’t have the freedom to negotiate a deal on their own terms.

The problem is that “freedom to negotiate” in all instances leaves many workers vulnerable to exploitation by their employers. Silicon Valley, and its culture of extreme liberalism, may be as Steve says, the cultural home of the modern business era. 

But its biggest recent innovation – the sharing economy – makes losers out of almost everyone. Exploitation and underpayment of workers is a condition that sharing economy businesses rely on to survive.

Standing against the oppression of authoritarian state power, the deterritorializing philosophy of neoliberalism was a vehicle of liberation. But now we must, as Antonio Negri describes, push through individualist principles to develop a path of liberation from the oligarchic oppression of permanent underemployment.

And I doubt Michael Crow at Arizona State is going to do that with his buzzwords and pitchman’s logic.

Editor's Note. Thanks to Steve Fuller for correcting me that Crow is actually President of Arizona State University, and not University of Arizona, as I originally thought. It's not the first time I've mixed up a state's "University of" with its "State U." Holy hell.

The Election Takes Care of Itself, Jamming, 17/01/2016

I hope, the forty-fifth and first Jewish President of the
United States of America.

A friend and colleague of mine, T-Boz, recently went to work for the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire, and I got into a Twitter conversation about it this week with another colleague, Steve Fuller.

Fuller’s tweets are available to anyone who cares to look back at my mentions. But if I can summarize his criticisms, he was concerned that Sanders’ idealism and relative radicalism in America’s political context would make him a reiteration of George McGovern.

I understand his concern, but I do think the situation is very different. Actually, if you consider Steve’s current home of the UK, I find more similarities between McGovern and Jeremy Corbyn.

McGovern, like Corbyn, was an insurgent candidate who achieved the highest position in his party on the strength of a popular movement. McGovern was the spokesperson for the movement against the war in Vietnam, and Corbyn is England’s spokesperson for the anti-austerity movement.

The mass media story is that Corbyn is “unelectable.” The Murdoch-controlled media* of Britain attacks him so frequently that it’s made his fairly tame social democratic policies so unpalatable to the general electorate that he may as well be a Stalinist. But that’s not Corbyn’s biggest problem, as far as I’m concerned.

* As well as the BBC, paralyzed with fear at the prospect of David Cameron’s looming and inevitable catastrophic cuts and radical rewriting of the company charter.

No, Corbyn’s biggest problem is that the British party system invests a huge amount of power over policy in the hands of MPs, and district associations have virtually no power to recall or even critique a sitting MP. And Labour's parliamentary leadership today, like the American Democrats in the 1970s, is schizophrenically split over a catastrophic war: Iraq.

Hilary Benn was the Labour Party's foreign affairs
opposition critic when he stood up and proudly
endorsed Conservative PM David Cameron's bombing
of Daesh in Syria. The Labour Party's leader, Jeremy
Corbyn, laid the party's position clearly: Labour was
against further barely discriminate bombing. Benn won
praise from Britain's conservative media, but a
demotion and probably a broken friendship from
Corbyn himself. Deservedly.

That’s why Hilary Benn openly denounced Corbyn on the floor of parliament last month, enthusiastically supporting the mass bombing of Syria, despite the huge amount of civilian casualties that would result. Most Labour MPs refuse to admit that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, even though their leader has always been against violent military intervention.

So what about Sanders? Well, Sanders’ messages – against Wall Street criminality, the corruption of lobbyist-greased electoral and legislative politics, war, racism, poverty, and economic inequality – genuinely resonate with many Americans.

And although the American mass media have long presumed Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, Sanders’ criticisms of her – that she’s too establishment, too indebted to Wall Street lobbying,** militarily hawkish, and inauthentic – resonate through America’s mainstream media, and have for a long time.

** Much like Barack Obama’s most important Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who was an apprentice to the top Wall Street investment firms and hedge fund entrepreneurs, and who designed the financial bailouts of Obama’s first term to protect large banks and bankers, leaving millions of ordinary homeowners underwater.

Sanders’ populism is why soft Donald Trump supporters lean more toward Sanders than Clinton among current swing voters. He, like Trump, is seen as a voice for ordinary people. Sanders has the advantage over Trump of policy proposals that are based in real economic and political solutions, and not scapegoating and racism.

I don’t consider “not being electable” to be a real criticism of a politician’s policies or ideas. It’s a way to dismiss them without engaging the ideas themselves, presuming that they’re too different from the country’s mainstream to attract any support at all.

There is no voice more perfectly suited for channelling
the frustrations of the American people than that of a
cranky, elderly Jewish man.

It presumes that a population is never open to supporting anything but slightly different takes on the status quo. It presumes that genuine political change isn’t possible. If you build a mass political movement first, a movement that reaches beyond its in-group, then the election will follow.

Aiming for electability alone is what doomed Canada’s New Democrats. Messaging that appealed to conservatives only attracted a small number of new supporters while turning away much of the base support to Justin Trudeau, who depicted himself as the candidate of genuine radical change.

But is Sanders a new McGovern? I don’t think so. For one thing, Nixon was no Trump. Nixon may have begun the GOP’s Southern Strategy of implicit race-baiting, but he never descended into demagoguery. Cruz has made a major plank of his platform attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, a creation of Richard Nixon.

Trump, Cruz, and the Republican Establishment has thrown the racism, elitism, and violence of American conservatism into the light by demurring about nothing. What Nixon hid in euphemism, Trump and and the other Republican candidates now, and Mitt Romney in 2012, all say openly. 

The leaders of the conservative movement really do tell it like it is. And they do so in the context of a financial crisis that has massively hurt nearly everyone in the country.

In 1972, George McGovern was the spokesperson for
America's progressive social movements in the country's
party politics. But the public support of mass police
violence against anti-war protesters at that year's
Democratic National Convention showed that
Americans weren't ready to embrace such a movement.
At least, they weren't back then.

In the early 1970s, there were plenty of Americans distrustful of the period’s rebellious youth culture and in favour of the Vietnam War. And today, there are plenty of Americans who distrust modern youth culture, and who favour massive military intervention throughout the Middle East. 

But damn near every American knows somebody who went underwater on their mortgage a few years ago. Or they did themselves. That’s the message of Bernie Sanders: We can’t trust the people whose economic policies made that disaster happen and then paid off the criminal class of stockbrokers and hedge funds.

That’s also the difference between what made McGovern a failure in 1972 and will make Sanders a success in 2016. The American economy never collapsed in the mid-1960s, but it did in 2008.

All the Republicans think the policies that led to that collapse – low taxes for the wealthy, wages free to spiral down to the lowest common desperation, no real regulations on the banking sector – are actually how you build a successful economy. 

Hillary Clinton is deeply associated with Wall Street as a lobbying group, and is well-known as a politician who repays favours. Barack Obama’s first Treasury Secretary bailed out the economic fraudsters and criminals in the first place.

Bernie Sanders is the only one running for US President with sensible social democratic policies and a simple message to the plunder of the American people by an oligarch class: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!!!!

So many people agree with him about this already, across generations, social classes, religions, and cultures that they constitute a true mass movement. Once that’s your voter coalition, the election takes care of itself.

Save Us VI: How to Save Ourselves, Research Time, 17/12/2015

Continued from last post. . . . But it started here, and included this, this one too, and also this.

His argument that Modernity is essentially a worldview of total relativism and the impossibility of truth lays down precisely the role Leo Strauss will play in my Utopias manuscript. The symbol of the fear of humanity's smallness.

Steve Fuller and I may fight a lot, and snark at each other on Twitter, and got into quite a few philosophical dustups over the course of the longest book review ever written. But he taught me a valuable lesson about medieval Christian philosophy, theology, and culture.

Happy Xmas, everybody.

He taught me that this was a culture that believed the entire universe to be an open book. We just had to figure out the right way to read it. Nature is God’s expression, analogous to the Bible and the life of Jesus. Just as we become more divine by understanding the Bible and Jesus' life, we become more divine by understanding nature.

Metaphors and religion aside. Human knowledge is capable of understanding the universe. We just have to figure out the best methods and frameworks to do so. 

I say there can be many such methods and frameworks. They can vary by context, or what particular problems have to be solved, or some other fulcrum. Maybe we’ll drop some or add some or transform some over the years. Maybe we’ll discover that some need to be combined, or some need to be fragmented. 

The universe is really complex. We change and it changes. Our modes of knowing change as we better understand what we apply them to, and they change as we adapt to changing conditions in the world. But we can know it.

When I dropped the “metaphors and religion” there, I took you to my philosophical perspective about knowledge and the universe. This optimistic, practical, adaptable pluralism about knowledge is basically Gilles Deleuze’s solution to the problem of relativism.*

* The historical chain goes like this, very roughly. 1) Medieval theology: God made the world and made us to understand it. 2) Modernity: Human knowledge’s pinnacle is the absolute. 3) Post-modernity: There’s no absolute, and therefore no true knowledge. 4) Pragmatism: A form of knowledge is valid if it achieves the results we want. 5) Speculative Pragmatism: Knowledge has many forms and applications, and is valid if it helps us understand the world.

As for Strauss? He’s a retrograde. But an excellent representative of retrograde thinkers everywhere who think no knowledge is valid unless it expresses at least some of THE absolute. Basically, either religious or secular people whose only standard for valid knowledge is a religious or secular version of Category 1 or 2 above.

But Strauss is even more extreme, which makes his argument in Natural Right and History even more useful to me rhetorically. Because his analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ mechanistic view of reality centres the relativism that he thinks destroys knowledge in modernity itself, he can function as the ultimate conservative.

I fully admit this might be a ridiculous metaphor that
won't help anyone understand what I mean at all.

He and Heidegger both become – if you’ll let me make a completely weird metaphor that may not make any sense at all –  these weird neutron stars of arch-conservatism in the Utopias book. They emit totally different kinds of signals that resonate in a weird way, which expresses the same conclusion.

Only a god can save us. Either the universe itself changes, and takes us along with it, so that human nature becomes less destructive – God intervenes to save us. Or we return to a universal belief in a divine natural law that grounds the eternally true rights of man – we submit entirely to God to save ourselves. 

Modernity turns from this. As does liberalism, the definitive political philosophy of modernity. Liberalism is inadequate in many ways. Most notably in our current economic politics, its extreme individualism makes us hostile to our ethical obligations toward each other. 

In that, we have to move beyond traditional liberalism, to preserve its virtues like freedom of speech and thought, and the ideals of democracy, while overcoming its deficiencies.

And in this broader context about truth, knowledge, and our relation to the divine, we should be thankful for another aspect of liberalism, the West's first philosophy of freedom. 

I say Strauss feared humanity's smallness because of his presumption that human knowledge needs a divine or eternal ground (absolute and universal human rights, in the case of what I've been reading in Natural Right and History) to be valid. Without access to the eternal, we're eternally small, insignificant, and ignorant.

Modernity is the cultural way of thinking about ourselves as not really needing that eternal grounding. Knowledge can grow and progress. In giving us the tools to understand ourselves as free, liberal thinking gave us the ability to free ourselves from our limitations.