The Power of Reality and Over Reality, Composing, 13/11/2017

Originally, I was going to write a quite little post about philosophy again tonight, probably anticipating my takeover this week at SERRC. Or maybe talking a little about Gilles Deleuze before I dive into a few ideas I dredged out of What Is Philosophy? for my next big book.

Then something happened that gave me one remarkable, inspiring thought about Syria. It has some deeper meaning as well, but I don’t feel much like getting into that right now explicitly. It started when I gave the Ghost a comp ticket to the last night of the Syria Film Festival.

He showed up pretty late and couldn’t stay too long. He left about two-thirds of the way through the longest documentary Lost in Lebanon, but saw all of One Day in Aleppo.

Skyping in Ali Alibrahim, director of One Day
in Aleppo, at the end of SYFF 2017. My
favourite feedback about this film came from
the Ghost. He said, about that moment where
the camera crew's car was shelled, "Are you
sure that wasn't faked? It looked too real!"
The real looks so real that we can't tell if it's real.

This was the first time the Ghost had experienced real footage directly from the ground of a war zone. There is a moment in One Day in Aleppo where the car the camera crew is driving in gets caught in an explosion. They have to carry their driver out of the car because he’s been badly wounded by shrapnel.

All of these were actual events that happened, and of course the crew never stopped filming any of this, they’re professionals!

Soon after festival weekend, the SYFF crew meets up to discuss ideas for next year. I mean, we’re also patting each other on the back, and usually having a big potluck. But we’re also talking about ideas for next year.

We have plenty, too. An approach for a rebranding as we head in to our fourth year, for one. We’re generating ideas to do that, new vectors of the Syrian experience to explore. For so long, we’ve focussed on the war, which is necessary, but has its limitations.

That’s why I mentioned my friend the Ghost. After watching One Day in Aleppo, he wasn’t able to speak again until three hours later. This was exactly the effect the filmmakers wanted people to have.

Here’s the rub. As the Ghost was driving home in a state of shock, I was talking business with people, congratulating volunteers, and chatting about our final attendance numbers. I’m not about to say we’re a little desensitized, but it does show a detail that we can’t see from being too close to the machine.

We play some damn heavy shit. Now, heavy shit certainly does continue in Syria and the entire Persian, Arab, and Southern Mediterranean world. But as an artistic approach, heavy shit brings diminishing returns.

My favourite film this year included a note of hope, even if it was only symbolic. The oldest daughter of a disappeared Free Syrian Army fighter develops a new identity for herself – no longer as a revolutionary Syrian’s daughter, but as a hopeful Syrian-German. Watani: My Homeland.

A lot of the most hopeless people I saw in these films were the ones who were so pessimistic that they’d ever rebuild their country. We need to find more stories of rebuilding – whether we discover them or tell them ourselves. If only to awaken the possibility.

Open Minds to See Necessary Cruelties, Jamming, 30/06/2017

This week has turned out to be a lot busier than I expected, so I wasn’t able to blog as much as I wanted. I finished reading a really intriguing book by Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology.

I thought I’d check it out for my subway reading on the way to work. I want to learn more about life and politics in India today, since so many of my students are Indian newcomers.

Anderson’s book is a break from a 1200 page trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, which I picked up to return to my habit of reading one ridiculously difficult book each year. The prose is beautiful, but I can’t take 1200 pages of early 20th century Egyptian men’s crises of conscience without a breather.

I had to make this the lead photo. He's just so cute!

So there are plenty of ideas to catch you up on. But I was wandering through the news looking for information about the wider world. As I do sometimes. I came across two really illuminating pieces from very different ends of the political spectrum.

I get a lot of my news from Twitter. I follow a bunch of left-wing people and a few right-wing people, including a few women who work at the Cato Institute and the always-sanctimonious Grover Norquist.

I also follow journalists and media folks who I know personally, and a few friends who are just guys and girls with Twitter accounts who like tweeting about stuff. But I always keep that crowd just diverse enough that I hear stuff from outside my bubble of similar political views.

Gabriel Winant wrote a genuinely insightful article about what the new working class is today in America. Democratic Party leaders, he says, focus on an outdated version of the working class that was minted in the mid-20th century. But that class is itself largely of colour now.

So it’s an utter mistake to think of minority outreach as separate from class-based outreach. This profound mistake in understanding demographic categories has become a catastrophe for the Democratic Party, since they no longer mobilize class-based politics among the people who need it.

Because those people are now largely all black, and the campaign strategists still see blackness overwriting their class needs.

I also learned what needlesticks are, the biggest health risk from cutting corners in the healthcare sector in America.

I learned an intriguing international development from a link to The American Conservative that I saw from one of my libertarian think tank writers. It told how Jared Kushner has caused another serious fracture in the executive branch of the United States.

He simply looks like an idiot all the time. And you know what they
say about people who look like idiots.

This time, it’s because Kushner has such close friends in the government of the United Arab Emirates. They seem to have pushed him to bring Donald Trump over to their side in the fight to isolate Qatar.

That was a huge mistake because Qatar actually has been a strong American ally in their fight against ISIS and in other ridiculous military interventions around the Arab world. They bombed the shit out of Libya very effectively, and let the Americans use their massive air force base.

Rex Tillerson and James Mattis are desperately trying to get the Saudis and Emiratis to play nice with the Emir of Qatar again, because this fight is encouraging the Qataris to get closer with Iran and Turkey, and we can’t have that, now can we.

Of course, Mark Perry was a little more dry in his language than me. Maybe didn’t mock it so much. But that’s why I think the right-wing media is best for learning about the different dimensions of war diplomacy in the Middle East.

Left-wing media outlets get too incensed over the fact that the United States is involved in such ridiculous entanglements in the Middle East. So I can never get past the outrage to actual analysis of what the hell is going on.

I need to read the work of someone deranged enough that they can write dispassionately about global war to understand the causes and connections of global war.

To Be Incorruptible V: If You’ve No Shelter You’ll Have No Peace, Research Time, 25/04/2017

Continued from previous . . . I find a lot that’s valuable in Machiavelli. But there are limits, of course. Someone like him writing in the 1530s is in a very different historical position than someone like me writing in the 2010s.

I mean, the reasons why are obvious, of course. But I want to call attention to one reason in particular – it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of good ideas in the same tradition of materialist radical democracy in the intervening five centuries.

However much I value Machiavelli’s concept of patriotism as devotion to the public good of your community, other questions related to the nature of the community generate troubling answers. Not a reason for rejecting Machiavelli as a whole, but a reason to be careful with how his thought might influence you.

Here’s a serious problem of the 2010s that Machiavelli’s writings can’t break through – the boundaries of a community. Globally, there’s a near-universal political crisis over the nature of the border.

I draw a sword against conspirators;
When think you that the sword goes up again?
Never, till Caesar's three and thirty wounds
Be well avenged; or till another Caesar
Have added slaughter to the sword of traitors.

For decades, we’ve been troubled over the dangers that come from borders in trade, and investment fall away. The erosion of borders in these cases has encouraged explosive social problems as terrible inequalities entrench themselves.

The most intense iteration of border erosion facing the West is state attempts to control the movement of people. Most in our faces is the refugee crisis – literally millions fleeing horrifying wars and oppression across North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Many crowd into slums and makeshift camps like the squalid tent cities at Calais.

I go to Machiavelli thinking there might be an answer to this question in his book on the strengths and safety valves of democratic society. I don’t find the answers I want. Machiavelli, living in a time of wars and invasions, sees in the movement of desperate people only more invasion, violence, and war that desperation has driven to extremes.

Most often, in his era and in the time of Republican Rome, Machiavelli encounters refugees as literal invading armies. If some natural disaster rendered a city-state unliveable, its leaders and people would invade another country’s territory and set themselves up.

War was the only response to what we’d today call a humanitarian crisis. Yet he does describe a material root of the erosion of human capacities for kindness as well as our state borders.

Returning to his golden age of Republican Rome, Machiavelli sees the root of the fear of refugees in what – during that ancient era – were the most common causes of whole cities uprooting themselves.

Resource wars. A drought would ruin a harvest, or a flood would wreck too much farmland, and a city wouldn’t have the material to support itself. All they could do was invade their neighbours and hope to plunder enough loot to sustain themselves.

A battle over scarce resources, made more scarce by massive disasters, would bring ordinarily peaceful cities into deadly conflict. Their means of survival itself was at stake. Life was inescapably fragile. Risk was great, and likely perceived to be greater in the moment.

If there isn’t enough to keep everyone alive, our peaceful ideals can all too easily be pinched into nothing. A flame between two calloused fingers.

It was a catastrophic drought in the late 2000s that drove Syria into upheaval. A time when, in a state with tight borders, there was no longer enough to keep everyone alive and prosperous.

To Be Incorruptible IV: Directions of Force, Jamming, 21/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, you can find a positive, progressive concept of patriotism – knowledgeable devotion to work for the public good of your community and country.

This patriotism of the public good is the patriotism that progressives need to take back from the reactionary and nationalist forces who seem to have a monopoly on patriotism, at least when it comes to public relations. For most of my adult life, folks on the left have been tarred as anti-patriotic.

I came of age at a time when Americans and many Canadians had been overcome with hysteria after the September 11 attacks. We think back on this era with kitsch like Come From Away now, but at the time, a culture of 300,000,000 people were thrown into mass hysteria and rage.

Patriotism was a blunt instrument of intimidation and contempt swung blindly around the Earth’s furniture smashing the architecture of our fragile civilization. It justified the toppling of governments – however grotesque those governments were – and unleashing a never-ending war in the Middle East.

Patriotism was a personality-consuming devotion to country that justified the rapid inflation of the surveillance state. So many patriotic Americans believed the military could do no wrong.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.

As a result, there’s enough military equipment trickling down to police forces that every county with more than four cows got its own squadron of armoured personnel carriers, mortar-proof flak jackets, and enough crowd control gear to evacuate downtown Chicago at rush hour.

Patriotism today means that anyone who believes that maybe we should step back from militarizing your own country is a traitor. Patriotism is all-too-often becoming a victim of nationalism. Less than two decades after America’s most recent great trauma, love of country is flowering into hatred of Muslims, Hispanics, and African-Americans.

Machiavelli is a key figure in the tradition of Western thought that gives us a patriotic antidote to this hellmouth.

His patriotism is distinctly minoritarian* – punching up for your own power. Rather like the original American revolution, actually. Machiavelli’s patriotism is the spirit of revolt against oppression or control. It’s the spirit of the colony becoming a country, of a slave breaking her chains. The spirit of a new beginning.

* I’m saying this to emphasize Machiavelli’s connection with modern radical democrats, particularly Gilles Deleuze’s vocab, a radical democratic vision of reality itself. An ontology for free spirits.

Machiavelli’s patriotism is the creative energy of a new society coming to consciousness as they carve out a niche for themselves in a world of long-established powers. It’s national self-consciousness of a shared desire for freedom.

Patriotism is the desire that others respect and recognize your community as an equal. It’s the same drive as an individual human’s desire to be an equal in her society – only articulated on a cultural scale.

It’s an antidote, for sure. But it has its own problems.

Europe’s Fall? Advocate, 15/07/2015

All the ideas I have for non-fiction books are fundamentally political. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a philosophical exploration of how environmental activism can literally forge a new self-image for our species. The Utopias project will explore how our dreams of building a perfect society inevitably fuel our most destructive politics. 

This photo was taken during Greece's rioting in late 2013.
If the government falls and the economy continues to crash,
there will be more violence in the future.

So all my writing has to speak to the fundamental political conflicts of my time. And in general, I think we should all think more about the political conflicts that span the globe. It’s easy to read a few quick articles about the Greek crisis, the war in Syria, or the American election and consider yourself informed. But have you thought?

I watched the humiliation of Alexis Tsipras and the people of Greece with terrible dismay and sadness. I felt crushed. It wasn’t just because the terms of the new agreement – mass privatization, new taxes, slashing pensions, no true debt relief – are so harsh, even the International Monetary Fund is critical. It wasn’t just that Anglea Merkel framed the harsh terms explicitly as punishment to the Greek people for defying the terms of EU technocrats. 

The history of Europe had long been about war, domination, violence, and empire. The European Union was founded as a way to overcome that heritage and build a political culture of brotherhood across the continent. Instead, it’s become the engine of one country’s dominance over the continent. The idea of European solidarity, after last weekend, is a joke, and the world is worse off because of it.

Even worse, the collapse of European solidarity has left its economically depressed countries (Greece, and also Spain, Portugal, Italy, the rest of the southeast) vulnerable to home-grown violent political movements. Racist government has already taken hold in Hungary, whose government plans to build a wall along its eastern border to stop the flow of refugees from the Syrian war and Serbian migrants. As Syriza falls, Golden Dawn will almost surely rise, and the politics of racism and violence against minorities will become a major force in European society again.

Vladimir Putin may look ridiculous to us, but his comical
propaganda is received as the word of a national hero in
his own country. A lot of us in the West have to face the
fact that we're completely ignorant about Russian culture.

All of this comes as Russia is growing increasingly aggressive in Europe. I’m not just talking about the civil war in Ukraine, but general belligerence toward countries near its border. Russian officials have threatened that Sweden will face consequences if its government joins the NATO alliance, as it’s considering. The Russian air force regularly flies military planes over Estonia.

Max Fisher’s investigation for Vox.com of Russia’s foreign and military policy influencers is enlightening about the genuine danger Europe faces. Putin and his circle among the military, his party, and ex-KGB businessmen and politicians genuinely feel threatened by the United States. 

Returning to the new century’s biggest fool, their fear goes back to the Bush Administration. The invasion of Iraq to cause regime change and build democracy at the barrel of a gun in the Middle East terrified Vladimir Putin. He knows he isn’t a democrat, and he remembers the Cold War. There’s a general presumption, Fisher discovered, in Russia’s political and military elite that the only reason the United States isn’t similarly destabilizing or attacking Russia for regime change is because of the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. 

Russia’s current imperialist destabilization of independently-minded border states (Ukraine, Georgia) is about building a buffer of friendly, controllable regimes to keep the United States army from going after them directly. For Putin, Russia’s greatness depends on the military and economic subjugation of Europe, because he believes that Europe’s goal for its east is the collapse of Russia.

We in Western democracies forgot that Russia was a powerful, dangerous country since the end of the Cold War. Not only did Francis Fukuyama temporarily convince us that History had ended, but Russia in the 1990s was a basket case country whose economy had collapsed, whose state assets were in the hands of decadent oligarchs, and whose President Boris Yeltsin was a drunken buffoon.

We North Americans also forget that militarized, racist,
violent nationalism never went away in Europe. In
Eastern Europe, it continued to thrive, fostered by
economic and cultural isolation and the belligerent
influence of its national Orthodox Churches.

But Russians never stopped being afraid of the United States, never really considered Western democracies allies. This is why Russia is seriously considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons if NATO were to send its armies to defend its Baltic members from attack. The war that would result from this kind of brinksmanship would set the continent on fire and kill millions of people in months. 

However much Merkel’s government might be concerned with the growth of Russian hostility and paranoia toward Europe and the United States, she’s doing a terrible job of managing it. A fallen, chaotic Greece would be the perfect place for a Golden Dawn government to install itself as a military dictatorship after Syriza falls. 

Their white supremacist values would see the Golden Dawn Greek government likely withdraw from the EU and NATO (a Western, democratic alliance), disappear Syriza members and supporters, suppress more moderate opposition figures, and either deport or massacre Syrian refugees and Greek ethnic minorities. Such a belligerent, anti-EU government would be a perfect ally for Putin’s Russia.

The last century’s totalitarian movement arose, in part, from popular disgust with democracy’s inability to fight economic depression. We should be serious about the possibility that it could happen again. That’s why I’m writing my next book of political philosophy, to grapple with how easily democratic freedom can fall.

Can There Be Social Revolution Without Blood? Research Time, 26/06/2015

We live in a violent world. There was a video circulating around my Facebook friends a while ago that analyzed the data of all the killings and deaths during the Second World War, which was making the point that, by economy of scale, we live in a remarkably peaceful world.

But even though we’re far from the constant mass slaughter of the Second World War, we still live in a world where organized crime, civil conflicts, and wars between states kill many every day. I wrote yesterday, in part, about how I think we should all honestly admit that the multi-front war in the Middle East – interconnected conflicts in Libya, Syria and Iraq, and Yemen with participants and bankrollers from overseas – is the Third World War.

Today's American face of conservatism, reaction,
and racism.

Slowly working on a giant book of philosophy about political and social revolution means I have to confront the problem of justifying violence. My ultimate conclusion will be very anti-violence and anti-war, but I know I’ll have to accept that there’ll inevitably be some violence in any serious political change. 

Think about the most obvious example, given events of the last week in Charleston. #BlackLivesMatter and the affiliated mass protests in Ferguson, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, and elsewhere throughout North America, in the most optimistic case, can radically transform society in the United States. 

If American society truly learns the lessons that these demonstrations and conversation offer, then the movement will have produced genuine and transformative social progress. But the cost in murdered people is already so high. One of the major questions underlying my Utopias manuscript is whether social progress is worth that violence and death, and whether a cost-benefit analysis is even appropriate. My thoughts right now on the subject are that it’s more of a perversion.

The problem of violence in social change is why I’m going back to Marinetti and the Italian Futurists as a central philosophical source. They express an admirable energy to smash the conservative, mothballed social structure and elite that hold society back. Read Marinetti’s manifestos, and you can see clearly why I call the Futurists proto-punks.

But their ideology is terrifying. It calls for humanity and the entire Earth to be remade through industrial technology, literally the mechanization of man. It calls for the totalitarian governance of society to mobilize people for constant industrial production. A world without forests; a paved world, every road a highway. His dream of a greater Italy is an Italian colonial empire that stretches farther than the greatest reach of the Caesars’ Rome. 

Marinetti calls for permanent revolution, the constant production and flow of “courage, power, and energy” to overcome the old before they become entrenched in positions of power and calcify a culture. And his revolution is violent: bloodletting and war. It’s a combination of rebellion and patriotism, because the revolution’s purpose would be to inject your society with the courage and energy to make it a great power. 

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, another face
of conservatism, reaction, and repression sitting at
the heart of the Third World War.

Dealing with this contention will require a lot of thought about what violence can achieve, and when it’s unfortunately necessary. The only response to many of the tyrants in the Middle East, the site of the Third World War, is organized violence. Bashar Assad would never leave office through the peaceful demands of demonstrations. Same with the Saudi and Jordanian monarchy, the Hamas government of Gaza, and the repressive military dictatorship of Abdel al-Sisi in Egypt.

Yet the best hope for peace in Israel is the voice of groups like Meretz, who call for reconciliation and sacrifice in the name of building a peaceful nation of two states. They’ve chosen the most difficult path, which is also the most admirable one. 

The central theme of Utopias is the tension between violence and social revolution. How we achieve our dreams of a better world and the substance of those dreams.

• • •

Reading list, to supplement this. Hannah Arendt’s voice will be enormously important to working through this problem. After mulling over Marinetti, I realized I should look into some of the writings of Vladimir Lenin on revolution, and Mao Zedong on the concept of permanent revolution. And Alain Badiou’s elaborations on Mao’s philosophy.

Playing the ideas of Antonio Negri and Etienne Balibar off each other will be very productive too. Negri has already been very influential on my political thinking over the last few years.