Teaching Prosperity in the Underground, Composing, 29/07/2018

So it’s been almost a week since the last post. I didn’t mean to do this on purpose – it’s just been a busy week. Thankfully, it’s mostly been busy with some promising business opportunities starting to come together.

And sometimes, just some incredibly long days. So long that I’d run out of energy before getting down to write. At least to write this, as I’ve mostly been working on other things that I actually get paid for. The blog is meta – a writing project about my writing projects – meta takes a back seat to actual.

I'm one person, not a mechanical writing machine. I'm powered by
food, coffee, and serotonin.

I’ve started work on a small media project that will involve interviews, and I’m starting to line those up for later in August. More updates to come.

But there are some other interesting developments in my teaching job as well. As you might remember, I published my review of Raphael Sassower’s book The Quest for Prosperity last week. I read it months ago, and only got around to writing it all now.

But that means I’ve had a few months to stew over its arguments and ideas. I think the book does come up short in some areas. But its critical chapters on the political economy of the 21st century global economy are wonderfully insightful.

There's a lot going on in those early chapters of The Quest for Prosperity that I couldn’t fit in all their detail into the main review. I only had so much space and so much time to write the thing. But in working over the ideas, I've begun incorporating them into my teaching work.

To give you an update, I’m the head of a program in Business Administration at a small private college. We’re using a standard set of textbooks, but I’m working on lecture content that itself goes beyond just those lines.

For example, I’m not about to present uncritically a map from Freedom House ranking the economic freedom of different countries around the world. I’m not going full communism in there. I’m just asking students questions about what economic freedom means to them, whether they ultimately agree with Freedom House’s terms, and how to articulate their differences.

The marketplace should be a friendly place.

Actually criticizing some aspects of business school orthodoxy as part of the program is turning into a pretty effective value proposition for the place. Unfortunately for the rest of North American civilization, this is how we stand out from the crowd.

One idea of Sassower’s that I’ve incorporated into my program’s business lectures is how he distinguishes between markets and capitalism. Markets are a matter of what Adam Smith called “truck and barter,” small exchanges among community members that add up to mutual benefit.

Capitalism as an ethical attitude is a spirit of competition, where you can all too easily see another person’s benefit as a potential loss for you. Worse yet, you expect others to see your benefits the same way you see theirs. So you become paranoid, aggressive, and suspicious.

Solidarity is broken. Friendship is impossible.

Manuel DeLanda covered the differences of markets and capitalism in a book published more than 20 years ago. But he had an ontological focus on the macroeconomics of the massive capital flows that industrialization and colonialism powered.

Sassower’s emphasis on political economy foregrounds moral principles and ethical attitudes, so we can see the transformation of a society’s values along with their economic system. Good is no longer giving benefits to your community, but leading your community as a function of your wealth. You don’t want to be part of a community – you want to own it.

Conceiving Prosperity Again, Composing, 23/07/2018

If all goes well, this is going to be a very different kind of website in a few months. It’s why I might not post here as frequently as I have before. It will be the first good reason behind any sustained pauses in blog updates I’ve had in nearly a year.

So I came home from the gf’s place Sunday afternoon and after I unwound, I started work on my review of Raphael Sassower’s book, The Quest for Prosperity. It’s not quite finished yet, though I wanted to get it done by now. But I don’t have much longer, and it should still go live by Thursday at SERRC.

A key idea I’m writing about in that review is the notion that civic institutions aren’t sufficient to prevent the rapacious activities of oligarchs. I think our current political moment seems to be demonstrating that. What American Trumpism shows is that institutions – despite all the structural precautions that may exist – can always be corrupted somehow.

Shepard Fairey drew this image of Ronald
Reagan on a wall in the Little Tokyo
neighbourhood of Los Angeles in 2011, as
part of a public art initiative called the
Freewalls Project. He had the support of
the city's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Image by Wally Gobetz via Flickr /
Creative Commons

I think it’s a bit of shortcoming in Sassower’s analysis. But only in the sense that landing a crew on Luna is a shortcoming in that we eventually need to get to Mars.

Sassower, in the latter chapters of his book, asks what kinds of civic institutions can best guide people to socialize each other into communitarian moralities, where oligarchical personal greed is less likely to develop. He identifies several key ethical principles, and a few very intriguing examples among existing institutions and organizations.

I can probably add to his list of example institutions, given what I’ve been reading lately as well. I’m thinking of how Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes the ethics and socialization paths of Ontario’s Indigenous societies.

It’s a life that’s called Nishnaabewin, and I’m going to talk about my own engagements with these ideas, including how I want to use them in my own work, later on. As you can imagine, it’s probably going to get awkward.

So we have our guidelines and we have our models. But those guidelines and models aren’t enough because institutions alone can’t do anything when power imbalances grow.

Here’s an example to illustrate what I’m trying to say. Because I’m at the point in the review where this is what I’m trying to say, and I’m having a tough time articulating it.

Let’s say you’re a claimant in a civil case. Doesn’t matter if you’re technically in the plaintiff’s or defendant’s chair. All that matters is that you’re making a claim with the help of your legal defence, and the other side is making their claim too.

In terms of your civil rights, you’re both equal. That’s what equality before the law means – the institutions regard you as equal claimants whose dispute will be settled according to reason. But in terms of your material resources, you aren’t equal.

You can tell how unequal you are when you see your opponent walk in with Alan Dershowitz as his counsel, and you’re sitting next to a snot-nosed, freshly graduated, already-drunk part-timer.

Material power dynamics overcome nominal equality in the context of civic institutions. This fact is a powerful reason why it’s so difficult to overcome greed – no matter the law, money is always power. Now what do you do about that?

Paradoxes of Democracy I: Undermining Trust, Research Time, 21/03/2018

So I’m working on a white paper on democratic governance for a small Toronto think tank this week. It’s a format I’m still getting accustomed to, but I’m hammering out the first draft right now to get my ideas and arguments clear. Then I’ll wrangle it into the step-by-step format the group needs.

The bulk of the paper is a discussion of the reasons why popular mobilization is both central to democracy and an incredible danger to it. Since online social media is a powerful facilitator of revolutionary mobilization, I’m going to propose a brief policy framework to make sure such mobilization doesn’t too easily get hijacked by reactionary or fascist ideas.

A little late, I know. But all policy ultimately becomes catchup in a contingent world.

See, when I’m talking about revolutionary mobilization, I’m not just talking about the Arab Spring, or Black Lives Matter, or the Stoneman Douglas movement for gun control. I’m also talking about pro-Russian conspiracy mongering about Ukraine, and Pizzagate.

The fascists of kleptocracy. One successful for nearly a decade in that
mode. One is still getting started, so might actually be stopped.

You typically can’t equivocate these. My own sympathies are clear. I’m no fan of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, but if you’re going to understand the mobilizations on their behalf, you have to do something that a lot of us on the progressive side are uncomfortable with.

You have to understand why a fanatical Trumpist believes themselves on the morally right and just side of America’s political conflict.

Get yourself into the headspace of someone who really believes that Barack Obama installed authoritarian communist loyalists throughout the United States government, which Hillary Clinton systematically looted, and that Donald Trump is the saviour of American virtue fighting corruption at all levels of society.

No one is mobilized without believing their own mission to be the right one. In this example, they’re part of the group of Americans defending Donald Trump while he cleans up the corruption of the Democratic Party.

I think completely differently. But I share faith in a virtue – that democratic society demands governance based on trust. Trumpists have seen a betrayal of that trust, and are fighting to restore it.

The framework of their revolution is admirable. It’s the content I have a problem with, but the content has its own problems.

The Highest Nobility Is Our Virtue, Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls, Reviews, 02/07/2017

How much is going on in “The Doctor Falls,” really? Was I right to save the entire entry on this two-part story for the second week? Honestly, I think I was.

Was this also a scheme to boost a little visibility on Patreon once I start promoting my upcoming book of Capaldi Doctor Who essays? Honestly, I’ll openly tell you that of course it is.

The next few months of 2017, leading up to Peter Capaldi’s actual regeneration in the Xmas Special, will see me actually paying some attention to my Patreon page. I’ll be posting old Doctor Who philosophical reviews a couple of times each week, just to encourage some attention, and driving some social media attention to the page as well.

"The Doctor Falls" provides the narrative gravity of the beginning of a
(21st century Doctor Who style of a) regeneration story by bringing
powerful ideas out of a small setting. The Doctor's greatest nobility is
in the utterly innocuous, a setting without spectacle. Not the whole
Earth at risk, but just a small community of people.

Each of these old posts will be reposted through my Facebook fan page, and through Patreon too. The goal will be attracting a larger audience than my current small set of patrons to fund a larger project – re-editing the old essays, expanding some ideas, and ultimately launching my own book on Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

What more significant place to splash the first step of that promotional campaign than in my review of “World Enough and Time,” and “The Doctor Falls.”

The Weight of the Occasion

“The Doctor Falls,” as an episode of Doctor Who, was written so carefully that almost every line was maximally portentous. Steven Moffat has written eleven season finales or stories with the same symbolic importance.* What do I mean here, when I talk about the symbolic importance of a story.

* I'm counting “A Good Man Goes to War,” “Angels Take Manhattan,” all three “X of the Doctor” stories, and “The Husbands of River Song,” as having the same symbolic importance as a season finale. You’ll see why when I answer the above question.

Let’s start from a common theme that tends to occur in a lot of Doctor Who stories these days. Quite often – but especially so under Moffat’s tenure as creative director and in his stories – 21st century Doctor Who stories tend to include ethics statements for the character.

There's no more epic, intense moment in Doctor Who like a regeneration
story. It's when the entire show literally transforms.

There’ll be some moment in the story where the Doctor or some other character will make a big, powerful statement, highlighted by the narrative and the cinematic emphasis,** about why the Doctor does what he does.

** Big, rousing theme music. An arresting change in camera technique, often focussing more on close-ups to showcase emotionally evocative and powerful performances. Usually occurs at a turning point or a climax in the narrative.

This statement may be in the form of a speech, or an event. Here, it reiterates the point that Moffat made in “Time of the Doctor,” that you take a stand to protect people because the gesture of kindness itself justifies who you are. To be fundamentally kind is to put yourself entirely on the line to protect innocent people under siege.

An Improved Second Draft

Matt Smith’s regeneration story was a wonderfully epic statement of that theme, though the experimental format of “Time of the Doctor” kind of obscured the statement itself.

The extended time frame of that story – an entire community of people growing around the Doctor for centuries as he protected them from an intergalactic siege – kept us from building an emotional connection with any characters.

“The Doctor Falls,” makes, as well as excellent

SPOILERS!!

I loved the madness of the structural complexity that Steven Moffat
achieved in "Time of the Doctor," but I did find that it made the
Doctor into more of a fairy-tale himself than a character. That
fit the imagery Moffat was bringing to the Matt Smith era, but
it also showed a limit of where those images could work.

an excellent contrast. Where “Time of the Doctor” revelled in its jerking, piecemeal, patchwork of a narrative, “The Doctor Falls” keeps things simple. There’s one community, and we’re in it for a mere few weeks. We’re introduced to this community first, a whimsical solar farm under regular siege from the primitive Cyber army.

The cast from “World Enough and Time” breaks into this story and change everything. It’s an excellent example of one type of story – a rural horror story with a few BBC-copyright elements – being smashed into by a crew of sci-fi immortals.

We’re allowed to focus on a few key characters of this rural horror story, the girl Alit and the community matriarch Hazran. We get to know them well enough as an hour-long story can for a couple of supporting characters.

But they carry through to the end of the story, and provide a grace point for Nardole leaving the TARDIS crew. It’s a nice return to the old Doctor Who tradition of companions leaving for a new home, as does Bill.

We follow the same five main characters through the episode. Nardole grows closer to the community. Bill comes to grips with her cybernetic zombification. The Doctor and the Masters battle over whether the villain will ultimately turn.

What I loved best about Michelle Gomez's Master was the stealthy
coldness she kept under her quirky, smirking social personality.

Master of Her Domain

I saw some initial reviews of the episode that called it, “the battle for Missy’s soul.” I mean, that rather missed the point of who Missy actually is. Michelle Gomez and John Simm aren’t playing different characters – they are both the same person.

This is why I think it was a mistake to keep referring to Gomez’s Master as Missy. It implies that she’s actually someone other than the Master. It was brilliant move introduce so casually transgender regeneration.*** It was typical to undercut it with the irreverent playfulness of a Steven Moffat who’s so overjoyed with his own jokes that he’ll throw out exactly the wrong number too many.

*** And tease it in a so-not-really-a-throwaway line.

Understanding the true nature of the Master’s storyline in this episode means knowing all the way through that John Simm is Michelle Gomez for the same reason David Bradley is Peter Capaldi. Gomez and Simm are the Master.

This is a battle, of sorts, between the Doctor and the Master over what kind of person the Master will eventually be. It’s the story of a man seeing his own future and doing everything he can to reject it, and the older one has a few last doubts that this change in life is the right one.

John Simm's Master was – aside from being the only credible one
available – the best contrast for Gomez's most empathetic Master
ever. He was, of all of the major Masters, the one more thoroughly
consumed with hate and rage.

It’s an absolutely beautiful Time Lord story to tell, but one that you could never play with the Doctor. There’s been a constancy to the Doctor pretty much since the Daleks, which prevents you from thinking about the character like this.

For one thing, we see so much of the Doctor as a character – it’s their show, after all – that you don’t really get a big enough gap in our knowledge of him to get such a radical break as Simm to Gomez. Simm’s Master is literally from a totally different era – the Davies era.

Simm’s Master is solidly a Davies creation as well. That frenetic, feverish energy – the sheer giddy delight in the possibilities of the universe.**** Gomez’s Master is speaking of Davies just as much as she is of Simm when she whispers how she so loved the flaming power of being him.*****

**** Contrasting Moffat’s era to Davies’, especially being able to take in the entire Moffat era in memory, truly does show how very rooted in the theatrical gay aesthetic the previous era was.

*****Clearly, Moffat also knows that theatrical aesthetic just as well as Davies. He can see it – he just can’t write it.

This is a fitting end to Gomez's Master. Of course, as soon as two
Masters got together, it could only end with the two betraying
each other at the same moment. Betraying their ostensible allies
is an essential part of the Master's character. But maybe not
anymore.

Gomez’s Master is a cerebral eccentric, a seether. The differences between Gomez and Simm as characters power their story. It’s a story that still, despite the younger man’s intentions, profoundly transformed the Master as a character.

Don’t think that “You won’t regenerate” line is at all sincere. Doctor Who will technobabble its way to a new Master in a few years, whenever Chibnall or some future writer thinks of a good story for her. No, this is the end of Gomez’s Master, and Moffat has given the next writers of Doctor Who a wonderful gift.

What Is a Hero?

Gomez’s Master ended in a moment of genuine goodness – she was at the beginning of an act of kindness, of becoming genuinely heroic. She was already there, and it was utterly justified because she did do it without recognition, as the ethical standard of her season arc said.

To be good without any prospect of recognition or reward is an act of the supreme virtue – kindness. That’s exactly what the Doctor says as the two Masters are leaving the village. Kindness is a good life in itself because of the nobility of kindness – it’s a life without ulterior motive, at its most profound.

You can tell lies, have some hidden motives, because these are petty hypocrisies. It is most profoundly noble to do what you can for others in need with no expectation of your own aggrandizement because you don’t need reputation for the sake of your own self-worth.

The Xmas Special is clearly going to be extremely entertaining, and
the collision of these two Doctors will make for remarkable new
story possibilities. It'll probably be the happiest regeneration
story that we've ever gotten since at least John Hurt's Doctor.

The Doctor has always been this kind of character – pretty much since the second-last episode of “The Daleks.” That’s why such a complex multiple-Doctor story as what the Master went through here ever happen? No matter what can happen with a multiple-Doctor story, the Doctor never stops being a decent person.

The Master has chosen that kind of nobility. From now on, she can no longer be a villain because she has been kind. The Master always had kind of a limited act before now – the same kind of cartoonish villainy Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts thought of. Doctor Who’s very own scenery-chewing Snidely Whiplash.

Overcomplicated evil schemes, the quest for power over the universe, the ruthless embrace of destruction, the gloating obsession with the Doctor. It was as reliable as Daleks shouting “Exterminate!” while they conquer and destroy.

The Master is something different now. An ex-villain in Doctor Who. Someone who has the capacity to commit horrifying acts, who has a history of doing so, but has now turned against it.

The next Master doesn’t have to be a villain. She can be a chaotic, devious sage. A demented and depressed blend of Kali and St. Francis of Assisi. A mad inventor tearing worlds apart in absent-minded enthusiasm. A dedicated revolutionary in too much love with her own violent zealotry.

Michelle Gomez is probably the most significant actor to play the
Master in the character's entire history, simply for incubating so much
more possibility for the character than has ever existed before.

All those are possible directions for the Master’s character that I could think of in a minute’s thinking three hours after seeing where Moffat’s story and Gomez’s performance took her in “The Doctor Falls.” Chris Chibnall is being handed a beautiful present to play with in his era – a Master with more potential than the character’s ever had!

The Weight of the World

Season finales, companion departures, and regenerations are stories that, in the 21st century era of Doctor Who, are moments where the entire ethic of Doctor Who as a show and the Doctor as a character are summed up.

That format gets a slightly different mix every time, depending on what kind of event is the primary reason to maximize symbolic weight. Most sensibly, symbolic power gets its maximum hit from regenerations or companion departures.

The entire show has anchored itself around these characters, so the departure of a lead actor requires a moment of thematic summation. Their story climaxes, giving us the perfect moment to hear what Doctor Who is for this moment, for this companion, for this Doctor.

I could say many wonderful things about Bill. Pearl Mackie is
brilliant when she plays maximum soul-shattering emotional
intensity. Those moments were essential to Bill's story arc
throughout the season. Her transformation into an interstellar
proteus alongside a same-sex life partner already sounds like
the most awesome ending for a companion in the history of
Doctor Who. More about this arc in the book version, I think.
Bill's transformations will be the focus of my "World Enough
and Time" essay.

It wasn’t always this way. But our era of television has viewers that watch it with a special eye toward thematic resonance and meaning. Television literacy understands ideas and symbols with the same ease as plot, performance, and music. We’re pretty much all critics now, in the very good sense of the term.

What does the Doctor say? Not just those words about kindness, but a very existentialist version of them. Where you stand is also where you fall. Stake the possibility of your life or death on one moment.

What kind of person will you be in that moment when you face the possibility of death? That’s the core question of nobility. What is the most impressive and awesome character to embrace at such a critical moment?

Such a character is most inspirational to us ethically – in terms of our virtues – what makes us the best kind of people we can be. What kind of character uses all of humanity’s capacities in their optimal arrangement?

The kind person. That’s the entire ethical message of Doctor Who.
• • •
Read the full set of essays on this year's season of Doctor Who.
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye
Smile
Thin Ice
Knock Knock
Oxygen
Extremis
The Pyramid at the End of the World (1)
The Pyramid at the End of the World (2)
The Lie of the Land
The Monks Trilogy
Empress of Mars
Eaters of Light

Can You Rely on Human Goodness? Research Time, 22/06/2017

A short post today. A fable from Alexander Hamilton about the right and wrong kinds of freedom. Paraphrased from Federalist #23.

So the first constitution of the United States – the confederal constitution – had a specific process for how the national government was to build its army and national defence forces.

In that process, the federal government would make requisition orders out to the individual states. Each of them would give weapons, soldiers, and money according to their needs.

The USS Constitution, built in the earliest days of the republic, at
a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where else could all of
that money come from but the American government itself?

The states would, of course, give freely and faithfully to their federal government. After all, these requests would be for the sake of national defence – the security of all American states acting in solidarity through the efforts and leadership of their federal government.

Such strong bonds of friendship across American state leaders lasted just as long as we would all expect. It took barely a decade for all the Thirteen respond to such requests with mocking laughter.

Every state was a miser. All the leaders from the Carolinas to New England – and especially Delaware – refused to give more than a few trinkets, some spare nickels trickling up from the state treasuries to the capitol.

Where did their virtue and patriotism go? Never trust a leader to be a virtuous patriot. As soon as someone hits the governor’s mansion, that treasury was only for them and their people. Certainly not those people, he’d say, talking about a fellow American. A New Yorker and a Virginian say it to each other.

If the federal government didn’t have the power to raise its own national defence, the leaders of states would starve them of it. So alienated from their fellow Americans people were in the 1780s.

Dank Enough for the Dreamers, Research Time, 08/06/2017

You read John Jay and you feel all the brutality of Henry Kissinger. In a few pages, he describes a world of war. Not constant war, not a world without any peace at all.

Jay’s world is of inevitable war – the knowledge that whatever peace and community exists between peoples at some time, corruption will erode that brotherhood like a swift river along clay banks. Best to make yourself one people, to avoid that old killing hatred.

Since I’ve already painted Alexander Hamilton as the pragmatic idealist of the group, you might think that he gives the uplifting account of national unity. It’s true – Hamilton’s vision of patriotism is inspiring.

I saw some prideful, self-aggrandizing, embarrassing patriotism during
the Harper years here in Canada. I'm thinking particularly of his
tasteless celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812.
The government arranged a spectacle of imperialist military history,
basking in the glory of Canada as the faithful northern diamond
of the British Empire. Gag me.

It’s also rooted in a vision of humanity that will tear each other apart for the sake of ego and fleeting glory, musket bullets turning to metal teeth devouring the flesh of our brothers.*

* I listened to Bob Dylan’s strangely haunting, fragmentary vernacular poem of a Nobel acceptance lecture the other day. I feel like throwing down a few naturalistic metaphors. It’s the Herman Melville in me.

Yes, says Hamilton, commercial trade and the multicultural fermentation that goes with it builds an impressive brotherhood among peoples. But those long relationships ultimately can’t stop war and hatred arising. It’s always possible for long-loving brothers to throw punches and draw blood.

A collection of neighbours becomes a people when they develop a shared concept of patriotic solidarity, and devote themselves, at least a little, to its force. That solidarity among a community is the productive kind of patriotism.

Patriotism is the virtue that grows out of that feeling of solidarity in each individual. That virtue in turn makes community solidarity possible, and encourages its growth. But such virtuous patriotism can become corrupt when solidarity turns to pride.

A prideful soul aggrandizes itself. A prideful man seeks the honour and glory of demonstrating his superiority over others. A prideful people, says Hamilton, seeks the same. The corruption of patriotism is a raging desire throughout a people to aggrandize themselves – to demonstrate their greatness by subjugating and humiliating others.

The patriotism of solidarity consolidates communities and individuals into a people. One of the essential beliefs such a virtue of patriotism generates is the notion that all of our countryfolk rise and fall together.

The patriotism of pride corrupts that solidarity through the belief that our rise requires others’ fall.

When a Legendary Fear Is True, Doctor Who: Extremis, Reviews, 22/05/2017

As a story, “Extremis” is kind of old hat for Steven Moffat, as my senior colleague in Doctor Who criticism Phil Sandifer has said. Yes, there’s metafiction piled on deep in this episode. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

I want to talk about a demon. I want to talk about the most famous demon in the history of Western philosophy. That demon inspired “Extremis.” So

The Doctor decides that he will not give up in the face of his unreality,
his existence as a simulation of whatever the real thing would be. The
most accurate simulation would never give up anyway. That's what
"extremis" means in this story. That your virtue only shows itself in
moments of genuine extremity, in times of great risk and danger.
The refusal to meet your illusory nature with despair is, from an
existential perspective, the bravest thing you can do.

SPOILERS!!

naturally. The most philosophically intriguing part of this story is its central conceit. The evil demon is true. It’s usually one of the first problems that incoming university philosophy students learn. It consumes you when you first hear it – its imagery and implications are so powerful.

The power of that question – What if our entire reality is unreal? An illusion? – is immense. It can be a cornerstone of madness.

The moments of doubt that your existence matters at all can manifest as a dissociation, an all-too-common feeling of emptiness. What does it even mean to say that your existence is unreal?

Live the Revolution

In pop-cultural terms, it’s about living in a simulation. The Matrix is the obvious touchstone. Even when I was first studying René Descartes’ Meditations in my first ever philosophy class, my teacher Jim Bradley compared his evil demon problem to The Matrix. The two scenarios aren’t quite the same, though. But “Extremis” blends them both with a powerful ethical lesson.

The Matrix is a simulation of reality. So is the projected world we uncover in “Extremis.” The difference is that the world of The Matrix is a simulation for the people in it, but the people are real. The people of The Matrix are real people – organisms trapped in a simulated reality.

To realize this prompts revolution. You break out of the machine, build yourself a new life in this messy reality, and prepare to dive back in. Though there’s really no reason why you should dive back in, especially given how poorly the sequels went.

But this isn’t what “Extremis” presents us. Keanu still has one thing to fall back on – his physical body. That remains real, even if its nature is hidden from him in the simulated world. No, Steven Moffat is presenting us with something very different here.

A Prestigious Heritage

“Extremis” is based around the meditation on the evil demon. When you read Descartes, this is probably the most affecting thing he ever wrote. It goes something like this.

Philosophy, as a discipline and as a tradition, tends to make a fetish of
the truth. It's unfortunate, because truth is too important a matter to
demand fidelity to it or its apparent implications. Veritas in this story
is supposed to be the proof that your life is meaningless.

Descartes structures his Meditations on First Philosophy as an attempt to isolate some certain truth about existence. His first two (of six) chapters aim to break down our supposed certainties about reality, what we take for granted.

So he brings up the possibility that what we experience may be an illusion. All our perceptions could be based on mistakes or falsify the real nature of the world. So far, so Matrix. But Descartes goes further.

He goes for a world-shattering image. He asks you to imagine that your entire physical body – everything you know even through your proprioception, your material selfhood itself – is an illusion.

As well, imagine that the fundamental rules of your entire universe are illusions too. I’m not just asking you to imagine that 2 + 2 = 5 or 763. I mean, imagine that even number itself makes no actual sense in the true nature of reality.

So if you can imagine it, then it’s possible. It may not be true, and in fact, it probably isn’t true. But it’s possible.

Cleaving Reality

Possible, but not true. We’re still in a realm of imagination here. It’s a powerful imagination that can revolutionize your way of thinking. Yet that’s always what the meditative tradition was for.

I didn’t always know about Descartes’ influences as a writer and a thinker. I had always been taught a story of Descartes that saw him as a transitional figure between medieval and modern ways of thinking. But that transition was in the form of a radical break.

Descartes was most remarkable for uniting mysticism and the new
discipline of scientific investigation, as it was developing in its
infancy. Mystic science didn't really take, unless that's what you
want to call philosophy.

I learned about Descartes as the inventor of modernity, as much as modernity can be said to have been invented by one man. His thought experiment in The Meditations was, according to the philosophy curriculum I experienced as a young man, the beginning of a distinctly modern idea – the separation of human rationality from nature.

We could call the reality of nature into doubt – even to the fundamental level of mathematical truths. But what we’re never able to doubt is the ongoing action of our own self-conscious minds. Whenever we’re thinking about ourselves, our own act of thinking, we know that this thinking is real.

So reality becomes separate from our minds. Our minds are always certain, are able to justify their own existence. Nature and material reality, on the other hand, is always subject to doubt. Potentially so, anyway. So human thought becomes more real than the world that produces it. At least, that’s how you understand it. Humanity develops one more sophisticated reason to tear our planet indiscriminately to pieces.

How you think that reality is unreal depends on a chilling proposition. What if some omnipowerful evil demon is creating the entire field of reality in which you exist as an illusion, including your body and history?

When Thought Meets Mysticism

But reality’s unreality, and the evil demon that causes it, isn’t supposed to be a terrifying proposition. It was originally, and in Descartes’ hands, supposed to be a foundation for justifying the existence of the divine.

You see, Descartes wasn’t the first one to develop the thought experiment of the evil demon and the unreality of reality. Descartes was the first to develop it in a scientific context, since he was a scientists first and foremost – a mathematician, geometer, and theorist of optics, as well as a philosopher.

In many ways, the monks are an embodiment of living death, the
emptiness of simulated existence. Even their appearance is as the
living dead.

In that sense, Descartes is the beginning of Western modernity. When you’re taught Descartes, he’s presented as the progenitor of modern philosophy. That’s a bit of a stretch when you know the real history. Medieval history.

Descartes didn’t exist in a vacuum. He grew up in a medieval cultural milieu. It’s a world that, in many ways, is very different from our own, obviously. Foremost among medieval European thought was the primacy of religion.

Investigating the world was seen as reading God’s writing and nature in reality itself. The early scientific innovators like Roger Bacon thought they were up to the same thing, developing experimental methods to find different ways of investigating reality, because to know nature is to know the mind of God.

Meditation was one technique to bring a person closer to God as well, to bring them into contact with divinity. The solution to Descartes’ problem was that God – the only source of our concepts of infinity and divinity themselves – guaranteed the reality of reality.

Because we could conceive of God, we couldn’t do it under our own power. Descartes argues this by relying on a medieval rule of metaphysical logic that nothing more perfect – like the concepts of perfection in divinity – could be developed by a less-than-perfect being. They had to come from God, because human being isn’t adequate to generating them.

The thought experiment of the evil demon leading to a communion with God in thought didn’t come from Descartes, though. It was developed by Teresa of Avila, a Jesuit nun who wrote meditative texts.

Because as far as even obvious simulations like Super Mario are
concerned, from their own perspectives, they're as real as Bob Hoskins.

Meditations were popular guides for ordinary people to explore mystical elements of their worlds, and their own minds, through inward contemplation. Being such a heavily Christian culture, the meditative text was a guide to uncovering God in your own thoughts and existence.

Descartes unified that mysticism with a scientific mind-set. That’s why we call him a modern thinker. But we could also call him a medieval man equally accurately.

The Demons Are Real

But I’m not thinking only about Descartes, Teresa, and the Wachowski Sisters. I’m talking about Doctor Who. Particularly the chilling scenario of “Extremis.” Literally, it’s the most extreme place you could take the evil demon problem.

It’s simple, really. The demon is real. He does control your entire reality, having created it as a simulation. Not only are your surroundings illusory, a program running in a massively powerful computer – you are too.

Teresa and Descartes could always rely on the act of meditation itself as the place from which the existence of reality could be justified as a mystic experience. Whether through communion or argument, it didn’t matter. The point was that the evil demon’s trickery could be overcome.

Not so for the Doctor, Bill, and Nardole in this episode. They themselves are also simulations. The horror of their existence is in realizing it. For them, the revolution against the terror of their situations seems to justify the mass suicides we see throughout the episode.

As the Doctor says, if Super Mario realized that he was a character in a video game, he’d delete himself from the whole program so he wouldn’t have to die anymore.

I suppose I should say something about the Master, seeing as "Extremis"
finally reveals that she really is the mysterious creature in the vault.
In a way, this is a return to one of the most sentimental lines in
Russell T Davies' Doctor Who, when the Doctor offers to keep the
Master a prisoner and take care of him, raise him to be a better
person. Faced with this imposition on his life, John Simm's
Master apparently shot himself to escape. Here, Michelle Gomez
answers that quandary: She embraces the possibility of that
change in character as a chance to save her life. The Doctor doesn't
impose that choice, as Tennant's did. He asks, and she says yes.

The Doctor’s solution is brilliant, in its way. Because there is still a material reality that exists. The reality of the actual Earth that the evil alien monks are simulating to aid their invasion. The Doctor of “Extremis” may not be real. But he has a better idea for revolution than simply opting out of the program.

It’s an act of outreach to himself. To speak to himself not by turning inward, as in a meditation, but by turning outward. He communicates to the material Doctor on Earth, as the simulated Doctor from inside the monks’ simulators. A mysticism of materiality.

The Doctor's conclusion about the illusory nature of his own existence in "Extremis" is different than pretty much everyone else in the story. Everyone who reads the Veritas dies by their own hand, having understood that their existence is merely simulated. The Doctor sees the crime and the terror of this idea and fights against that resignation.

To resign is to admit your powerlessness. To admit powerlessness is to forgo power. Not only is his existence illusory, but even the illusion is based on a crime – a simulation as an intelligence exercise before conquest and destruction. The Doctor knows that the response to evil is never to give in to it, but to fight in whatever way you can.

In the battle for justice and good, life is justified. Even a life that was never real.
• • •
My reviews so far of Peter Capaldi's last full season of Doctor Who.
Oxygen
Knock Knock
Thin Ice
Smile
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye

A Gift For Monstrous Men, Research Time, 11/05/2017

Here’s an analysis from Machiavelli that has some troubling relevance for 2017, as if we needed to be troubled any more than we are already.

In yesterday’s slightly rambling post, I commented on a couple of chapters from Book II of Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It was about how the growth of oligarchy and the corruption of institutions wrecked the people’s faith in democracy.

Yet their freedoms to speak and organize still existed, allowing the faithless and resentful to organize a full overthrow of the democratic institutions they felt were worthless. That was disturbing enough because of how similar the political and social situation in the United States today is to that five century old description.

This is Donald Trump with his friend and longtime business partner,
Uzbek billionaire Lev Leviev, a diamond magnate who rose to the top
of the business class of an autocratic police state dominated by a single
ruthless man. Donald would be envious.

There's a set of chapters in Book III that I find even more disturbing when I watch the open kleptocracy of the Trump family.

Machiavelli writes that a kind, virtuous person dedicated to the public good in their work and life can only thrive in particular circumstances. So what kind of society lets such a good, generous person rise to the top? Where do the nice folks finish first?

Your society has to be dominated by values of equality, respect for everyone, and the fair submission to the rule of law. Not only must we profess that, we actually have to live by those values.

The most successful businesses are the ones who never cheat or cut corners, and provide services and goods that are primarily benefiting society. We have to live diligently, frugal but with an aesthetic sense to appreciate fine things. No one is greedy and no one cheats.

Police and security forces are never out of line, never too rough, always serving and protecting all people equally. No racial biases (conscious or not), no systematic pressures on minorities, no corruption, no allowing solidarity among cops to defend the violent or greedy. Everyone answers to the law not because it’s powerful, but because it’s just.

As I describe this, I find it very hard to believe that such a society has existed for centuries. Machiavelli describes Republican Rome in those terms, but even there, I doubt such harmony was ever universal.

Such a society is utterly unrealistic, but that near-impossibility is the only kind of community where our ethics would actually be adequate to the world. Where doing the right thing always resulted in your benefit, fame, and wealth.

But even the money didn’t matter! Everyone considers more income than would make you and your family pleasantly comfortable utterly unfair and gauche. We would all actually be satisfied with enough to live a nice life, and spend our excess wealth and power on the public good. That would bring everyone happiness.

As a society corrupts itself, says Machiavelli, such virtuous people dedicated to public good find it more difficult to thrive. It’s a downward spiral from the first misstep to ruin. Virtuous, good people have more trouble in society the more greedy people surround them. The greedy’s name for the good is the sucker.

The more corrupt, monstrous men dominate and hold powerful positions in a society, the more public life will be a gift to the monstrous.

To Be Incorruptible III: Our Best Wishes in One Voice, Research Time, 20/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Before you can know if an institution’s structure and rules will lead people to make the best decisions, you have to know what kinds of decisions would be the best.

It sounds like I’m moving in circles. I’m not. I’m looking for presuppositions. The questions that need an answer if you’re going to develop a clear answer to the question you asked in the first place. So what makes a decision good for a community?

This is a question of the common good of a community. Well, what constitutes that common good depends on how we understand good. Are we thinking like a typical utilitarian? Not when we read Machiavelli. Nowhere in the Discourses on Livy does he perform the callous mathematics of a too-simple utilitarian.

His examples of noble behaviour discuss plenty of sacrifices. He praises, in multiple places, the decision of a Roman republican ruler executing his own sons when their actions and personal ambitions put the republic at risk of invasion or tyranny. Machiavelli is no stranger to cruelty to save the common good.

But this isn’t an everyday cruelty. The libertarian right is today’s most popularly powerful philosophy of freedom thanks to modern think tank networks. Think of how they and their founder philosophers think of cruelty in the name of the common good.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

For a libertarian, cruelty in the name of the common good is described with images of a Stalinist omnipresent communist state. Bureaucratic arms control whole industries, billions and trillions of dollars worth of people’s property is expropriated and collectivized. Even on a less grandiose scale, the act of collecting taxes is akin to theft.

This isn’t the kind of common good Machiavelli talks about when he describes the cruelty of necessary sacrifices. The sacrifices of Roman and Italian republicans are rare – they occur only at times of domestic instability, coups, wars, invasions from imperial war machines.

The common or public good, as Machiavelli describes it throughout the Discourses, is for everyone in society to stand before each other in equal dignity. Now, this does require some financial levelling. He describes the corrosive effect on society of too large a class of the idle rich.

These are people whose riches are so great that they encourage laziness and self-absorption. The super-rich are isolated from any association with anyone other than those they employ to serve them. Their money even isolates them from the need to be kind to others. Even the smallest altruism required for minimal participation in civic life disgusts them.

Such people are socially cancerous – their personalities degrade and insult the dignity of everyone around them. The only goods that matter to the idle rich are private goods, that which makes the rich richer. “It is not the private good but the common good that makes cities great.” That’s in Book Two, Chapter 2.

Contrast the private, egomaniacal goods that the idle rich seek with the public goods that democratic citizens seek – You see more clearly what the public good is.

Whatever the situation of your community, whatever problems you face in your economy, society, infrastructure, whatever – If you think with altruism and work together with your neighbours and compatriots, you’ll understand the public good and work toward it.

That altruism is the expression of the best patriotism. As long as altruism is at the heart of community action, you’ll fend off corruption and corrosion.

If you think only of your own personal good and see others only as means to your advancement, enrichment, prestige, and pleasure . . . The word you’re looking for is ‘tyrant.’

Now, this is fine for a clearly defined community. But at the borders, who is and isn't your compatriot gets slippery.

To Be Incorruptible I: The Virtues of Free People, Composing, 18/04/2017

The series of posts I’m starting now is very important to my thought process putting together Utopias the book. I’ll be writing about an answer to the core question of utopian political thinking that I found reading Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.

I’m considering utopian thought at three scales. The most broad scale of thinking, you can call the problem: Figuring out the relationships of our ideals with real-world action, and what of those relationships are best for democratic life.

Make your thinking a little more concrete and it becomes a question. You’re focussing the problem around a particular inquiry. Reading and reacting to Machiavelli’s thinking, that question is: How can we change human nature so that no one will ever be corrupt again?

The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round.
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent.

Increase the concreteness of your thinking one more time. Now you have a hypothesis, a detailed argument responding to that question, an answer. Identify an answer to that question that Machiavelli offers in the Discourses.

I'm going to talk about one answer that he returns to at different points in that book – institutions that engender trust in each other throughout the community, a love of freedom, and a devotion to the public good.

Machiavelli considers those three values to be most important for maintaining a free society. People who hold fast to these values will always be virtuous people, whose lives will include a devotion to public service that strengthens their community.

Since he understands corruption inescapable in life, Machiavelli also concludes that these values won’t dominate a society forever. Spoken like a man who’s worked in government for years.

But you can encourage those values to grow in your society, and promote them in daily life. Institutions – basic frameworks of your community life from birth to death – can boost these values so that people will naturally fall toward them.

I’m not talking about the state in a modern sense, but any powerful organization whose structures and actions shape public morality. It’s been churches or shamanic traditions, groups of elders, elected leaders, any propagator of moral ideas, imperatives, and virtues.

Education is only the most obvious of the institutions that propagate values. Here’s one example that Machiavelli makes pretty explicit. I’ll even give you a direct reference this time – Book One, Chapter 59.*

* If you want to read the book, don’t be intimidated by the number of chapters. They average maybe three pages apiece.

If you run your government on democratic processes, it will tend to increase trust in your society. Yes, today this sounds hilariously unrealistic. But the way democratic institutions are supposed to work, it makes sense.

I mean, I’ll tell you tomorrow, because it’s going to take a while to lay all this out. But I promise you, it’ll make sense.

“She Said Hang the Rich!” Research Time, 11/04/2017

We live in an era when inequality has defined the cracks and fault lines in our society. The American government is ruled by plutocrats who campaigned in the name of returning prosperity to the people, and their base is slowly eroding as those promises are revealed for the hypocrisy they always were.

One indelible image of the psychopathy and hatred of society that
consumes the super-rich is the story of Patrick Bateman. It was the
one hit of Bret Easton Ellis' whole career.

American society – Western society more generally, as well as human society around the planet – is under a lot of pressure from social inequality. Leave aside the racializing crimes of genocide like slavery and the forced relocation of indigenous peoples. They’ve left horrendous scars on American culture and character, but I want to talk about one particular vector of inequality today.

That's the vector of the distinction between the very rich and poor. American society produces multibillionaires who behave like entitled pirates whose riches give them the right to buy citizens and the government.

At the same time, it produces people who are driven so far into debt pursuing education and training, or basic medical care. The United States economic system essentially bankrupts its working people as they try to improve or save their lives. Even keeping an even keel too often results in a life of danger, drudgery, and suffering.

Into this social-political shit tornado comes the words of Niccolò Machiavelli, essentially, I told you so. In his philosophical meditations on Roman Republican history and the chaotic Italian politics of his own time, the Discourses on Livy lay out one way* where modern America has gone wrong.

* Of many concurrent, integrated, interdependent ways.

Today's title comes from the lyrics to a song I've been listening to
since I was a little kid, "Somewhere Down the Crazy River" by
Robbie Robertson.

Democratic government, writes Machiavelli, becomes impossible in a society where there are too many rich people. Now, he’s not necessarily talking about those who’ve become rich through building businesses and industries. These are people who are still working hard running enterprises that raise the public good.

No, Machiavelli’s talking about the idle rich. People who live so drenched in wealth that they don’t even have to do any real work. Actually, the problem isn’t just that they refuse to work for a living.

Even more contemptible and destructive to the common good are people whose absurd wealth isolates them from even the need to be reasonably kind to other humans in daily life. The smallest, most inconsequential act of altruism becomes an enraging imposition on their freedom.

Civic life isn’t empowering for these people. They’re enraged at any suggestion that they give anything of themselves for the common good, or that they owe anyone else in society any generosity. These are the attitudes that tend to come from having been raised in the perverse comfort of extreme wealth.

What to do about them? Let’s just say that Machiavelli doesn’t recommend very pleasant ways of removing these spoiled people from society, or from positions where they could endanger society with their piracy.

I think a growing number of folks today can sympathize with that approach.

A Discourse on Manitoba, Composing, 10/04/2017

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. It’s a book of commentaries on different events in the history of the Roman Republic, where a concept, principle, ethical guideline, or virtue becomes clear through examining a few examples from ancient Rome or his contemporary northern Italy.

I thought I’d try writing today’s post as a piece of writing in the same style.

I work in political activism and in organizing my local social democratic party, the NDP in my part of southwestern Toronto. So I’m interested in news and developments throughout the party around Canada. Here’s a little discourse, inspired by Machiavelli, on one lesson to be learned for democratic spirits everywhere.

Growing Accustomed to Power Encourages Factionalism and Weakness; Their Only Remedy Is Total Defeat

At a party last night, I met someone from Manitoulin, who told me
that she knows people so broken by their family's experience in
residential schools that they don't even know what indigenous nation
they come from – whether they're Cree, Ojibwe, or Iroquois. Wab
Kinew has come through this generations-long crime against
humanity as a strong, virtuous leader. He has the potential to
restore Manitoba's NDP to greatness, and maybe even begin the
long nation-building process of reconciling indigenous and
settler cultures in Canada, so that we can ask their forgiveness
as a people for our attempt to destroy them.

How the New Democratic Party develops in Manitoba is particularly important to the party as a whole. It’s part of the party’s heartland in the prairies, and the only voice in state government for progressive policies and philosophies.

As a province, Manitoba has a lot of disadvantages. Few industries are there, the economy has never been strong beyond Winnipeg, and many of its indigenous communities – a considerable minority of the population – suffer horribly from the trauma of Canada’s genocide machines of the residential schools.

During their 17 years in power over the provincial government, the NDP achieved a lot to build a more fair and equal society throughout Manitoba. Gary Doer was a wise and moderate premier, designing a more fair tax code to invest in healthcare and education institutions.

Doer’s great virtue was knowing how to consolidate the security of his party’s electoral victory in 1999, making modest yet transformative changes to the government to help Manitobans become more prosperous, defending themselves from economic downturn with government services they could rely on and lowering the tax burden of the poor.

Machiavelli’s analytic frameworks focus on the virtues gained from how you react to where fate has placed you. The roots of Doer’s wisdom were in his experience having taken over the NDP when they were in disarray as a party.

Howard Pawley had presided over a party that had descended into rebellion against him and his cabinet, and resigned in disgrace after an election defeat in 1988. Doer rallied the party members throughout the province, and his growing esteem in the eyes of the people slowly rallied enough of them to win after a decade in opposition.

Doer stepped down as Premier of Manitoba after ten years, a man loved by Manitobans and many more across Canada. Greg Selinger took his place. But Selinger had not been shaped by years of building his reputation through public leadership, nor had any years of rebuilding a party from difficult defeats shaped him.

Selinger had arrived at political prominence in the halls of power themselves. He’d grown accustomed to their comfort.

Greg Selinger was a man who was able to walk into power, and so
never understood how fragile power is when you inherit it from
inside its own halls. He may have won elections, but elections are
battles, just like the clashes of armies Machiavelli described. They're
determined by the virtue of combatants and leaders, but also by
contingent events and chance. An election is an institutional
legitimacy for your access to state power, but it doesn't give you
moral legitimacy in the eyes of the people. That takes politics.

Taking power for granted, he quickly revealed himself to have lost the virtues that his predecessor had gained through years of hard work rebuilding the nobility of the NDP in Manitoba, and building the nobility of his own soul. Selinger had never gained power.

The party membership may have voted for him to be their leader, but he had won the party itself no victories. Selinger became the Premier by designation, not victory over the people. Even those victories he did gain, he gained from the seat of power itself.

Selinger reversed his promise not to raise sales taxes, a decision that not only hurt the poor more than the wealthy; the act itself was a transgression against a vow he’d made to the people. The public coffers now had more funds, but they were raised on the backs of the poor and with hypocritical speech.

Selinger’s broken promise made the people reject him. Sensing their leader’s weakness, factions split the NDP caucus. Theresa Oswald, one of Selinger’s trusted ministers, joined with other party leaders to demand his resignation. But the rebellious faction never spoke of regaining trust with the people, instead framing their rebellion entirely in tactical terms.

Selinger’s popularity was so low, he’d be unable to win another election. They argued in terms of the NDP’s ability to keep power over the state, never about the true source of that power, the love and trust of the people.

That Selinger would lose 2016’s election was obvious, an inescapable fact. Now he’s resigned, and the factions themselves are adrift. Separated from the offices of power, they’ve lost the fuel that fired their faction’s engines.

Gary Doer understood that you only have a right to power when you
have earned it through the genuine trust of the people. That's not the
same as winning an election, even though election victory is the
institutional test to gain state power. Just because you can pass one
test on our peaceful battlefields of electioneering doesn't mean you
have a right to the power you gained. His remarkable actions as a
spokesperson for an enlightened, kind government for Manitoba
as opposition leader and Premier earned him that right, when they
earned him the respect of the people.

Now that the power of state control is farther from their grasp, the leaders of Manitoba’s NDP can now focus on the true task of politics – organizing and rallying the people to win their love and trust.

Wab Kinew is an NDP politician that, to my eyes now, holds the greatest promise for this, since there’s a dedication deep in his heart to forge an entirely new social compact between Manitobans and their state.

He’s a flawed man, but has the potential for greatness because of the idealism and strength of his soul. He’s survived the fires of Canada’s century-long genocide against its indigenous peoples without breaking. Such a person has potential for greatness, and the opportunity to rebuild a party whose fundamental values lie in prosperity and progress for all offers a long path of growing nobility.

Restore virtue to politics and you’ll earn the love of the people, who will join you for transformative acts that will bring prosperity, happiness, healing, and hope to all. This is the message of Machiavelli’s Discourses.

Real Republican Freedom I: Perí Genéseos kaí Fthorás, Research Time, 28/03/2017

Remember when I was talking about Rousseau? Well, I’m not doing that anymore. But there’s one thing I saw when I picked up Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, a common idea stood out.

So I’m going to tell you right now – I need a scholar.

The idea is the inevitable fall of any city, any society. All living things are born as pure and strong specimens, but then grow corrupted, decaying as the body turns on itself. From generation there is corruption.

That includes human communities like Machiavelli’s Florence, Rousseau’s Geneva, Livy’s Rome, and my Toronto. But cities don’t experience the corruption of individual organisms, of course. A community doesn’t degrade from cardiovascular failure, auto-immune disorders, or cancers.

Maybe just metaphorically. The corruption of a city is the erosion of public virtue – of dedication to public good, the health of the community, spirit of patriotic brotherhood among citizens.

No, being born into privilege and an ethically corrupt family doesn't
predispose you to selfishness and your own corruption. Of course not.
I mean, fuck, even Barron is playing with toy limos and sports cars.
The kid doesn't even own plastic dump trucks. What kind of
construction magnate's son is this? Oh, right – a construction
magnate who's never had to work for his living.

Here’s a narrative, from early in Machiavelli’s Discourses, of generation and corruption of a city-state. And it can happen remarkably quickly for a society. Maybe a century. The government is established and managed by a virtuous, intelligent, wise prince.

He consolidates power as a monarch, and his ethical personality results in a period of greatness – the people are prosperous, the city is famous for its good works. Then the prince’s sons take over the government.

Raised in privilege, the inherited rulers have none of the virtue and ethical sense of their father. They’re selfish bastards who steal from the citizens and squander the city’s wealth on their own pleasure. So the noblemen get together and stage a coup.

No matter how virtuous and dedicated to public good those nobles may have been, their children will be just as corrupt and self-serving as the princes. So the multitudes themselves overthrow the oligarchs.

Yet after so many years of repetitive corruption, so many regimes that have led to constant disappointment, there’s no faith left in leaders. No one bothers to respect or obey the authorities. Even when they run the city in their name, bitterness and resentment have taken over the public imagination.

No faith left that a leader wouldn’t be hostile to his people. And the republic is destroyed.

That cycle of generation and corruption is cyclical – in Machiavelli’s thinking, it occurs throughout human history, infinitely in both directions. What I’d like from some of my scholar friends is some perspective on how Aristotelian this was.

For almost the entire medieval period, Aristotle’s works were core sources for many of the subjects that are empirical sciences today – physics, cosmology, and biology. I haven’t focussed study on Aristotle since my undergraduate days, taking a few courses from Memorial’s resident Aristotelian scholar.

But I remember many of the basic concepts, and Machiavelli’s (and later, Rousseau’s) account of human societies’ inevitable corruption, collapse, and rebirth strike me as very similar to Aristotle’s ideas.

Would early 1500s Florence still have been shaped by that Aristotelian way of thinking about the world? Would those texts still have provided so many truisms of popular education? One of my historical scholar friends, do let me know, please. . . . To be continued