How to Ground a Social Order, Composing, 10/07/2014

The grand old Peter Kropotkin.

I finished Mutual Aid last night, and found it fascinating. Kropotkin ended the book with a discussion of the rural and urban mutual aid associations that were growing in his time, particularly voluntary associations for poverty relief, the resurrection of communal gardens, farming fields, and meadows, the use of industrial equipment for agriculture, and the nascent union movement among workers in the cities of contemporary Europe and North America. But the ideas that I found most interesting of all, I described mostly in previous posts, and can’t really think of any way to elaborate them further just now.

Instead, I thought about one rhetorical point that Kropotkin made throughout the book, his rebuke to the notion that any resource held in common among a community will be destroyed. This is the tragedy of the commons, originally described by John Locke and for us, recently described again by Garrett Hardin. The analysis goes that, because each individual will take the most immediate material benefit out of any resource (like a farming meadow, pasture, or fish stock), the actions of all of them without restraint of property right or police will exhaust and destroy the resource beyond renewal. Kropotkin says it’s bunk. So do I.

I spoke yesterday about the relatively recent birth of the concept of the radically individualized person, upon which the argument for private property by the inevitably tragic nature of the commons depends. It defines self-interest to be the same as greed, and that the only person whose welfare any of us would ever really care about is ourselves. Such a social order is defined by the war of each against all, and the coercive and violent institutions that keep the peace against the inevitable dissolution of our society.

The entire argument is flawed because it is an expression of dogma. It appeals to a notion of the individual that we have all become too accustomed to thinking is true without actually testing it against the actual behaviour of people. After all, most of our associations with people around us in our everyday lives have nothing to do with accumulating personal wealth and power at their expense. We do our jobs and associate with our friends and neighbours, and are generally quite kind to each other.

Those who do act in such a way as to ruin common goods and profit at the expense and suffering of others are rare enough that we can identify them for what they are and act accordingly. Hobbes and Locke describe radically free individuals as, essentially, assholes. The vision of humanity that Kropotkin and I hold focusses more on human kindness and altruism than egoistic, self-aggrandizing behaviour.

So how do you ground an institutional social order in this circumstance? The entire Utopias project is ultimately about visions for real social orders, and eventually aims to offer explicitly what I think is the best such kind of order, as many political philosophers have done over the years. The question of law is paramount, but I’m not quite sure of how to engage with it.

Kropotkin himself has some writings on the nature of law which I briefly revisited, and some ideas in Alexandre Lefebvre’s The Image of Law go some way into a Spinozist conception of law which I think could be quite interesting. But there’s an enormous field of legal theory that I don’t know well in detail, and there’s only so much that the Utopias project can do in one shot.

The project has three parts. One is understanding the mechanistic vision of humanity that emerged from the First World War and had its essential formulation in European totalitarianism and the Futurist political philosophy of Filippo Marinetti. The second part describes a machinic vision of humanity, a more hopeful political tradition that has its ground in the metaphysical tradition of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, the four most prominent among a variety of other thinkers who will supply the conceptual centre of the project.

And the final part will describe the core political features of this new world, essentially a self-organizing, anarchistic politics. This is the most amorphous part of the project at this point, and it’s why I’ve been reading Kropotkin again, and will explore Bakunin, Goldman, and others soon enough, along with, perhaps, a little Marx. But no project is ever truly complete, even when it’s finished.

21st Century Kropotkin III: A Challenge to the Libertarians, Research Time, 09/07/2014

A little personal history. When I was in middle and high school, I had a friend who I lost contact with when university started. I met up with G again years later on Facebook, and he was a radical libertarian. We had several stimulating conversations over the following year, which was a worthwhile critical voice for my own political beliefs. My own thinking on several important matters became more nuanced because of G’s critiques and those of some of the folks he introduced me to. 

There are some awful stereotypes
about libertarianism that should be
combatted. Nonetheless, I'm not a
libertarian, nor do I wish to be.

But I never became a libertarian. I think that’s why G eventually defriended me on Facebook, and we hardly talked again, except once when he taunted me in a comment thread. I welcomed a voice that offered a set of political beliefs that were different than mine, precisely because it kept me out of groupthink habits and the resulting dogmatism. Yet when it became clear to him that I wouldn’t accept the dogma of his own libertarianism, G seemed to disconnect himself from me, even though we had spoken regularly for over a year.

I tell this story because there’s a point in Peter Kropotkin’s relation of the political history of Europe’s transition from the Medieval to the Modern period when he almost sounds like a libertarian. And I think this glimmer of resemblance constitutes a fundamental challenge to the essential premise of libertarian philosophy: the political primacy of the individual and the free market of independent individuals.

Kropotkin gives us a narrative of Europe’s transition from medieval society to the modern as the destruction of freedom by oppressive military forces. Communities and craftsmen’s guilds fostered cities of people working together for the common good and achieving remarkable prosperity. Medieval Europe held their cultural pinnacles in city-states, whose central organizing philosophy was an update of the Greek polis: each community was different, but all were equal, and confederated together for mutual defence, aid, and development. With slavery out of the question, their societies were free of most forms of hard hierarchy.

The development of the medieval city-states amped up in the 11th century, and climaxed in the 13th. The period of decadence began in the 15th and 16th centuries, as the grand old families of many city-states became oligarchs and despots, and the guilds grew alienated from their agricultural base in the peasantry. But the true death blow to this self-organized prosperity came with the assaults of the military state. The Catholic Church, as an institution, had taught for centuries that society should be unified and authoritarian. They combined with the growing military force of Europe’s kings to create the modern state.

When the military state crushed the free city-states of medieval Europe over the 17th to 18th centuries, the major thrust of the political movement over the following hundred years until Kropotkin’s time, the 1890s, was that all social and community bonds would be mediated by the functions of the state. My enthusiastic Hegelian friends should note another reason for my opposition to Hegel’s philosophy here: central to the German’s political metaphysics is the notion that the progress of society is the subsumption of all individual and community activities and identifications in the mediating institution of the state. Kropotkin’s philosophy lets you call this out as political authoritarianism.*

The French Revolution's outcome,
which was clearly a victory for the
freedom of working people.

* Kropotkin even argues that Hegel's treasured French revolution was just another form of authoritarianism. Far from freeing the people, it simply traded stewardship of the levers of state violence from the landed gentry and royals to the bourgeoisie and new capitalist class. He never mentions Hegel by name, however, but to anyone familiar with the philosophical tradition, the association is clear.

Here’s where Kropotkin’s narrative can become a critique of contemporary libertarianism. The essential focus of libertarian political philosophy is to make the individual, his needs, desires, and personal freedoms the paramount political principle. But, says Kropotkin, this concept of the totally free individual, unconnected from institutional or communal obligations is itself a creation of the militarized state. 

The modern state was created through the military force of Europe’s royalty and landed gentry (having become overpoweringly rich on colonial exploitation) unleashing a centuries-long wave of mass violence to break the bonds of social obligation and non-hierarchical organizations that were the backbone of the free city-states’ prosperity. Tradesmen’s guilds were suppressed because “there shall be no State within the State.” 

As the state and its functionaries mediated all social ties and obligations, the radically separate individual was the only way that adults could express themselves. The concept of the radically free individual needed the state to create it in the first place. Before this period of violence, the individual was free through the shared benefits of his social obligations, and his identity was a function of these relationships which enabled his prosperity in times of plenty and his survival, through the obligations of his fellows to care for him, in times of poverty. 

Libertarianism conceives of individuals as inherently radically free, any obligation being either totally voluntary or else a function of state repression. But it was only the repression of the state that destroyed the ability to conceive of how social obligation could free you. The freedom of libertarianism is entirely negative, freedom of the individual to disconnect himself from all obligation. The freedom of Kropotkin’s anarchism, inspired by the example of the mutual aid institutions that defined the medieval city-states, is an even greater freedom because it connects you in networks of social relations, mutual obligations, that empower you and all your compatriots.

I know which one I prefer.

21st Century Kropotkin II: The Continuity of History, Research Time, 08/07/2014

A few years ago, I presented some of my work in environmental philosophy at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, a short version of a paper about the usefulness of John Dewey’s ontological thinking for environmentalist ethics and ecological metaphysics. The paper, in longer form, was eventually published in Environmental Ethics. 

At the conference, I met the ageless Joseph Margolis, who was the keynote speaker. One of the interesting conversations he and I had over the week was about the nature of time, and history in particular. He and I disagreed over what could properly be called history. With his Hegelian influence, Joe understood history as an entirely human affair. With my ecological way of thinking, I understood history as a function of change itself, which means that everything in the universe has a history, and all our histories affect each other. 

An advantage to Kropotkin's view of history is that he
doesn't separate the pre-history of humanity from the era
of civilizations that left detailed records.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a take on history similar to mine, but arrives there for different reasons. The book, as I’ve said in previous posts, is weird. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before, which is a commendation as far as I’m concerned. It understands the political associations of mutual aid and communal life as evolutionary adaptations of self-conscious social beings. He explains how this is so by situating the human race in an unbroken continuity of evolutionary history.

Now, Kropotkin’s evolutionary chronology has distinct disadvantages. It’s extremely brief, covering essentially just under two chapters of a book that does largely concentrate on human history. Since the book was written over the 1890s, Mutual Aid doesn’t have nearly the depth, breadth, and detail that contemporary accounts of the evolution of life on Earth can muster. While our own knowledge does remain incomplete, today we do have a better grasp of what kinds of creatures dominated the past epochs of Earth’s biosphere, and rely less on the notion that contemporary animal and plant species can be extrapolated back in time with little change because of their ‘hierarchically’ ‘lower’ place on the ‘scale’ of evolution.*

* I include these terms in scare quotes because hierarchical concepts don’t even really make sense in contemporary evolutionary theory. Kropotkin uses them because they are the terms contemporary to his own time. 

Henri Bergson was one of the most popular philosophers of
the early 20th century, but he remains a cult figure today.

But despite these failures of the technical aspects of evolutionary knowledge, Kropotkin offers a vision of Earth’s history and biological evolution as a single duration. Writing in the 1890s, he was already articulating in his scientific and political writing what Henri Bergson was doing in his concurrent philosophical work. Time and Free Will developed the basic concept of duration, and his subsequent books put it to work. A duration was a single continuous flow whose internal changes were a unified process, affects affecting affects (if I can make a reference to stoic philosophy, causes causing causes causing causes). Each duration was qualitatively different.

The boundaries between durations were sketchy in Bergson’s philosophy. In some contexts of his writing, a duration was an absolute, but in other analyses, what constituted a duration depended on what a thinker herself chose to examine as such. 

I don’t know how much of Bergson’s work Kropotkin was exposed to, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the question seriously. But if Kropotkin could be said to analyze human history in any way, I would understand him as conceiving of human political history as the later stages of a duration that encompassed all that was known of the changes that constitute the history of animal life itself, from his genesis to his own day.

It’s a very novel way to think about human history, and I think we could all benefit from taking this point of view more often.

The Dangers of Utopian Thinking, Composing, 05/07/2014

A little utopia can be a dangerous thing. Of course, that depends on whose it is. 

Only in the last two days, the Hobby Lobby decision has become a potentially dangerous precedent in the restriction of rights to reproductive medical technology. Essentially, a majority of the United States Supreme Court has interpreted their own ruling to imply that an organization of any kind (business, charity, non-profit, college) can shift the burden of contraceptive insurance onto government health care services, further abdicating responsibility for the comprehensive health care of their employees. The fiery dissents of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor state the implications for the freedoms of workers and women.

Hobby Lobby's Steve Green with one of
the first Biblical antiquities in his
collection, currently the world's
second-largest, which will soon be
housed in a Washington D.C. museum
two blocks from the National Mall.

However, one can also understand this decision as a victory for religious freedom, as the Green family, who own Hobby Lobby, and others of similar religiosity, are no longer forced to provide services to which they morally object. It’s all very well to say that the Greens are wrong in considering the birth control methods they object to covering do not actually induce abortions, that preventing a possibly fertilized egg from implanting in a uterine wall actually isn’t an abortion, and that plenty of fertilized eggs fail to implant naturally. But whether a belief is wrong doesn’t seem to matter when the belief itself is to be protected. The Christian fundamentalists of America have never been all that concerned with scientific facts. Their argument lies entirely in protecting their ideals and beliefs from interference by the laws of the land. 

But if any good can come from this court decision, it’s that the Green family have become extremely visible public figures, and we can see precisely what their plan is for the United States: a cultural revolution that crafts the country as a unified Christian nation. VICE journalist Grace Wyler has written a fascinating article on the Greens’ curriculum for an Oklahoma school district which bases most of its content on a reading of the Bible as literal and absolute truth. Philosophically, the Greens are acting to turn the United States into the kind of ideal society they want. And it is such a pure, heartfelt, complete conviction that it can’t be argued with rationally.

The Greens are a living expression of the toughest challenge any utopian political philosopher must face: demonstrating why their vision of a better world trumps the visions of their competition. This will be the ultimate challenge of the Utopias project as a work of philosophical writing. Although I will engage with the vision Filippo Marinetti expressed in his doctrines of Futurism, as I believe these concepts form the spine of the planet’s overall cultural narrative of the last hundred years, you can understand the peaceful anarchist ideals with which the book will end as my alternative to this vision.

But as a utopian thinker, I’ll also have to defend my own alternative to the ecological (that the world exists for us to dominate and use up) and moral (that the production of wealth is the greatest social value anyone can have) violence of the last hundred years is itself a better path than the religious fundamentalism of people like the Greens.

21st Century Kropotkin I: Indigenous Living May Be Obsolete, Research Time, 04/07/2014

Peter Kropotkin tells a story throughout Mutual Aid about the evolution of human society as an adaptation, the latest iteration of a long line of social phenotypes. The human models of sociality are especially interesting because we can transform them so quickly. Much of ant organization, to take an example close to my philosophical and literary heart, has changed little over the millions of years these beautiful insects have lived on Earth.

Kropotkin, however, traces several different forms of communal and consensual organization among the human race throughout its history in Europe and northern Asia alone. The oldest cultures of humanity, which he takes to survive in the indigenous peoples of our species, all practice communal forms of life: ownership of land and the resources to farm are conceived as common, and it is only the products of individual or familial agricultural toil that belong to that family. 

Even here, care for the misfortunate is taken as read; Kropotkin describes examples from indigenous groups all over the world of how, if a destitute person asks for alms, a person is obligated to take him in for days to feed and clothe him. If a member of the community finds himself ruined, the richest donate some of their livestock to get him back on his feet.

Charity in the contemporary Western world is notoriously slim. Such nefarious examples as the grandchildren of Wal-Mart creator Sam Walton don’t even donate anything substantial of their fortune to their own charitable organizations, and what little they do is largely to avoid paying taxes. During times of economic recession, charitable giving among the general population shrinks considerably. Our civilization has so many financial pressures, including barely manageable debt burdens that are casually accepted as an ordinary part of life. The lifestyle of the rural indigenous makes communal living easier: there is so much less to spend your wealth on.

Can a vision of a human society express an ideal of the
perfect political system and be at all human?

Life as a communal peasant certainly seems easier as Kropotkin’s pen describes. These communities are smaller, simpler, more kind, and gentler. I worry, however, about the orientalism that Kropotkin could be articulating when he praises these indigenous groups. He seems to describe the societies of Amazonia, indigenous Australia, Siberia, and the Berber Kabyle people of Algeria in idealistic terms, as if they had perfected society in their communal practices. After all, idealization accomplishes just the same as demonization in annihilating the human singularity of a people under an idealistic group identity.

The problem seems to be laid off by Kropotkin’s anthropological focus on the peasants of northern Europe in describing their own communal social frameworks. But the problem of idealization remains in his work. Mutual Aid is, as I’ve said for the last while, a strange book. Not only is it a work of evolutionary theory that becomes an anthropological history, it is an anthropological history that also serves as a political argument for anarchism, advocating that we live in self-organizing autonomous communities. I’m still wrapping my head around what precisely the implications, problems, and benefits of such an amorphous approach to philosophical writing can be.

The political nature of the book, while I find myself in great sympathy with it, expresses a vision of the communal lifestyle that may not be possible in our heavily industrialized world. In the world of the peasants and indigenous peoples that Kropotkin describes, every man is capable of building his own house and maintaining all the systems that keep the village alive and thriving. We no longer live in that world. If Kropotkin's vision of the anarchistic ideal for society is drawn from examples of the medieval or older past and non-industrial indigenous peoples, then the very technology I'm using to spread these thoughts and ideas would not be possible in the society he wanted to build.

Anarchistic Philosophical Appetizers, Research Time, 03/07/2014

I’ve missed some days of philosophical reading while I began looking for new steady employment, as my freelance editing gig doesn’t seem to be paying the dividends necessary for my lifestyle (rent, food, internet access, occasionally being able to do things like visit Toronto or buy a book). But I did gather some news regarding the Hobby Lobby decision, which already seems to have completely wrecked any attempt in the Affordable Care Act to provide anything approaching a universal subsidy for any contraceptive services. 

The rights of working people have fallen victim to the
purveyors of . . . macramé.

The legal landscape of the United States now seems to be defined by a series of Supreme Court rulings that, in following through on the conception of corporations as legal persons (that personhood most often expressed in their owners), is on track to completely disenfranchise working people of most of their autonomy. The Court seems, at least to me, to be on track to declaring any attempt of workers to establish independence from the demands of their employers in any aspect of their lives, as illegitimate impositions on the freedom of corporate persons. 

The Hobby Lobby decision treats the rights of employers not to have their religious beliefs infringed as paramount over the right of employees to maintain their autonomy in areas of their lives having nothing to do with the smooth functional operation of the company itself. In light of the very strange historical path the United States seems to be on, I have cracked open the singularly strange Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, a book that is, in large part, a historical narrative of the evolution of human society from the social forms of insects and wild animals through to the humanity that was modern to the author in the late 19th century.

At my current point in the book, Kropotkin has just begun his account of the nature of tradesmen’s guilds in the medieval cities of Europe, covering a period from the 800s to about the 1500s. You can expect more thoughts on where this historical narrative ultimately goes as I get there. Today, I just want to focus on two ideas.

Idea 1. I find it quite intriguing how Kropotkin deals with the boundary between pre-historic and civilizational humanity: he acts as if it doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t. It’s easy for us to see the humanity of urban civilization as having made a decisive break from the humanity that was more like the animals. It’s why we distinguish the cavemen from the humans who lived under Hammurabi’s Code. It’s why we even have the word ‘pre-historic’ to describe these ancient people. 

Archaeology of the indigenous Americas and other very ancient settlements and movements of the human race has helped disavow people of this idea. If you get a chance to see Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, you definitely should, because it humanizes humans that are generally thought of as less than human. There is a continuous flow of time and development throughout all life on Earth. We break up our species and our planet’s history into stages because we find such segregated eras easier to analyze and understand. But their ability to describe adequately the flux of history is limited.

Idea 2. Getting back to my rage about the Hobby Lobby decision (which is one more reason why I am no longer interested in the possibilities of moving to the United States), I wonder what a thinker like Kropotkin would make of this madness. His history of human civilization in Mutual Aid is one of growing tensions of the forces that accumulate wealth and power in an increasingly corrupted cabal with the drive in humanity of equality before the laws and judgment of our fellows. 

Peasants were much more sophisticated than our modern
stereotypes usually depict.

This is how, as I read yesterday evening, he understands the growth of the medieval cities. The village communities of post-Roman Europe practiced common agriculture, consensual decision making, and settled conflicts by independent community custom. Feudal lords arose when commerce among communities increased, and conflicts arose with no common context of custom for arbitrators to apply. 

The notable families of a confederated region accumulated power through their legal capacities and wealth through fines and taxes. When these lords were unable to defend their villages against invasions from such forces as the Normans, Arabs, and Hungarians, the most prosperous communities built their own walls and eventually developed into legendary cities like Florence and Ghent. 

The American political and legal system is now in another period of flux, when the gap in power between richest and poorest is growing and legal institutions only seem to be protecting those already so powerful that they need no real protection. I went to sleep last night wondering how a nuanced and original thinker like Kropotkin would understand our strange modern era, which is nonetheless continuous with the strange eras of our past. 

New Careers, New Beginnings, Same Blog, Jamming, 01/07/2014

Today, a failed intellectual is a public intellectual. It's
where I'd rather be.

The great and infamous nihilist, Nein Quarterly (or, if you demand to focus on meat-space names, Eric Jarosinski), has officially left the academy and the wider world of university teaching, as he relates in his recent essay in the Chronicle for Higher Education. His students will miss him, but in many ways, he’s right that his theatrical philosophical comedy on Twitter and other parts of the internet has done more to popularize the German philosophy and literature he loves more than any of the teaching work that he was doing. And if the tensions and stresses of life in the academy was causing him that much pain, then he’ll be happier as a public intellectual.

One of the things I admire about Chronicle is their honesty in confronting the demographic nightmare higher education is facing, as academic labourers are produced at a rate and number far too high for the university system to absorb. My posts leading up to the Canadian Philosophical Association indicated my own path for the future, a path that I will pursue in the long run, seeking out noteworthy and worthwhile philosophical texts and helping shepherd them to publication. Perhaps while working in a career that will put some of my research skills and credentials to more direct beneficial use in improving the world, and helping my fellow PhDs find their own paths to do so.

I think the most creative philosophy and wider humanities research and ideas will be developed and published outside the university system over the next few decades. The university system itself has become broken in many ways, such that it discourages the boundary-breaking work that actually progresses our disciplines. 

But I want to post at least some thoughts about one way we’ll likely be perceived in the university community, which still has the institutional power and heft to work as a gatekeeper of knowledge’s respectability. Many of the professors I spoke to at the CPA were enthusiastic about the ideas I was developing for a network of independent philosophers — people who write and publish philosophy while working at jobs outside the university sector. 

This would be philosophy as a pastime for working enthusiasts, but enthusiasts who’ve received the training necessary to do philosophy well. A tradition of professionalized amateurs whose freedom from institutional constraints could grant them the space to produce truly creative and necessary works, which wouldn’t necessarily conform to the priorities of a university’s corporate and elite donors. 

However, some people (not a lot) have given me a cold shoulder as my attempts over the last two years to find work in the university sector came up empty. This is the biting element of Nein’s concept, #failedintellectual. Because to go through the doctoral process, produce and publish a thesis, but go on to a career outside the university sector, is seen as a failure in some of the people most devoted to higher education as an institution. We’re the children of that institution, after all, and in walking away, we would admit that the institution had no use for us. 

But in a system like today’s, where failure has become inevitable, those who would stigmatize us and our contributions to the philosophical tradition are not just wrong, but sadly ignorant, trapped in a paradigm of thinking that no longer applies to our world. The people who hold this attitude, where the only good use for a PhD is in the university system, are not worthy of their own credentials. 

They would produce work that is likely disconnected from the concerns of the material world, soulless historical studies or exercises in conceptual erudition. It is work written with the presumption that the wider public does not and should not care about philosophy; they will be forgotten, hyper-disciplinary works too insular to secure a cultural foothold.

Some might call comments like these, in a publicly accessible forum that goes out under my real name, a suicide note for an academic career. Those would be people I wouldn’t have wanted to work for anyway, even when I was starting my doctoral studies and was more optimistic about the resilience of the university sector. Like Nein, I’m taking a bet that my creative endeavours in philosophy (and fiction as well, in my case) will strike a public nerve with more power than the stagnating work of too much hyper-disciplinary humanities scholarship. 

My chief mentors in philosophy were working people who studied hard and made the university sector a place to engage with public issues and enhance education for the wider population. I didn’t earn my doctorate just to lock myself away with elites. I’m certainly not going to do that now. This blog was not just some unorthodox means of burnishing my CV for an academic position. It was an exercise in public philosophy, it still is, and it always will be. I'm throwing my lot as a writer with the public. I've made the best choice.