Consider Adam Riggio Reading Iain Banks, Composing, 09/06/2015

I’ve been talking about some pretty heavy topics on the blog lately. The First World War, the inherent dishonesty of the human race, some really trippy moral philosophy about the nature of moral facts themselves. But I’ve also started reading a classic sci-fi novel by an author I came to rather too late. 

Iain Banks was a shaggy, brilliant man.

I first discovered Iain Banks through Phil Sandifer’s long-running blog project, TARDIS Eruditorum. The post that made me decide that I was definitely going to get into Banks’ work at some point soon, was Phil’s post about his death from cancer in 2013. So Banks himself was already over when I decided I’d get to know him. 

He was just his books now, and no longer a person. What a loss to him, but also what an incredible gain. Today, Banks is the growing aggregation of all the ideas and experiences of reading and discussing his books. I see a lot in his work that touches on themes I had already been thinking about for a long time. I admire his skill as a writer and his sense of humour as a personality.

Also, we share the same birthday. A funny coincidence that I take just a little bit to heart. Banks and I share LeVar Burton and Christopher Eccleston.

I’m a sci-fi writer too, in case you hadn’t noticed (or purchased), so I’m also reading Banks to see how he approaches similar problems in characterization or plot as I do. I could adapt something he does to my own situation and storylines. 

He and I have some of the same artistic goals. For example, describing an intelligence and its thoughts when that creature is of a wholly different, and in many ways more advanced, order of mind than humans. Including myself. 

The most difficult and challenging aspect of my Alice character* is getting into the headspace of a person who is beyond the cognitive and ethical powers of humans in very profound ways. And doing that while still making the character interesting and entertaining, instead of some boring old god.

* The film project is back in development, with a new, more exciting plot and a trickier narrative. And less social awkwardness. More on that later.

Banks developed a type of creature for his Culture novels called a Mind. These were artificial intelligences that could think and plan in orders of magnitude above human cognitive capacities. So my future reading of Banks will concentrate on working out the techniques he used to represent their actions and thought processes. 

Something else I enjoy about
Consider Phlebas is that the main
character is stuck dealing with
idiots. He's clearly smarter and
better at interstellar espionage than
the puffed up egomaniac mercenary
captain who, in the story, can only
succeed at ruining jobs with
amazing fuck-ups that get half
his crew killed.

Some of what worked for him with Minds may work for me with Alice, and some may not. But I have to do my research and find out precisely. I don’t have it yet, but the next Banks novel I get will be Excession, because of its sustained focus on the society of Minds, their communications, and their reasoning processes.

My first Banks novel was his second Culture book, Player of Games, on Sandifer’s recommendation, as I was thinking about a sci-fi novel that did exposition really well, threading it into the narrative and suspense building processes. I quite liked that book, but I’m finding more techniques to adapt to my own story ideas in Consider Phlebas.

An interesting coincidence brought me to that book. I blogged a couple of times this April about the Hugo Awards hijacking, the organization of Gamergaters, writers of militaristic sci-fi, and a few extreme political misogynists to force works with more socially progressive ideas out of contention for this prestigious award. 

After all, works that disagree with radical socially conservative, militaristic ideologies could only gain popular approval through a left-wing media conspiracy. Surely not because people genuinely like intellectually challenging art with themes that confront our moral presuppositions. 

In one of my more productive Twitter conversations about this, I was told that Banks’ Consider Phlebas was an excellent example of well-written military sci-fi with a politically progressive edge. And just a couple of days later, as I was walking by a bookstore in Roncesvalles, I saw Consider Phlebas on a discount table outside. It was only $10, and proceeds from the table were donated to a legal defence fund for #BlackLivesMatter activists. 

Couldn’t have been a better fit.

I quite enjoy the narrative, though I noticed that the protagonists of both Phlebas and Games have very similar sarcastic senses of humour. I’ll see how this voice develops as I read Banks works from the 1990s through his death. 

But what I’m finding most intriguing is the setting. Consider Phlebas is about a single protagonist, Horza, and his picaresque adventures as he wanders as a mercenary operative through a galaxy-spanning war lasting decades. Banks even includes an appendix where he describes the full course of the war. 

Paul Atreides, the one person who shapes a whole
galaxy with his actions.

This was apparently quite innovative in sci-fi of the time because Horza had no significant effect on the outcome or course of the war at all. Usually, at least according to Banks in some interviews about the time, sci-fi books had protagonists who became major players in the politics of the entire galaxy, their heroic deeds shaping the history of billions. 

It’s a difficult shadow to escape from in sci-fi. Frank Herbert tried it with his deflationary talk about the ‘charismatic leader’ of the social movement. Paul may not have been a genuine, God-appointed Messiah, but he was still a remarkable protagonist with special powers whose actions shaped the politics of a galactic civilization.

But Horza is one person with a peculiar life, whose adventure is one story among many throughout this long, complex war. So I could say that Iain Banks was thinking systematically about the historical and political settings of his works at a very early stage in his published career. 

The individuals in the story are remarkable, and their lives make for gripping sci-fi narratives. But the war isn’t a venue for their world-historic movement, emerging to control galactic events like a Skywalker.

Consider Phlebas feels more like a story set in the Second World War – Stalag 17, The Great Escape, The Big Red One, Saving Private Ryan. The war is an enormous setting for these individual stories to unfold. It’s their world. An epic setting that elevates a story of mercenaries and criminals into fantastic intensities.

Tangents From a Psychologist IV: What Does It Mean to Be Immoral? Jamming, 08/06/2015

Continued from last post . . . But since the last post was on Friday and I can’t seriously expect anyone to remember the details, I’ll give a brief recap. I was, basically, riffing on a small experiment in Dan Ariely’s years-long studies on the psychology of dishonesty, whether the presence of an image of terrifying eyes watching you would promote honest behaviour.

I'm not quite sure if these are the kinds of eyes Ariely used.
I'd be more amused if they were, so I'll imagine them to be.

In an office, there is a subsidy jar, where the workers would throw some change after pouring themselves a cup of coffee or making a fresh pot. An image of horrifying eyes sits on the wall above it, and every act of pouring a drink makes you feel them watching, watching, watching.

So yeah, a little weird if I can take it there. I have what I call a philosophical critique of this psychological experiment. The question isn’t about the design of the experiment, its purpose, or even interpreting its results. It even applies to more than this one experiment – all the experiments he describes in Dishonesty. I’m not sure what I’d call this question, except to say it’s philosophical. That’s all I can think of right now.

When the participants (the people who are being experimented upon) throw in their change, are they really doing it with reference to what is morally right? 

We all agree that it’s immoral to cheat and lie. If we have a setup in our office where employees pitch in a little change – no more than 25¢ per cup – for coffee to subsidize the cost, then it’s cheating to take coffee for free. But that’s not a moral law that exists over and above the agreement for everyone to chip in for coffee subsidies.

The refusal to pay your fair contribution according to the deal doesn’t break any morality over and above that deal. It breaks the deal itself. 

Here’s what I mean. There doesn’t need to be a general instruction or imperative “You should not break your promises and agreements among comrades, friends, neighbours, or co-workers.” There only needs to be those promises and agreements themselves.

See, I've always had kind of a minority position among a lot of the people I’ve known over the years who worked in philosophy. I don’t actually believe in morals as things. I believe in moralities, systems of rules for proper action and assigning responsibility that people create together and manage as historical and social circumstances change. 

But I don’t believe there are such things as moral facts over and above the moralities we build together. I believe that human moralities can only function within some basic constraints, the minimal conditions for people to trust each other. One such constraint is that we’ll follow through on our promises. At least frequently enough that the whole system doesn’t break down.

I admit that this post drifted away from my
original topic of security and surveillance. But
it can be relevant in understanding how to deal
with Edward Snowden and what he revealed
about our governments. A society is only as
strong as its bonds of trust, and the strongest
safeguard of public trust is trustworthy action.

Here’s something I only thought of as I was writing this post. When I was at McMaster, I frequently taught tutorials in undergraduate courses that gave brief introductions to major theories in moral philosophy. One of these was Immanuel Kant’s moral thought.* As we basically introduced his concept of the categorical imperative, we taught it as a tool to identify genuine universal moral laws.

* Now this is a pretty damn complicated set of ideas, because his critical philosophy is an enormous system that deeply integrates morality and the possibility conditions for human knowledge. 

The idea was that if a particular behaviour that breaks a moral injunction were universalized – if literally everybody did it – it wouldn’t even make sense to call the behaviour what it was. The activity contradicts itself logically. The example my frequent teaching supervisor would use is adultery. If everyone cheats on their spouse, then the whole institution of fidelity promises no longer makes sense.

My way of thinking about morality puts a materialist spin on this idea. Instead of adultery, think of a public transit system. Everyone is supposed to pay some kind of fare to use public transit, whether cash, a token, or a pass. That payment subsidizes the whole transit system. 

When you’re drawing up a budget for the transit system, you always expect there to be a few people who sneak onto a vehicle for free. The system’s physical structure (how conspicuous it would be to jump a turnstile, for instance) and enforcement patrols deter people, but some always manage, and so you budget for a few riders who sneak free rides.

The transit system can handle this up to a certain threshold, a tipping point where there simply isn’t enough money coming in to maintain services and labour. This is more than a transit system usually permits, but it’s not the universal disobedience of Kant’s vision. A material limit has nothing to do with logic; it’s about the flows of material necessary to maintain a system in relative harmony.

That’s true of society. A society doesn’t collapse when literally everyone becomes a raging asshole. The collapse comes much sooner than that: when there are just enough raging assholes that they ruin all the good stuff for everyone else. 

• • •

A History Epilogue

I once had a professor with whom I was constantly at loggerheads, and the question of what morality was, was a major conflict (among many others). He thought there were universal moral facts over and above all the moralities we developed, whether as societies or an individual philosophers. And he thought one of the tasks of philosophy was to argue its way toward discovering these truths and proving them unequivocally true. 

One of his common examples of a moral universal that philosophy discovered through argument was about slavery. Philosophy had proven that slavery was univocally wrong, he’d say. 

But I don’t think philosophy proved that slavery was wrong. I think philosophical discussions and traditions helped provoke conversations that showed the immense social, physical, mental, and cultural harms that slavery did. And I think philosophy helped show that you couldn’t be a democrat and believe in slave-holding without hypocrisy. 

Neither of those identifies some universal truth over and above the institutions of slavery or the physical existence of human people and societies. One recognizes how destructive slavery is, and the other proves that two kinds of political belief – democracy and slave holding – are incompatible and can’t be made to combine no matter how hard you try.

Tangents From a Psychologist III: Whose Eyes Are Watching You? Jamming, 05/06/2015

I originally planned to end this series of posts yesterday. Then I read some more of Ariely that got me thinking about more tangents, this time involving how his research can, in some small way, contribute to the legitimation of the surveillance state. 

Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a trip. But there’s something here, I think.

He describes a very minor experiment in his long and complex series of works on honesty and moral behaviour. It’s about an office change jar for a tea kettle. A lot of offices have a little jar or a bowl where workers can toss change whenever they make a fresh pot of tea or coffee. Just a quarter or two each time to subsidize the kitchen supplies budget. 

Will they ever stop watching me?

It’s a gesture, but it’s also linked with honesty and good behaviour. If you make a pot of tea or coffee, you throw a couple of quarters in the jar. It’s much less than you pay for coffee at a Starbucks, Tim Horton’s, Second Cup, or Aroma. And it’s for the benefit of you and all your fellow workers. But you don’t always throw change in the jar when you make each pot, or when you take a mug of coffee from a pot someone else just made.

Ariely considers this a minor immorality, and thinking about his experiment reminds me of another philosophical criticism I could make of his work. I also consider this criticism very sketchy precisely because it’s a philosophical criticism and I don’t know how appropriate it is to make it. It has to do with what exactly we’re following when we put our change in the coffee jar. 

So here’s the experiment. It has to do with how images posted above the coffee jar in an office affect people’s frequency of contribution. Posting a generic image of flowers above the jar prompted no significant change in the level of people’s contributions. What was most effective in promoting compliance to the unspoken rule of contributing to the subsidy jar for coffee and tea?

An image of staring, accusatory eyes. 

He writes that even the feeling of being watched encourages compliance to morality. We act more morally when we have the impression of being surveilled.

This is, of course, a terrible suggestion given our current political climate. It doesn’t uncritically endorse the surveillance state, since there are no actual cameras in the image of those hungry eyes constantly watching you while you make your coffee. But it may imply that an elaborate conspiracy to make the country’s entire population believe that it’s constantly being watched will be just as effective.

Why yes, they are watching you. Pop music is creepy.

It’s Michel Foucault’s panopticon, basically.* And it’s utterly anti-democratic. Either it’s genuinely complete surveillance over real life, partial universal surveillance in which everyone is aware that government agents could be watching them all the time, or an elaborate conspiracy theory that’s universally believed so that everyone believes they’re being watched all the time without the government having to spend any money on real surveillance. The overall effect is governance by fear of authority.

* Yes, I know Jeremy Bentham thought of it first, but Foucault developed the elaborate framework of conceptual analysis that lets us understand the panopticon not just as a weird way to build a prison, but as the conceptual framework for a billion-dollar international security apparatus. 

It reminds me of my major problem with Joseph Heath’s proposals to make people more rational in their everyday lives: they all require state micro-engineering of everyone’s environments to rid them of deceptive features that disrupt our reasoning abilities.

Ariely expresses his interpretation of this experiment as part of a process of investigating human psychology. He never goes so far as Heath did in Enlightenment 2.0, and make proposals for government action. But the discovery itself is troubling. If we’re only moral insofar as we’re affected by the subliminal suggestion of an authority watching us, that doesn’t leave much hope for genuine ground-up social progress.

But I think there’s one angle where I can make a legitimate critique of Ariely’s ideas. I’m not trying to walk into his disciplinary territory, as I’ve been nervously stepping over the last couple of days after finishing Dishonesty. Now, I’m dragging Ariely into the territory of philosophy, and asking just what people are really following when he posts those intense eyes above the change jar.

Because I don’t think it’s morality. . . . To be continued.

Tangents From a Psychologist II: The Dangers of Jumping Disciplines, Research Time, 04/06/2015

Continued from last post . . . Since I made yesterday's post, I discovered that one of my friends who I knew when I was at McMaster now works for Dan Ariely's consultancy firm. She assures me that the hundreds of articles he's authored, co-authored, or otherwise shepherded to paywalled publication over the last couple of decades indeed back up all the conclusions of his books with all the technical know-how I thought would be there. Nonetheless, I'd still like to offer a critical perspective on something else of what I've read in Dishonesty, coming from my own place as a professional-level philosopher.

Here's an experiment that gave me pause when I read about it in Dishonesty. Ariely owns a vending machine that he uses for experimental purposes. He set up his machine so the listed price of each item was 75¢, but it would dispense items for free: You put your money in, made a selection, and it gave you your selection and all your money back.

One observed behaviour was that, when someone’s friend was nearby, they would call them over to have some free candy from the vending machine together. Ariely describes the experiment in a chapter where he talks about work he did to test a hypothesis that people will cheat more when they’re in a social context where many people are being dishonest.

So he interprets the vending machine experiment this way. Page 195: “If our friends cross the ethical line with us, won’t that make our action seem more socially acceptable in our own eyes?” He sees the student as knowing she’s doing something wrong, and the presence of her friend is a way to rationalize the wrong.

I see a different interpretation, though. Ariely doesn’t describe how his vending machine was branded, but most vending machines are owned by large companies, some of the largest in the world. Most vending machines, when broken such that they give their product away for free, are usually repaired within a day or two. The company doesn’t lose much, and they can afford to lose it. They usually budget some losses for times when their vending machines break.

Why wouldn't you want to share with your friend?
Friendship is for sharing.

A vending machine is part of such a large system that the actual harm of taking advantage of a few dollars worth of chocolate bars is no harm at all. Because it’s no harm, there’s nothing immoral about taking advantage of it. You understand this if you understand the economies of scale in which most vending machines exist. 

You call your friend over not because you need a social setting to make your dishonest behaviour seem more acceptable. You call your friend over because you had a lucky moment and found an opportunity for a couple of free Snickers, and you want to share your small largesse with a friend because friends are for sharing.

Ariely doesn’t mention this interpretation in his account of this experiment in Dishonesty, and I suspect that it’s because it’s outside the conceptual framework in which he’s developed his experiment in the first place. He literally wouldn’t have thought about it.

My interpretation has no role for dishonesty. It actually says that, because of the way someone may understand how vending machines are typically managed, they wouldn’t see their behaviour as dishonest because there’s nothing immoral to be dishonest about. Only someone with a very juvenile sense of cheating and stealing – as if I were taking money directly from the CEO’s pocket – would think of this scenario as theft.

Here’s the other reason why I may miss his point. I have expertise at an advanced level, but it’s in philosophy – qualitative and secondary research, with enough know-how for quantitative research that I can design a survey, but I still have to figure out how to work some of the computer programs to interpret quantitative data. I’m not a psychology researcher.

I’m a philosopher. That’s my discipline. It’s the genre of my non-fiction work, the field I trained in for several years, the field in whose academic journals I’ve been published. One of the most basic, widespread, and effective forms of philosophical criticism is to think of an interpretation or an angle that has escaped a writer’s notice. Giving some interpretation of his work that is outside his presumptions. Finding his blind spot.

I found a blind spot in how Ariely interprets his own experiments. Having framed his overall research problem as an exploration of human dishonesty, he isn’t able to interpret an experimental result as having nothing to do with dishonesty. 

Or maybe he’d interpret my interpretation of the vending machine experiment as an extended rationalization (that’s a little meta, as I’m writing about it in an extremely long sentence with a massive bracketed phrase) of my own tendency toward dishonesty in the situation.

We can learn so much from a vending machine. This is
probably my favourite thing to happen to Pete in all of
30 Rock.

Yet I can’t help but think that I’m on to something about Ariely’s research framework. He’s developed all these experiments to explore human dishonesty. So he’s going to interpret all the behaviour as expressions of dishonesty or ways we have to work around dishonesty. Some philosophy-trained writer asking him whether his conception of dishonesty is adequate to how people actually think is only going to complicate matters. 

In the discipline of philosophy, this kind of critique is legitimate. In the discipline of psychology, I’m frankly just not sure. How legitimate my critiques can be will affect the scope of all my non-fiction writing projects because I draw my sources from a lot of different disciplines into a philosophical framework.

So I don’t even know if my third interpretation of the vending machine experiment would even be appropriate. I can’t check my critique against the results because I don’t have the time or money or institutional access to get behind their paywalls. Because Dishonesty is a popular psychology book, I can’t be sure yet how much Ariely is genuinely representing the core of his work to a mass audience, and how much his presentation is influenced by slippery Gladwellism.

I’m just kind of scratching my head.

Tangents From a Psychologist I: Can a Former Academic Go Pop and Stay Sharp? Composing, 03/06/2015

A single article in a psychology journal is usually about a single experiment or set of related experiments, and interpreting those experiments. A book is different, especially one written with a popular audience in mind. Each chapter of Dan Ariely’s Dishonesty covers several related experiments, and the whole book covers years of research history. 

Each chapter presents the accumulated evidence of many different experiments. They all proliferate from his basic inquiry, which the book represents, to discover the motivations behind why people cheat. Now, the criticism that I’m about to make in this blog should be taken as the criticism of a man with a blog, not a professional experimental psychologist.

Every non-fiction writer for the mass market needs to
find ways to deliver their ideas simply without
stripping them of substance or spoon-feeding their
audience. TED Talks don't have the best reputation for
either. Pictured: Dan Ariely giving a 2009 TED Talk.

Because I could be off the base entirely here. I could be missing the point entirely when it comes to my interpretation of psychological studies, as presented in a popularly-aimed book. There are two reasons for that. One has to do with me, and the other has to do with the nature of popular books that synthesize years of disciplinary academic research.

Let’s consider the research first. I haven’t read the articles where Ariely first published his results from this years-long chain of experiments. But those articles are behind academic journal paywalls, probably the most prohibitively expensive in the world. They’re so expensive that only university libraries can afford them, and many libraries can’t any longer. 

This is something that I’ve run into, and discussed before, on the blog. It isn’t just that I’m still a writer who publishes non-fiction. I come from the academic world – teaching in universities was going to be my career until every job opportunity there that opened itself to me beyond a hair’s width over three years was either slammed shut on my fingers or was institutionally corrupt from the start. 

Publishing academic writing (distinct from non-fiction that aims for both critical and professional respect as well as a mass-market audience) requires access beyond those paywalls. It wasn’t just that the paywalls were enormous. It was that the hassle to access papers behind academic paywalls when you don’t personally have a role in university institutions is itself a barrier to being an independent scholar. 

It’s why I decided not to be an independent scholar, and pitch my work as non-fiction instead. However trippy the Utopias project will ultimately be, once it’s finished, I’ll be pitching it as a non-fiction work for the mass market. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity exists in a weird, kind of hybrid place: originally written as an academic book, but with the tone of trippy non-fiction. I don’t know how that will affect its impact, and I’m not sure what my editors at Palgrave will think of it.

Maybe I’ll have to tell them to read this post. 

Writing a work of non-fiction from outside a university setting means that you can’t always rely on research material that stays behind the paywalls. Writing non-fiction for an audience outside the university system means that relying too heavily on research material that’s stuck behind the paywalls might get in the way of connecting with your audience.

As I look for work in my communications career, one thing I’ve had to overcome is that fact that I do sometimes write like a nerd. I can craft a communications plan, an outreach strategy, write public relations products, and build relationships on social media. But when it comes to writing about myself, I’m still a big nerd. And that gets in the way sometimes when you’re looking for work in an industry where not everyone is a big nerd like you.

Writing non-fiction for a wide market, you have to write like a nerd, with conceptual rigour and depth. But you still have to be approachable. It’s a fine line. Too much approachability and a lot of academic work can sometimes be conceptually sloppy. As much as I like a lot of what Ariely writes in this book, and as fascinating as his subject matter is, I do find sometimes that he gets conceptually sloppy. . . . To be continued.

Bringing the Brutality, Research Time, 02/06/2015

Storm of Steel had a curious finish. It’s the story of the First World War, of course, and I’ve read many historical accounts of that story. But most of them were historical accounts that focussed on the geopolitics, brief films that depicted the war through more conventional narratives, or through a lens of satire that eventually couldn’t maintain its bite in the light of the war’s final horror.

The best was the first. Ernst Jünger, and the pummelling repetitions of bomb after bomb, shell after shell, after shell after shell after shell.

The first lesson in how to survive a war is not to fight.

Jünger lived this pummelling for nearly four years, and his diaries, adapted into the loose narrative of Storm of Steel, best depict the terror and madness of the entire affair. So here are my thoughts, as I put the book down, of the most striking parts of the work itself and what may become its most important influences as my Utopias manuscript comes together over the following years. 

The last major sequence of Storm of Steel happens during the Ludendorff Offensive, the final German push of the war, a desperate attempt, in 1918, to turn the tide. It was an offensive based on stormtroopers, the most experienced infantry fighters leading a mass charge against British lines. 

The attack had to succeed absolutely in one gesture to avoid being rolled back as soon as the troops stopped moving, which Jünger’s unit did because the Germans’ own artillery wouldn’t stop pounding British positions, even after the German army had occupied them. Although these further details aren’t mentioned in the book, since it’s based only on Jünger’s diaries of the time and place, German supply deliveries couldn’t keep up with the troops’ advance, and mass strikes by merchant navy sailors in Germany itself were crippling the country’s ability to move material to the front.

The human toll from the mass movement of the Ludendorff Offensive was unsustainable if it hadn’t resulted in the immediate and total defeat of the Britain-led alliance. Enormous numbers of German soldiers died in one last, insane rush at all the encampments and artillery stations of the British lines. Jünger takes nearly two full lines of text to list all his friends and comrades who, despite having survived the last four years of brutal war, would be dead by the end of this offensive.

In 1935, General Erich Ludendorff
published Der Totale Krieg, whose genesis
you could see in the gruesome mass suicide
attacks of his army in the First World War.
He had long supported Hitler's nationalism,
having joined him in the 1923 Beer Hall
Putsch. Hitler would continue Ludendorff's
dream to annex almost all of eastern
Europe, expel the native populations,
and settle the land with Germans.

Jünger himself nearly died during the assault, taking his worst wound of the entire war. Over the last four years, he had been lacerated with shrapnel, shot in the leg, had his head grazed by bullets and shrapnel splinters, and shot in the chest already. As he’s jumping over a New Zealander trench, during the German retreat from its counter-attack, he gets his worst wound of the war.

Insanity doesn’t invalidate you from combat. If anything, you have to be crazy to go into this kind of combat, where your entire physical presence is dwarfed by explosions and artillery barrages beyond your control. Jünger describes, after what’s left of his unit reaches the British machine gun dugouts, a Lt. Breyer, calmly striding through the mud and flesh of the battlefield, swinging a riding crop, smoking his pipe, taking the occasional potshot at a retreating British soldier with the rifle he carries slung over his back. 

That’s the more colloquial definition of insanity: behaviour that’s utterly disconnected from your real-world circumstances. Jünger himself eventually embodies a different kind of insanity, the dissolution of his personality into a pure force of will through the trauma of that last push. The push toward enemy lines in which the infantry itself isn’t made of men, but is an organic wave. The soldiers are ground-based shells, a mass meant to overwhelm through their sheer weight and number.

Among the shouts and war cries of the German soldiers before this mass attack is the scream “I don’t care what happens to me anymore!” Individuality disappears from your own conception of who and what you are. 

Jünger himself doesn’t engage in much philosophy throughout the book. The meaning of his images and descriptions comes from the reader trying to make sense of them. They aren’t philosophy themselves, as much as provocations for the reader to start thinking philosophically.

Soldiers throw themselves at the enemy until the enemy is overwhelmed or they can no longer move. After four years of faithful service, this is the culmination of Jünger’s life, and his book. The book was almost never written, because in his last moments as an active duty soldier, he’s almost killed.

Storm of Steel ends on a note of strange
validation: the honour of the Kaiser.

But the drive to destroy appears in his actions again. He doesn’t know how long he was unconscious after falling into the trench he was leaping over, a bullet having blasted into his chest and out through his lung. Each time a fellow soldier picks him up, whether on a stretcher or on his shoulders, he’s soon shot down, sprawling Jünger on the filthy earth again.

As he lies there, his position is surrounded by UK-allied troops. His entire regiment is surrendering around him. Yet he still gets up and gathers a few soldiers to attack a British machine gun nest. He isn’t shot again, though everyone around him falls dead. A German medical officer rolls him in tarpaulin and finally puts him on a horse-drawn cart bound for a field hospital.

He had become the will to destruction itself. And the end of the book comes with his reward. Invalidated for the next few months of hostilities thanks to his wounds, he receives official notice on 22 September 1918 that he’s received the Pour le Mérite medal, the highest honour in the Kaiser’s military.

He was one of its last recipients, and the last living holder of the military version of the award when he died in 1998 at the age of 102.

A Free Society Is About Who Can Give Orders, Jamming, 01/06/2015

At least, that idea is what I want to think about today. I came across something very weird in the news today. Well, when you consider modern politics, most of the news is actually pretty weird and unsettling: a serious civil war being fought in eastern Europe, massive earthquakes hit Nepal and the Pacific near Japan, a series of wars are raging in Nigeria, Libya, Syria-Iraq (and Turkey), Yemen, and there are civil uprisings against the systematic racism of police forces across the United States. Oh, and two major states in the Americas, California and São Paulo, face crippling drought while a heat wave in southern India has killed 2000.

So yes, that’s quite a lot of terrible things I could be talking about on a day I decide to post something about some interesting or unsettling political event around the world. I decided to pick a weird little demi-hoax that appears in the wake of last month’s UK election. 

I think I'm going to make sure I only use silly or unappealing
photos of any politician whose ideas and style I dislike.

I think I’ll focus on this because every other major political event around the world is so horrifying that the only sane reaction is a scream.

First, some context. Thanks to displeasure with the policies of Labour under Ed Miliband, it seems there were a few Labour Party members in Scotland who voted for the Scottish National Party instead this year. 

Because we all constantly broadcast our ideas on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs like this, it was very easy for Labour Party officials and staffers to identify who, individually, among their Scottish members grumbled about their own party and voted SNP instead. 

Well, it turns out there’s a rule in the by-laws of the Labour Party that says such people can be disbarred for up to five years for doing such things. The particular rule is on Page 27 of the copy of the Disciplinary Rules that I found here. 

The Labour Party can kick someone out of its ranks for conduct that it considers “incompatible” with continued membership. The clause is pretty vague, precisely because people are going to do ridiculous and awful things all the time, which are different from what’s come before. So you need a rule general enough to adapt to any case.

There was a Mr McLean who received a letter from the Labour Party that his services would no longer be required. McLean sent a copy of this letter to Jamie Ross, a reporter for Buzzfeed in the UK. Ross then tweeted its image, which went a little viral and spread rumours of some awful things about the Labour Party. Many reputable sources picked it up from Buzzfeed and ran it without further investigation, including The Guardian, and me.

It seems quite draconian to expel members simply for expressing public dissent. It occurred to me that it fit the presumptions of the political cultures that were influenced by fascist political movements. The health of the Party requires total uniformity. The draconian aspect is that there’s a central authority within the Party bureaucracy that applies the rules to the cases they see fit, and welcome or expel members because of how well they follow the party line. 

The strength of the Party is in its control over its people. This is how I’ve heard many self-identified libertarians* describe the left in general: autocrats and dictators who would submit the freedom and will of the individual to the authority of the government to control their lives to achieve some peculiar ideological conception of the perfect society.

The slightly infamous letter.

* It’s also an opinion that I’ve heard, in my personal experience and in my reading of political news, from many generally conservative thinkers who don’t like to admit to themselves just how deeply influenced by libertarian thinking they really are.

So I was relieved to discover the entire affair seems to be a hoax. Well, not quite a hoax, because this Mr. McLean really was booted from the Labour Party. But he was booted because he’s always been an advocate for Scottish independence, though he was never affiliated with the SNP. 

It seems he joined the Labour Party specifically so he could get booted out. He’s a Scottish nationalist version of James O’Keefe, the famous American hoax journalist. McLean wanted to join the Labour Party, get kicked out, and then start a viral rumour that they booted him for online expressions of being dissatisfied with Labour policy. 

He’d then be able to paint Labour as a party of autocrats who wanted to control their members’ opinions. When Labour Party officials found out that this was the only reason he joined, they booted him. Which is exactly what he wanted them to do, and he then humiliated and demonized the Labour Party in social media.

I never said that Labour Party officials were all that smart in the first place.

That Labour would disbar a member for holding a dissenting opinion and expressing it in their personal communication platforms is horrifyingly draconian. But, and this is rather nice to think about in the context of our catastrophic modern world described at the start of the post, no political party is this rigidly authoritarian anymore. 

At least no political party in the liberal democracies and socially liberal cultures of the West. Indoctrination into ideological conformity used to be a major task of political parties: this was the purpose of propaganda and political education. Credit where it’s due: the new liberal movement after the Second World War identified these totalitarian tendencies lurking in our partisan democratic systems. 

They called enough attention to the genuine contradictions of democratic beliefs with the enforcement of partisan conformity of thought that we don’t do it anymore. It’s a sign of how this thread of our politics, whether it occurs on the right or left, or black or green, has been influenced by new liberalism. 

The problem is that new liberalism has very quickly hit its own decadent phase. Many people who developed their train of thinking under its influence still believe that leftism is about submitting your free thought to the control of a party apparatus. They don’t realize that truly progressive leftism is about channelling our self-organized social movements for systematic liberation and justice into slow-moving but substantive changes in our entire civilization.