The Society of the Selfish Bastard, Research Time, 09/10/2015

Of all the right-wing thinkers I’ve read so far for the Utopias project, Fukuyama is the closest I have to a real favourite. His arguments aren't nearly so rigorous as Robert Nozick’s. Unlike Friedrich Hayek’s deep knowledge of economics, his grounding in science is virtually non-existent.

Unlike Ayn Rand, he isn't a megalomaniac who’s inspired some of the most hilariously insufferable politicians in recent American history. 

What do I like about Francis Fukuyama? He's weird. He's an anti-Marx Marxist. A Hegelian revivalist in one of the most anti-intellectual social movements in North America. He thinks capitalism is a foundation of freedom, but The End of History oozes with contempt for capitalists.

Now, I have no idea how credible, in all the academic literature, Fukuyama’s reading of Hegel is here. My Utopias book project is unusual in philosophy writing in that I’m not really concerned whether Fukuyama ever gets Hegel “right” to some minimal degree. I just don't find that kind of argument very interesting, and I don't think many other folks outside the disciplinary academy do either.

Traditional liberal virtues understand Jordan Belfort an
example of humanity's essence. You can see why I have
a problem with traditional liberal virtues. We are better
for trying to be more ethical than a mercenary. 

What's interesting about Fukuyama, and the rest of the Big Four thinkers of new liberalism and new conservatism, is their real influence on American and global politics. More than any of the others, Fukuyama’s thinking reveals serious flaws in the general new conservative vision for society.

I’m mostly thinking about the bourgeois. The word isn’t used too frequently anymore, to the point where I've sometimes wondered whether such a class exists anymore. But they do. We just don’t call them that anymore.

Liberal political philosophy, at least in its traditional form, aims to be the framework by which a society of devils would be peaceful and fair with each other. Those devils are the bourgeois. Fukuyama gives a very good definition of such a person.

He’s the fundamentally selfish man. Liberal political principles are meant to produce harmony from the tensions between people struggling against each other to enrich themselves. Everyone is out for themselves, ready to take from others whenever it will benefit them. The only motivator in their lives is money. Homo Economicus.

So . . . assholes. 

And this vision of humanity is held up in so much of contemporary conservative thought as a model of virtue. Think back to the 2012 Presidential election in America. One of the Romney campaign's main messages was that his ability to run large, profitable companies qualified him as a virtuous political leader.

But Bain Capital's business model was stripping companies for their parts like a stolen Chevy in a chop shop. And it never really occurred to these Republicans that people would find this fact distasteful.

Acceptance of selfishness as a sacred attitude in liberal philosophy shows up in the theoretical end of modern conservatism. Remember Nozick’s radio show allegory. In a community where every member takes a turn each week producing a radio show that everyone listens to, I’d face social pressure to take my turn.

But Nozick says that our liberty is the essential human right. We must always be free to act without constraint, or at least with as few constraints as possible. So I can walk away from my radio show. Nozick even goes farther, claiming that social obligations are violent restraints on our liberty.

Fukuyama won’t stand for this, and returns to Hegel as his successor because he wants to restore some nobility to liberalism. He wants to build a liberal politics that has higher aspirations than constantly acquiring personal wealth. He wants a liberalism that cares just as much for virtue and strength of character as for material success.

So freedom for Fukuyama is more than just the absence of constraints. Authoritarian government oppression isn't terrible only because it restricts your movements and choices. The centrepiece of virtue is our dignity. Democracy is the best political structure for a society because it guards our dignity. 

Genuine Freedom Is Empty Freedom, Composing, 08/10/2015

Why did I write those last two posts the way I did? I’m trying to understand the roots of modern conservative thinking. Why folks like Dick Cheney, Bill Kristol, Ben Carson, and Rand Paul believe what they do. 

Playing these esoteric and over-complicated ideas in Fukuyama's writing against my thoughts on the Arab Spring helped me wrap my head around a problem. It goes a little something like this.

We will be greeted as liberators, they said. Let's see if
this all works out, then.

Start from this premise. 

Premise 1

Think back to the first years of this century, if you can bear it. It’s not much worse than the state of the world today, honestly. George W Bush and his administration genuinely believed that all people universally yearned to live in a capitalist liberal democracy. 

This was especially true of those who had worked for the think tank Project for a New American Century in the 1990s. This think tank developed the democratic domino effect theory of Middle East politics: if one Arab country overthrew its dictators and democratized, then they would all quickly follow suit.

Fukuyama’s End of History was the key source for this idea, that capitalist liberal democracy is humanity’s universal aspiration. I explored why this is so strange and self-contradictory (or at least hypocritical) yesterday.

Fukuyama and the neoconservatives of PNAC were also impressed by the fall of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union. All their lives, they’d grown up with the idea that there wouldn't be an end to the Cold War but nuclear annihilation. 

Everyone thought that everyone in communist countries loved their regimes. Then the citizens overthrew their communist governments and embraced capitalist life and democracy. 

At least it seemed the case in 1992. Russia and Serbia threw us all for a bit of a loop since then. And no one noticed the exception of Belarus, which remains a strange military dictatorship. 

And they didn't count the central Asian former Soviet Republics that remained totalitarian monarchies, like Turkmenistan under Saparmurat Niyazov – Turkmenbashi.

American marines at the Battle of Fallujah. This
"liberators" thing isn't working out well by now.

Test Premise 1

The problem with this theory of the universal democratic dream is that when it was tested – overthrowing Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq in 2003 – liberal, culturally pluralist democracy didn’t replace him. Instead, the population of Iraq split on sectarian grounds. Shia factions took over the government and armed Sunni resistance grew.

So Shia and Sunni nationalism tore Iraq to pieces, and inflamed tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Since then, the Middle East has been engulfed in proxy wars as they jockey for dominance. 

The incompetence and violence of the US occupation only made things worse. The US had an army with no real training in peacemaking or guerrilla warfare, was grossly underfunded, relied on desperate volunteers for their numbers, and still relied on unreliable and psychotic teams of mercenaries to do most of the real offensive work of the occupation.

Let's not forget that ISIS formed in America's Camp Bucca. It’s the product of the most dangerous and radical members of Al Qaeda in Iraq growing even more deranged under day after day of torture.

Conclusion

So looking at this, you’d say that capitalist liberal democracy isn’t a universal aspiration. If it was, Iraq would be a peaceful democracy and not a country on fire.

And this is Tahrir Square, Cairo, in June 2011. The
revolution was televised, and I watched it on TV.

Hey, Wait a Minute . . . 

But the Arab Spring happened, even though its revolutions were cruelly suppressed. Only Tunisia's was successful. Yet those revolutions were driven by the real desires of the populations of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf Emirates for freedom.

Maybe This Conclusion?

So maybe the desire for freedom from autocratic, totalitarian, and military governments really is universal. But precisely what that freedom is may not always take the form of Fukuyama’s ideal society: Western capitalist liberal democracy.

What I’ve figured out so far is that freedom is the ability to change your society. Putting that power in the hands of the people. What solutions you come up with will depend on the problems you have to solve. 

The last ten years of financial crisis and economic recession gave us plenty of problems. Now, we need to figure out how to solve them. Freedom is when the people drive that change.

Unseen Theology II: The Ghost of an Image, Research Time, 07/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . So what does this mean? That the animating spirit of W-era neoconservatism was Christian supremacy in disguise?

It's a pretty heavy and simple statement to say about a writer whose ideas and works are as complex as Georg Hegel's. But because Fukuyama takes up an oversimplified version of his ideas, I suppose that can be my playing field.

You could say that this is the most powerful face in the
Arab world: Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who's
become the de-factor ruler of Saudi Arabia, thanks to
the dementia and possible Alzheimer's of King Salman.

Fukuyama pitches his idea – history bends toward capitalist liberal democracy – as having universal scope. He gives a brief dismissal of Muslim cultures from being part of this trajectory. Oil wealth, he says, perverts the natural character of their societies so much that the supposedly universal yearning for democracy and freedom fades away.

Fukuyama dismisses the Muslim world too quickly. Quickly enough that probing why can reveal a very deep problem with his program.

His philosophical roots in Hegel inadvertently – and invisibly, even to Fukuyama himself – cut not only the Muslim world, but the entire non-Western or non-Christian world out of consideration. 

When I read Philosophy of History, I found an important limitation of the book was that the progress of human history culminated in Europe, in the West. Typical for the early 19th century in Europe. But that story of humanity can't work in an era after colonialism, when we can't really hide anymore from what European colonialism really was.

Any philosophical conception of humanity's history has to account for our plurality, our diversity. Go ahead and think messianically about the history and development of human civilization. The notion that human freedom will have a single, unified form is a deservedly tough sell these days.

You know what’s an even tougher sell? That the single, unified form of human freedom is fundamentally Christian. In the peculiarly Christian idea of the Kingdom of Heaven, Hegel saw the culmination of human politics. It’s the restoration of paradise, where everyone is equal in status and lives in harmony.

When I worked full-time in academia, I rarely found
authors or colleagues who took Fukuyama seriously
as a political philosopher. We really should, if only
because of how effective his ideas were.

European humanity becomes God by building a system of civil government where everyone in society perfectly and mutually recognizes each other’s equal dignity and rights. 

When I think about how Derrida described Hegel, I see parallels to my discussions over this Winter with Steve Fuller about his book Knowledge. 

There, we talked about how a very peculiar theological conception of humanity as being "in the image of God” sparked a revolution in our knowledge institutions. We started learning about the world because that knowledge brought us in tune with God, more like God. For Christians, humanity and God share a common nature.

God and Christianity doesn't figure in Fukuyama’s messianic vision of a planet full of capitalist liberal democratic regimes. Globally omnipresent democracy would be the paradise in which everyone recognized each other's inherent dignity and inalienable rights. 

These dignity and rights are grounded in human nature alone. Nothing about the image of God here. Fukuyama has, to his credit, learned the post-colonial lesson: We shouldn’t fit all peoples into a world-view that’s the product of only one culture.

But his break isn’t clean enough. Fukuyama still relies on Hegel for the framework of his political thinking. And Hegel's philosophy is so firmly rooted in Christian culture that, long after the ideology of Man as the Image of God faded from Europe’s scientific culture, he’s still riffing on it. 

You could also say that this dead fruit salesman is
the most powerful face in the Arab world. It's
a case I could certainly feel safe making.

Fukuyama’s entire conception of this universal yearning of humanity as human bends all the peoples of the world to a Western cultural narrative. His supposed liberation in Western democracy is an imperialist ideology in its heart.

This is Jacques Derrida's basic criticism of The End of History in chapter two of Spectres of Marx.

And you think it’s over. You think Derrida, the established philosophical genius so famous as to have an adjective made of his name, would have schooled this right-wing upstart. Fukuyama's just a booster for capitalism, after all.

Then came Bouazizi and the revolution.

Unseen Theology I: The Only Outcome, Research Time, 06/10/2015

You see, sometimes, my voracious and borderline psychotic reading habits end up striking some really cool, productive synergies. 

Late last month, I began diving into Francis Fukuyama, the last of the Big Four thinkers that define modern conservatism that I have to explore for what I want to do in my Utopias manuscript. He’s also the weirdest of the Big Four, for reasons I've gone into before, and will again.

I also discarded the second-hand biography of David Foster Wallace I had been reading, for reasons I've also explained on the blog. Instead, I picked up Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx from my shelf. An old friend from McMaster gave me a pile of Derrida books when he was cleaning out his bookshelves a few years ago. And I finally got around to this one.

Because that "invading a country into democracy" plan
worked out really well, didn't it?

I thought it would be a little useful to the project, but I didn't realize just how much. Spectres of Marx is an extended response to the popular impact of Fukuyama’s End of History. 

Derrida takes End of History to task for all kinds of flaws, all the flaws that made it so seductive to the movement in the Washington elite that would found Project for a New American Century. 

The idea that, as soon as oppressive or autocratic state machinery was destroyed, its population would naturally form a peaceful, fully functional liberal democracy, because this was the universal endpoint of the human struggle for freedom. This is the notion behind the W. Bush Administration's ideology that the people of Iraq would welcome the invading American army as liberators.

Fukuyama’s revival of Hegel as a prophet of capitalist liberal democracy is the unexpected philosophical centre of this notion that’s led to more than a decade of brutal war in Arabia, the Maghreb, and the Fertile Crescent already. 

Fukuyama essentially pitched liberal democracy as the only possible outcome of the inherent human drive for freedom because it’s the only kind of state through which everyone recognizes each other as having equal civil rights before the law. 

I’d venture that Derrida is probably best at poking holes in other people's supposedly iron-clad ideas and ventures by hauling their blind spots into the light. An example is one jab at Fukuyama that appears in Spectres of Marx. 

Fukuyama considers his conception of freedom ideologically neutral when it comes to religion. Freedom in liberal democracy is entirely secular because liberal democracy enshrines your freedom to worship as you wish among your civil rights to freedom of thought. As long as your religious practice doesn't infringe on the rights of another, you’re cool. 

Fukuyama was also wrong about the Middle East's
Muslim population having no desire for freedom from
their autocratic regimes, as we could see in the
revolutions of 2011-12. Bouazizi lives.

Then he does something very weird, not only for a supposedly secular thinker, but for one who'd have such a deep influence on people who believed they could democratize the entire Middle East by invading Iraq and installing a parliamentary government.

He says the Muslim world of the Persian Gulf and the Maghreb are exceptions from this universal drive. Ostensibly, this is because their governments satiate their populations with handouts from their states' massive oil wealth. 

But this is a poor excuse, making no allowance for autocratic regimes in Muslim states without oil wealth, like Egypt and Jordan. It makes no allowance for there having been no successful revolution against Saddam Hussein during the international sanctions regime, when oil wealth couldn’t reach the populace anymore. It makes no allowance for why there hasn’t been a mass uprising among the enslaved populations in Saudi Arabia and the small, oil-rich emirates.

There's something more going on here, and Derrida identifies it as rooted in the parts of Hegel’s philosophy that Fukuyama wants to ignore when he adapts the German's system to justify the perfect character of liberal democratic ideals. 

It's a philosophy that holds Christianity to be the one true religion. . . . To be continued

And Write in the New Style, Composing, 05/10/2015

You know, I never really liked Jacques Derrida’s stuff for the longest time. I still have a lot of issues with his presumptions, his starting points, and definitely his writing style. But I think my biggest issue with him was the way people talked about him and his ideas.

Imagine you’re a writer whose job it is to come up with new ideas and explain them relatively sensibly. That's writing philosophy. It’s a style of writing that requires you to push a little bit at the limits of what your language can do. That's why philosophy is sometimes written in such weird, inaccessible ways.

I hope what I do in my books, my philosophy essays, and on this blog is explain some very strange ideas in increasingly accessible ways. I’m not sure that I always succeed. 

But the best part about having a writing blog like this is that you can be experimental, try new things, some folks will enjoy it or not, and there’ll be another set of ideas in a day or two. The lead time on trying out new things is shorter than it's ever been before. 

So as long as you get the proper style of a blog down (casual, if slightly nerdy conversation), you can spin around as many trippy ideas as you want. It ends up making your language more accessible, less needlessly technical, a little more seductive, and more clear. 

I tried to do this in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. And I aim for Utopias to be even better at this style of philosophy. I’d like to write philosophy in a style about as accessible as a nerdy listicle, but with the conceptual rigour of the classics of the tradition.

Sometimes, I think people find
Derrida's writing so difficult to
understand, because they first
approach it presuming that it's
going to be difficult and
confusing. Because I always
have the ego when I'm reading
that, of course, I'll understand
this book decently, I can
overcome difficult parts better.
At least, I think I can.

Sometimes, like this weekend on an inter-city train, I’m reading a book by Derrida. And I think about this eventual goal of mine for writing philosophy. It gets frustrating.

When I was a student, I knew a few professors who studied the books Derrida wrote in his Spectres of Marx period, from the 1980s until his death. One of the ideas he explored was a conception of the messianic – thinking about the world as though it were leading up to a profound transformation into a new framework that would be paradise compared to the way things are now.

The idea’s pretty common. Derrida took the term from the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, religions where profound transformations of reality are central to the belief system. The appearances of God to humans in Judaism, the incarnation of God as human in Christianity, and the revelation of God’s final word in Islam. 

And from a secular perspective, you can hear it from transhumanist discussion and any cyberpunkish talk of The Singularity, following Ray Kurzweil. 

Derrida talks about experiencing time in your life as if existence were moving toward a time-to-come. And I heard a lot of people use this phrase without really being able to explain it to me. They’d just say that it wasn’t the future, but a time-to-come. 

I remember being 22 years old and completely turned off Derrida because people would talk about his ideas this way, unable to explain even in a simple sense what was actually going on. 

Now that I’ve started reading some of the books where he uses this term, I can say that I actually found it pretty simple to understand. Maybe I'm deluding myself, thinking that I can easily understand a writer famous for being difficult and obscure out of a bizarre fit of egomania. 

Maybe, because I haven’t had access to university library paywalls in years, I haven’t had my reading confidence broken by contending with a deluge of poorly written academic journal articles on the same subject. But it seems pretty clear to me.

Time to come. It means you don’t really think of a clear distinction between present and future as such. Ironic for a perspective that expects a radical transformation of reality in the future.

But not really. Because you live your life in constant anticipation of the messianic moment when the world is transformed. So the present becomes this rush toward a magic point. Call it a singularity if you want. The real distinction in time isn't between then, now, and later. It’s between the time leading up to the transformation, and after it.

When you live and understand your life in terms of anticipating that transformation, that's time-to-come. I don’t think anyone ever explained this to me, but that's what I read in the book this afternoon.

Memory Come to Life and Killing Everything, Doctor Who: Under the Lake, Reviews, 04/10/2015

The Doctor and NAME_OF_COMPANION(S) land in LOCATION_OF_BASE and encounter DESCRIPTION_OF_MONSTER. 

All it took was some black makeup and some simple CGI
to make one of the scariest monsters in recent memory.

So, that would be The Doctor and Clara land in an undersea oil drilling base and encounter murderous ghosts. Beyond that, I have to say 

SPOILERS

Blatantly conforming to the Base Under Siege story structure isn’t the only narrative stereotype Under the Lake follows. The black guy even dies first. The oil company representative even resembles Paul Reiser’s sleazy character from Aliens. There’s even a sequence where the characters confuse the violent ghosts by running around identical grey corridors. 

I don’t really like Toby Whithouse’s approach to the show, and to action-based drama in general. He’s much too interested in overdone stories about the growing angst and self-hatred of stoic, tortured male anti-heroes. I watched one episode of his spy series The Game and I was so bored that I didn’t want to watch another one.

I dislike the fact that he’s gone on record saying that he doesn’t think the Doctor should become a woman after Peter Capaldi’s eventual departure. Overall, he’s old-fashioned in his narrative styles to the point that it undermines the quality of his work. 

Under the Lake did a wonderful job depicting the deaf
base commander and her signing aide, played by an
actually deaf actress Sophie Stone.

But as Under the Lake picked up, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the ideas that flowed from the script. The base under siege, the most tired and simple style of Doctor Who story, was given a jolt of new energy by its themes about memory, the nature of death, its time-looping plot, and a twisted cliffhanger.

The ghosts, with their transparent eyes revealing cavernous hollowed-out insides, are twisted echoes of their living selves. And their appearances, relentlessly drifting from assault to assault, aggressively uttering the poetic coordinates of their signals to deep space. 

They are utterly chilling – nightmare-inducing for children as all the best Doctor Who monsters should be. And even more terrifying is the cliffhanger, where the Doctor has become one of them. 

We know because the show will continue after next week’s Before the Flood that the Doctor and Clara will survive. But how that will happen is the nature of the cliffhanger. Given what we know about the villains in this story, the Doctor will have, somehow, to survive his own death.

That’s the story itself, my own contributions to the notion that these are reviews of Doctor Who. But this story is also deeply invested in exploring the relationship of time and memory, the reality of the past that lurks inside the present.

There are some moments in Under the Lake that play out
in some very conventional ways. Pritchard's death scene
for one. I was watching him encounter a ghost while he's
still in an airlock on an undersea base, and he's taken his
helmet off. I was almost autonomically talking to the
screen, "Put your helmet back on. You stupid man, put
your helmet back on right now." He didn't.

Yes, I’m thinking Bergsonian again. Because his concepts of time, process, and memory have been very influential on my own thinking. And they appear throughout Under the Lake, so prominently that they’ll define the story as a whole.*

* With this season composed entirely of multi-part stories, I’ve occasionally wondered whether my discussion of all the major ideas and themes of one story in its first episode will exhaust what I can say for the following week’s post. But I think Doctor Who is rich enough that I don’t really have to worry.

Consider the mechanics of the monsters themselves. Their threatening manifestations are the ghosts of the dead Tivolian, Moran, and Pritchard. But really, the monster of this story is the inscription in the cabin of the mysterious spaceship. 

It’s a living piece of language, the carrier of the transmission that infests your thoughts and lets the ghosts turn you into a piece of their transmitter. The inscription animates a transmitter ghost within you, which is activated by your death.

The ghost is literally a memory, but not a memory of a past event – It’s an earworm, as the Doctor says, a constantly humming process that runs within you, hidden under all your other activities. This memory process invades you, hides in you imperceptibly. 

The use of constellations as coordinates in this story made
no sense according to our science. But I think it works in
the story. The aliens are describing a path to Earth, but
from the perspective of its endpoint. So from Earth's
point of view, the aliens would travel along a trajectory
that would take them along the stars that make up
Orion's belt and sword. That's how their maps work:
pathways drawn from the end's view of the origin.

Its origin is in the past, the original alien encounter before the town flooded. But it’s not your past. The monster of this story is an invasion of your own narrative by a malignant outsider. There’s no peace in the death this monster offers. You’re overwritten by an entity that animates you into a machinery that had nothing to do with you.

This is a monster that literally steals your soul.

Because memory is your soul. Whether or not it’s before your thoughts in a given moment, your memory is the combined set of affects that have impacted you to create the body and personality that you are now. This is what Bergson means when he says that the past is real. All that has happened to you is part of your present, part of your identity.

The act of remembering is simply focussing on a few of these events in a given moment of thought. I remember the name of that David Bowie song, the correct name of Canada’s Governor General,** the atomic weight of carbon, my favourite stories of the Matt Smith era.

** Thanks for the reminder, Phil. I keep thinking of Daniel Johnston the songwriter, not David Johnston the constitutional scholar.

We most often think of memory as remembering facts like these, but we don’t understand that memory is actually a continuing process of constructing our personalities. It’s not quite a narrative either, although narrative plays an important part in how we understand our own memories and pasts.

Narrative is how our self-conscious thinking – our intentional, subject-centred perspective – constructs and understands our personality. But our actual subjectivity is an aggregation of bits and pieces, millions of ongoing mental processes. 

I also thought it was a pleasant touch that, in a story that
picked up such a notable narrative convention of Doctor
Who in the late 1960s, the design of the alien spaceship
used the white surfaces and smooth walls that are
features of the most striking sets of the Troughton
era. At least, that's what the Troughton era looks like
in my memory.

It’s just like our physical bodies. When we act in the world – walking to work, having conversations, going shopping, writing blogs – we feel the unity of our bodies. That’s our proprioception sense, the ability of our body to detect where it is, its orientation, and what it’s doing. But our actual bodies are massive aggregates of millions of ongoing processes from the sub-atomic, to the chemical, to the cellular, to the personal level.

Our thoughts and mental processes are the same, the interaction of ideas, concepts, memories, flows of thinking and associations, neurochemical flows, and perceptions to make an ongoing personality. We feel its unity because self-consciousness in experience and thought functions like proprioception does for our body. It gives us a feeling of unity in all this aggregated inter-related chaos. 

While I wouldn’t call this feeling of unity a lie, it is a functional fiction about what we are. That unity is one aspect of what we are – if we didn’t feel it, we’d be a severe schizophrenic unable to function in the world. 

It’s parallel to those people who have no sense of proprioception. They have to look directly at their bodies to move their limbs properly. 

The complete picture of a personality is an enormous jumble of ongoing processes colliding together to make a person, a subject, you and me. 

This week’s monster on Doctor Who is a single one of those processes, a set of words that, when you look at some markings carved into a wall, sneaks into those processes. And when you die, every process stops, except that one. It embeds you into another set of complex processes, making you a zombified cog in its machine.

Solid terror.

It Is Accomplished VI: What Does This Title Mean? Research Time, 01/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . I didn’t mean to continue this series of posts into a sixth part. But last night, I was thinking about how I've drifted from the main topic of the first post to the more confessional tone of the fifth. 

The book project that so much of my last two years of reading is building toward is about utopias, our dreams of a perfect society. That entails quite a few questions. One of those is, What moral norms and political institutions are perfect? Another is, What does perfection mean anyway?

The world changes. And if we ever achieve a perfect society (whatever the hell that is), the world it exists in will keep changing. So to accomplish a perfect society is never really a finished task. The perfect society for one set of circumstances is going to run into problems as circumstances change. So perfecting humanity is an ongoing process of self-critique and change.

Awesome. But what does this mean for how utopia has traditionally gone? 

I remember some of Frederic Jameson’s insights when I think about this question. Utopia in the Western tradition of thought has roots in Christianity, the world’s first major eschatological religion – the first major religion in the world to conceive of time as having an endpoint that was also a fulfilment. 

At the end of time, goes the Christian Revelations, will be the Kingdom of Heaven. When the self-deceiving incomplete secularism of the Enlightenment* got hold of this idea, then the end of history will be the Kingdom of Eternal Happiness. Marx called it communism, Fukuyama called it liberal democracy.

One of the clearest expressions of our having caught up
to Nietzsche's ideas about the joy of having no God
and no inherent purpose for ourselves and the universe
is Rick and Morty. I'm serious. Its core message is that
"Nobody exists on purpose; Nobody belongs anywhere;
We're all going to die." Then they travel adventuring
around a multiverse of incredible diversity and
excitement.

* I’m simplifying to an absurd degree here, but this is the shorthand for how I interpret a lot of modern secularism, as all the same structures of Christian philosophy, metaphysics, and morality, but with some placeholder where God normally would be. Existentialism tried to get us into pure secularism, but they still lamented the loss of a God figure. Sartre's atheism was pretty dour. Just read Nausea. It took us more than a century to catch up to Nietzsche, who understood that a world without (the Christian sense of) God or perfection is actually pretty amazing.

Jameson showed that whatever you called the Kingdom of Eternal Happiness depended on the social circumstances of your time. Whatever the major problems facing your society were, your utopia was the world in which those problems were solved. 

When a social problem is big and pervasive enough to cover all of society, or all of civilization, the problem feels universal. For most of Western history, utopian visions really have pitched themselves as solving eternal problems. But I think we've moved past that as a society.

Think about the latest statement of utopian political activism: Naomi Klein’s Leap Manifesto. It calls for the kind of radical and all-pervasive transformation of Earth's civilization that you expect from a utopia. But it doesn't pitch itself as the perfect society. 

It’s actually not nearly so ambitious as the Communist Manifesto’s ambition to build the eternally perfect society. Total universality is so 19th century.** Klein’s Leap Manifesto is a document to solve a present problem, digging ourselves out of the current trap we're in, our stumbling accidental mass-suicide called the Holocene Extinction.

** The craving for total universality is so 20th century.

Thankfully, we're all historicists now. Well, not nearly all of us. There's still plenty of absolutism in both religious circles and atheistic ones. But historicism has been around long enough, and is properly understood by enough people, that it’s become ordinary. 

Our knowledge can reach universality in scope and reference, but our quest for knowledge always begins from our position – our priorities and frameworks of thought of our current societies, circumstances, and personalities. Even how we understand our relationship with the divine. A historicist doesn’t even have to be an atheist. She just can’t be an absolutist.

Today’s solutions seed tomorrow's problems, so we can never let ourselves become complacent.