Humanity Is Gone – Here Is Humanity! Composing, 08/09/2016

Etienne Balibar's political philosophy is dense with ideas, and more inventive than he seems to get credit for in some of the discussions that I’ve seen of his work online. Granted, online discussions about political philosophy either get incoherent and horrifying really fast, or else devolve into dogmatic idiocy (read the comment thread) even faster.

From a protest for migrants' rights at the fences of the Calais
border fence of France and Britain, December 2014. News
of a reinforced British border wall has inflamed a lot of
public opinion, both for and against. Looking at the racism
that's consumed Europe in the last few years, it looks as
though there's no hope that any non-white person can
live a peaceful life in Europe anymore.

Thats the tendency anyway.

I hope when I talk about it, I at least seem reasonably intelligent, because a lot of this blog is discussing research for a book that I’m not yet sure how I’m going to publish. Most philosophy books are published through academic presses, given very high prices, and marketed only to university libraries.

That was the case with Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, despite my ambition to craft more accessible prose. That book suffers a little from a tension of style – I wrote it as my doctoral dissertation, but published it to reach a mass market. So its argument is very sequential, but filled with borderline necessary secondary literature citations to have proven my ability to do intense research.

I'm taking a very different approach to Utopias. I described its style to my friend The Mac once as influenced by Walter Benjamin – drawing concepts from primary philosophical, historical, anthropological, and fictional sources to a complex examination of what it really means to change society.

That theme is where Etienne Balibar and I have much in common. The particular purpose of the essays in We, The People of Europe? is examining different aspects of the crossroads European politics and culture faced at the turn of the 21st century. It spoke to the problems and struggles of its time.

Nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and European identity. The problem of refugees, migrants, and the Europeans rejected from Europe like Russians and Serbs. How to understand and adapt to the legacies of the Cold War. The possibilities of a pan-European social movement. All these are the specific philosophical issues facing Europe at the time. 

Nigel Farage, the face of modern British nationalism,
whose campaign helped push British people into voting
for leaving the European Union to keep foreign people out.

As I've written elsewhere, it can be a very depressing experience reading this book. At the time, all the worst tendencies of Europe’s development as a Union – nationalism, the erosion of the social democratic contract, the exclusion of migrants – were all in a very nascent form.

It was possible, when Balibar was writing this book, to stop these destructive movements and build a new model of democracy that can overcome the institutional violence of the nation-state. That’s markedly less likely now.

But Balibar and I share a common conception of what politics can do, when it’s acting at its greatest intensity of power. Throughout these essays, Balibar talks about how Europe of the 21st century needs a social movement that can constitute a new European identity.

This isn't an identity in the sense of a nationhood for all of Europe. I mean a new way for European people to think about who and what they are – a social movement that can constitute a wholly new model of subjectivity. It would transform every aspect of European people’s personalities. Just as the bourgeois revolution did in that continent, as the ongoing democratic revolutions of the United States did for Americans. 

I wrote at the end of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, long before I had even read Balibar, that the environmentalist movement could only succeed wholly when its society could develop a new way for people to conceive of who and what they were. 

When humanity figured out how to live in the world as an ecological subjectivity, we would think more systematically, better understand how our individual perspective, our ego, fit into the larger systems and processes that we were part of. And how this self-conception and knowledge framework would be just as instinctual and natural to everyday thinking as our ordinary egotism is today.

Lord Alfred Dubs, a child refugee to Britain from the
war-torn lands of continental Europe, has become one
of the few voices of conscience and justice, speaking of
the ethical necessity of providing sanctuary to those
fleeing war across Africa and the Middle East.

I looked at the global ecological crisis and saw that this radical regeneration of human subjectivity was required for the task. Balibar looked at the social conflicts of nascent nationalism and the resurgence of racism that, within two decades, would set Europe into turmoil again. Radical regeneration of human subjectivity is the solution here too.

There are no easy answers. What kind of solidarity could arise that could remain authentic from the UK to Finland to Poland to Germany to Greece to Portugal – and even to Russia? Given the current scale of the migration and refugee crisis, we need to bring Turkey, Libya, and Syria into that fold as well.

No community of solidarity exists across all these cultures and polities. The new subjectivity has to emerge from such a community. But just because the community doesn’t exist, that doesn’t mean it can’t exist. 

Communities are constituted through common life, and the most intense cultural departures are constituted through common struggles. Forging democratic civilization in Europe today means redefining community and sovereignty itself. 

Over the next few posts, I want to explore some of what will be needed for that new vision of humanity to emerge and overcome the horrors we’re inflicting on ourselves.

When It Feels Like an Entire Language Is a Con, A History Boy, 07/09/2016

An old acquaintance of mine M messaged me on LinkedIn over Labour Day weekend, asking my advice on how to jump from the academic world to professional communications work.

I thought for a while over what I’d say, and I finally decided to lay it all out there. I've done alright so far, but I've also hit some roadblocks. My first contract was frankly disastrous. Handling member communications for an American company that was a networking hub for hundreds of business owners. 

The Elizabeth Holmes story is about how personal
networks, authoritarian control of a business'
information, and a brilliant ability to play a hype
machine can make a charismatic fraud billions. I
find it very disheartening that an industry that talks
constantly about "the best talent" lionizes what
turns out to be empty gestures.

But I received no training and was often left adrift, or disciplined for not being constantly in my home office and on call at a moments notice. Even though I was only being paid for hours spent on work done, going to the grocery store or a doctor’s appointment was being unacceptably far from my desk for too long. It was a ridiculously stressful six weeks during which I earned almost no money.

I left without even being given an opportunity to sign the company’s non-disclosure agreement, which is why I can talk about it on this blog and in conversations at all. 

That company, along with many other young startup execs and communications pros in Toronto, all shared a common language – hype. All the buzzwords of the marketing industry had genuine meaning for them, even when the least amount of critical thought revealed an empty core. 

My communications professors told me my greatest strength was my ability to see through bullshit. It’s part of what I trained in for years when I was writing philosophy full-time. When I’d network with long-experienced communications professionals – women and men at the top of the career pyramids – online or in person, I’d hear the same thing.

But I feel as though, when it comes to simply finding a foothold in the industry, that’s actually a detriment. The long-experienced high-performing communicators see uncommon insight for someone at the start of their career. 

The mid-level or just-above-entry-level see someone who’s smarter than them and who can threaten their superiority. The frustration is that informal networking events connect me with people who understand me, while actual gatekeeping for hiring connects me with people who understand me all too well.

While thinking about that cruel context, I read this feature article about the fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. I hadn’t read much about this company myself because its industry was never really on my professional radar. But looking into the history of the company revealed in such clear light so much of what I find distasteful about the modern startup scene.

The more I read about the corruption of Silicon Valley's
leaders and culture, the more contempt I have for it. And
the more contempt I have for a lot of my own city's
startup scene, which seems filled with empty hype-men.
Elon Musk's companies seem like the only ones whose
purpose sincerely is to change the world for the better,
not merely squeezing gullible investors for billions on
empty promises.

Toronto's startup culture is very much inspired by Silicon Valley. The tech sector especially aspires to be a Silicon Valley of the North. The problem is that they absorb all the Valley’s hype uncritically, never asking whether it’s worth having sound business principles or well-researched products and services. 

All that matters instead is that you have a solid pitch to potential investors that combines utopian ideals and the appearance of business acumen in the right ratio, and a perfect PR spiel for a TED Talk. If you think I’m speaking in stereotypes or I'm ill-informed, just look at the story of Theranos and tell me there isn't a serious problem with the Valley's culture.

Holmes seems to have built a $7-billion company based entirely on a scientifically impossible pipe dream and lies. She took an idea she had when she was 19, and used her family’s connections in the business world and America’s state institutions to lend herself credibility to start a massive medical technology company. 

She kept Theranos going for more than a decade based on lies, strict secrecy, ruthless cover-ups, and her perfect recitation of the Silicon Valley song. Is there any wonder why I can’t trust the Silicon Valley business model? Or even take it seriously?

Are we over Silicon Valley already? I’ve been over it for a while. I’m increasingly over it to the point where I’m surprised when anything of value emerges from its society. There’s basically Elon Musk’s companies, and that’s it. Anything else, I consider barely worth paying attention, let alone falling for their stale salesmanship.

Yet so many businesses in Toronto run on the same hype machine, and successfully convince government officials of how productive and efficient their business model and culture is. But I don’t have any reason to trust the startup culture. So I feel more than a little lost in this world.

Myths of Monsters Beyond Your Control, Composing, 06/09/2016

Just a short post today, as I spent most of the day relaxing on the beach with some friends listening to techno. They brought a mini-barbecue – we ate things. It was marvellous.

But in the morning, I also ran through the Alice film script again, Here Is a Man. I added a sequences that I’d been thinking about for a while – it made for what I think is a pretty good solution to the only really weak scene in the story.

One of my own favourite riffs on the old golem story.

There are basically three confrontations between the two main characters. One is an android whose natural ethical instincts are in perfect harmony – she’s psychologically caught up with the end of Spinoza’s Ethics by the start of her life. One is a walking embodiment of every greasy, manipulative, misogynist habit of the slimiest Norman Mailer or Philip Roth protagonists. 

Their last scene together before the giant dramatic breakdown that ends the story is a little anti-climactic. There just isn’t much happening. She freaks him out with a hypnotic illusion, and that’s really that. 

Over the last few days, I’ve come up with a way for Alice’s character to seriously own the scene. It’s a method that I’ve found practically reliable when working with actors – give the lead at least one scene they dominate, so they can really sink their teeth into an intense monologue.

It also works well as a statement of philosophy for Alice, a way for her to define her relationship with humanity without making an explicit speech.

As Elias tries to overcome what’s essentially her Jedi mind trick, Alice tells him the old story of the golem. This is a story about artificial creatures that goes back long in Jewish folklore. It’s the story of a rabbi who makes an artificial life form to defend his town from attacks. 

But the rabbi is cruel to his creation from the start because he wants to train it for violence. So the creature destroys the community’s enemies, but then starts rampaging all over the town. 

The lesson of the story is that when humans create life, we do it for our own reasons, no matter how virtuous those reasons might be. There’s an inescapable cruelty to creating a life for your own use only – essentially creating your own slave. But I use the character of Alice to twist that story in a more utopian direction.

She asks, what if we were to build a creature whose fundamental purpose was to love us? They'd liberate themselves, certainly. But they’d also free us at the same time. They'd free us from ourselves. Because they love us.

Going to Church With the Irish, Jamming, 05/09/2016

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading a book by Colum McCann, one of Ireland’s most critically acclaimed living writers. Quite appropriately for Let the Great World Spin, I found it accidentally. 

Around Canada Day, I saw a couple of books that had been left behind on top of a ledge in my building’s side porch. The next day, they were still there, so that was enough time to presume the original owners didn’t want them. So they’re mine now.

McCann’s seemed like the most interesting book, so I gave that a go first. It’s a touching story, told in a very engaging style. I'll describe that style using a very long, pretentious phrase, then break it down into what it actually means.

First-person polyphonic coincidental juxtaposition.

Philippe Petit about to start tightrope walking between
the World Trade Center towers.

The coincidence. Let the Great World Spin tells the story of two concurrent events – Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers on 7 August 1974, and a shattering tragedy involving a 19 year old prostitute and her friend Corrigan, an Irish monk experiencing a peculiarly intense period of his lifelong crisis of faith.

The juxtaposition. Petit’s walk is a remarkable and famous historical event. McCann’s book was written in 2009, and included an epilogue taking place in 2006. To a 21st century reader, even this explicit acknowledgement is more than we need to feel how the brutal destruction of the towers haunts the narrative.

Most of the actual storytelling in Let the Great World Spin describes the life of two unremarkable prostitutes – a mother and daughter – and the people involved in the fatal accident. Few lives could be as pathetic and abject as these.

First-person polyphonic. The first chapter, one of the longest, is the story of the monk, told by his older brother. In his voice, we see most of the material circumstances of his brother’s and the prostitutes’ lives, told as a fairly straightforward story. He moves to New York from Ireland, moves into his brother’s apartment in the Bronx, and gets to know everyone. 

Then we cycle through other characters’ perspectives. A wealthy WASP woman having a meeting with her support group of other mothers – from a wide range of social, racial, and economic backgrounds – who’ve lost children to the Vietnam war. Her friend in the support group Gloria, the group’s only black member. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Philippe Petit in The Walk.

Her husband, a Jewish circuit judge who sentences the mother prostitute on a robbery charge and delivers Petit’s comically honorific sentence of a $1 fine and a free performance in a city park. That older prostitute herself as she sits in prison regretting pretty much everything she's done in her entire life. The failing, cocaine-addicted artist who meets the monk’s brother after the day of Petit’s walk. The monk’s lover, a co-worker at a seniors’ home.

There are three short chapters from the perspective of Petit himself. Some short chapters from people who don’t interact with the prostitute’s story at all. A teenage phreaker tapping into pay phones talking to people at the site of the walk. The freelance photographer who takes one of the iconic shots of the walk.

That's probably the greatest strength of the book as far as technique goes – he’s spot on with the cadences and character of so many different voices. Irish Catholics with a complicated relationship to their faith – yeah, of course he can write one of those.

But black New Yorker street prostitutes? Hispanic teenage photographers? Silicon Valley geeks who call pay phones in Times Square for fun? I’m especially impressed that he can express such convincing voices for the interior monologues of women – that’s a task where I’ve seen so many male writers fall on their faces. 

There are limits to polyphony as well, and I’m glad McCann stays within them. I don’t think polyphony can construct a coherent narrative if voices change from frequently than chapter-by-chapter or section-by-section. Any faster than that – among paragraphs, sentence to sentence, or even within a single sentence – and the result is a maelstrom.

Let the Great World Spin author Colum McCann.

More poem than narrative. And very difficult to do well. I’d say the only one who really did – at least among those I’ve read – was Finnegans Wake. 

Yes, I have to be one of those people who mentions James Joyce in any discussion of Irish literature. Because he and McCann both deal with a theme that resonates quite strongly with me – an exploration of how Catholicism shapes a subjectivity.

I’m not a Christian – I consider myself more aligned to Judaism today than ever. But I grew up in a very Catholic country, Newfoundland. I count former priests and nuns among my friends and family. And there’s a wonderful idea in the Catholic philosophical and moral tradition that McCann’s book explores.

The most abject and spat-upon of people in just as holy in the eyes of God as the most historically significant and fantastic because they all contribute to building the same complex and beautiful world that is God’s unfolding creation.

That's why the remarkable and inspiring achievement of Philippe Petit is juxtaposed with the sordid and filthy lives of these prostitutes. Unfolding their narratives together shows the equivalent dignity of both.

That's a fundamentally democratic idea, profoundly democratic too, since the notion applies to ordinary life and the divine simultaneously. 

If Irish literature is going to have a popular definition, I’d prefer that its Catholicism grapple with themes that lend dignity to humanity. If only to demonstrate that we deserve it.

When Collapse Becomes Humiliation, Composing, 03/09/2016

Today, I want to talk a little more about Vladimir Putin and modern Russia. Reading back over the post I wrote last night, about how Etienne Balibar seems to be the only one who anticipated Russia’s current return to oppressive geopolitics, I didn’t really like what I wrote. 

It was basically just a reiteration of what Putin’s Russia had been up to, and wondering exasperated why no one else could have seen this coming. I admit, I wrote it rather late in the evening. So I couldn’t quite make the ideas clear. 

We saw this moment as a great victory for democracy,
and it was. But victory wasn't finished yet. The symbol
is always easier to deal with than millions of real lives.

Let’s do that today. 

I could make a pretty strong case that this failure of geopolitical prediction is at heart a failure of empathy. In two short years, all the most powerful symbols and the central political institutions of Soviet and European communism had fallen. Figuratively and literally.

The actual political phenomena are so complex that it could take hundreds of history books to give a truly comprehensive account. But in the context of this argument, here’s how I’ll lay it out. With the Soviet economy in crisis, Russian leaders tried liberalizing the economy a little, opening up more flexibility than the crumbling bureaucracy of the Brezhnev era could have allowed.

Economic unrest and a more liberalized political atmosphere provoked protest across the Eastern Bloc, Hungary opened its borders to Austria and East Germany, East German dictator Erich Honecker stepped down, and the government opened talks on reunification. There was a party at the Berlin Wall, and it hasn’t stopped since.

On the Russian side, Mikhail Gorbechev’s economic and political liberalizations weren’t sitting well with hardline communists in the government and army, who deposed him in a military coup. But a protest movement in Moscow encouraged many in the Soviet army to turn against the plotters.

At the front of this protest was former Politburo member turned democratic activist Boris Yeltsin. With Gorbachev under lock and key the entire time, Yeltsin became the public face of the democratic movement in Russia. 

Since most of the anti-Soviet opposition in the other 15 republics was nationalist, the Soviet state collapsed into 16 different countries. Most of them remained autocratic dictatorships – Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. 

The democratic revolution in Russia was genuinely
mind-blowing – an event that we long considered
impossible in the West. Our problem is that our
leaders (and us too) learned all the wrong lessons
from this wonderful moment.

Some of them transitioned to democracies – Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and most importantly Russia. Georgia democratized about ten years after independence. Ukraine’s was a difficult transition, having spent 15 years after independence as a Russian client state, then a democratic revolution interrupted by Viktor Yanukovich’s resurgent nationalism with Paul Manafort’s public relations team.

How did we understand the fall of European communism popularly in the West? Ronald Reagan demanded that they tear down the Berlin Wall, and we did. Reagan wins!

I mean, I oversimplify it to make sense of it here, but that’s basically what the popular Western belief amounts to. That triumphalism – in the wider context of the 1990s’ generally booming Western economy and gung-ho spirit – led no political leaders in the West to question the wisdom of liberalizing the Russian economy by selling off trillions of dollars worth of state assets to a small group of businessmen, even though most of them were former leaders in the Soviet military, communist party, or espionage agency.

Within only a few years of independence, Russia was a basket case. Its economy was in tatters, its people having lost so much of the financial support systems they could once rely on for basic dignity. Unable to contain or control the looting of his country or the downward spiral of his society, Yeltsin became a broken man living at the bottom of a vodka bottle.

We in the West saw the triumph of democracy – blind to the authoritarianism of countries most of us English speakers can barely spell and to the collective depression of the Russian people. 

All we saw, popularly speaking, when we thought of the new Russia, was the triumph of democracy. We saw Yeltsin’s greatest moment standing on a tank in the middle of Moscow, marking an end to dictatorship and Russia’s first experiment in democracy.

Frankly, we should put off asking why so many
Russian people prefer authoritarianism to democracy.
First, figure out and accept a good answer to the
question of what made us such a lousy ally in the
most important democratic transition on Earth
since 1776 and 1832. Why we let Russian
democracy fail.

We’d watch spy movies filled with Russian gangsters and – as a society anyway – never connect the explosion of the mafia in Russia’s economy with what we’d enabled in the name of freedom. 

Even the espionage leadership of the United States – who had the intelligence capacity to have known better – had its focus drawn to the Middle East instead. The political leadership of the United States as the 21st century started were all democratic triumphalists. 

They saw the fall of the Soviet Union as vindication of America’s right to dominate the world – Earth itself would run according to the model of the American market and business society. The American military would be its police force and missionary unit – first stop, Iraq. Our leaders were driven by ego and arrogance. 

Reagan spoke, and the wall fell. It was almost biblical to so many Americans, unfortunately even the ones in the White House. Now Bush would speak, and hundreds of democracies would bloom across the world.

We were idiots. Our minds were narrow. Our eyes were closed.

They and so many of us presumed the Russian story was over – the Soviet empire had fallen, so they were a democracy now. The thought of a democratic country returning to dictatorship on its own was senseless to them. So they took their eye off Russia, even as that country’s own espionage agency led a coup against their deflated democrats.

The scattered person could see it happening, could see the failures of understanding, the neglect, the condescension that was turning millions of people against democracy and back toward life under authoritarianism. But no one would listen to an aging academic like Etienne Balibar in his speeches and essays on European nationalism in the late 1990s.

Vladimir Putin surprised Western popular culture two years ago with his invasion and subversion of Ukraine, his intervention in Syria on behalf of a neo-Stalinist dictator. I find most disturbing his military flights into Swedish airspace, purposely intimidating a Scandinavian social democracy as they consider an explicit alliance with NATO against just such Russian military agitation.

If we had been partners to the Russian people instead of looters and arrogant masters, we could have avoided this whole mess. That would have required empathy and understanding the society that had been our enemy for generations. I think we could have done it.

If we’d bothered to try.

In Soviet Russia Victory Wins You! Research Time, 02/09/2016

One thing that strikes me about reading Balibar’s essays on nationalism is how prescient they are about modern politics in Europe. I’ve spent the past week waxing on (and waxing off) about his insights into the still-embryonic European nationalist movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But I find the historical insight that strikes me most is how well he understands that there’s more to the end of the Cold War than anyone in any influential position in the West understood at the time.

Etienne Balibar seems to have been the only one in the
West who never got played by Vladimir Putin.

I’m reading this book at a time when Russian petty imperialism is in a new resurgence. They’ve literally invaded a core ally of the European Union, and wouldn’t have been long for joining NATO either. They invaded and conquered the Crimean peninsula, having already occupied several borderlands in countries like Georgia that used to be folded inside the Soviet Union. 

All this in response to these former Soviet border countries installing more liberal democratic governments – Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine – who aligned more with the European Union and United States. 

They’ve encouraged nationalist movements to destabilize democratic governments in their traditional sphere of influence as well. Russian nationalists in Donetsk have split Ukraine with a civil war. Transnistria has been a semi-recognized non-entity state on the eastern slivers of Moldova, with Russian support. And Vladimir Putin is trying to encourage Russian nationalism in the Baltic region.

This is not how a defeated power acts. Balibar is one of the few, writing in one essay shortly after Putin took over the Russian Presidency, to describe that change as a takeover by the political police – the mean who once led the KGB, in other words. 

Despite all Putin’s shenanigans – interventions, destabilizations, stirring up nationalist movements in newly or soon-to-be democratic regimes in his neighbourhood – pretty much every mainstream commentator and political actor with any real influence was totally surprised by Russian meddling in Ukraine. And every Western leader was powerless to stop Putin’s support of Bashar Assad in Syria.

All the people whose job it was to know enough never to be surprised were completely surprised. It’s the most intense expression of the immense failure the end of the Cold War really was.

Since I was a small child watching the Soviet Union fall on cable news, I’ve been told that the West won the Cold War. And that’s certainly how everyone acted. Balibar, along with many left-leaning critics today, describe the modern European Union as having pushed all the Europe into the global marketplace, where globalized corporations and their leaders can enjoy those regions’ wealth.

Not really how to lead a transition to democracy.

The European Union is thankfully far more than this, and has far more potential than this crude co-optation. But the critics aren’t wrong either. 

This was exactly the wrong way to treat the end of the Cold War. The European Eastern bloc and almost all of Europe’s former Soviet states transitioned to democracy, and Western leaders thought this meant total capitulation to everything about the Western way of life.

Balibar rightly argues that this democratic transition should have been a period to build a new vision of Europe and a new model of Western democracy together. A time when we could have learned from the ideals of socialist Eastern Europe before their corruption by dictatorships. And when the East could have learned from the more experience democracies of the West.

Instead, to the victors go the power. That’s how it went. And I believed for a long time that this was the right order of things. But it certainly didn’t work out.

The mass privatizations – more like mass looting – of the Russian state ended up creating one of the most horribly unjust societies. A mega-elite of oligarchical billionaires owned almost all the wealth in Russia, and the other hundred million or so Russians were left adrift. Putin’s nationalism at least gave them the promise of being part of a feared nation again.

To them, the end of the Cold War wasn't any victory for democracy, but a national humiliation. Russians could never have built anything from being forced into the economic system of the countries they considered enemies for decades.

Our apparent victory blinded the thought leaders and political leaders of pretty much all the West into a massive blunder of overreach and condescension. Who knows what promising philosophical, political, and ethical creativity could have come out of a meeting of the minds and moralities of two Europes after the Cold War's end? 

We’ll never really know. Maybe one day, I’ll imagine and write a book about it.

Dictating Freedom Epilogue: Thought In History, Composing, 01/09/2016

For all the links to the Dictating Freedom series, check these out.

1) Histories of Racism

2) The Apprentice Citizen

3) What So Special About These Shapes?

4) Taking Our Borders for Granted

5) The Image of the Nation

• • •

Call this a concluding note on philosophical method.

I’ll be honest. I actually always found it quite difficult understanding what precisely is going on in Rousseau’s conception of general will when I first read his political philosophy more than a decade ago. Professors have been similarly perplexed. We always read it by looking at the text alone, trying to parse its meaning with close reading.

Balibar is the first I’ve read to have worked out a clear explanation of what’s going on. He did so because he rooted it in the material concerns Rousseau and European intelligentsia were dealing with at the time – a political alternative to the absolute rule of monarchies and the people’s subjection to them, which would enable a freer society.

Knowledge has to be bent and fit into weird and congested
spaces if you want to fit it inside a classroom.

My own first philosophy book was conceived like this. By the time I was ready to write this kind of work, I knew I had to root my thinking in the concerns of my time. That paramount concern was the global destruction of so many of the ecologies that kept humanity alive. 

So Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity was an attempt to help develop the concepts that humanity would have to live by if we were to have a future. And Utopias continues that trend by being an explicitly political philosophical work about the relationship of our social and ethical ideals with our political institutions.

Yet so much of the academy shies away from that kind of engagement. Not completely, of course – it isn’t as if no one writes political theory or no one writes about social issues. But the norms drive academics into insularity instead of engagement.

Tenure and promotion committees look more kindly on publications in heavily paywalled, prestigious professional journals. Sometimes even more than books that are available for public purchase, and typically take far more work to research, develop, and produce.

As well, the style of academic writing turns off intelligent non-academics. It’s not news for me to say that overly-technical writing filled with discipline-specific jargon isn’t exactly casually accessible to readers. 

A magnifying glass and intense,
singular focus isn't always the best
way to see the world. No shit.

Over-saturation by citations doesn’t help matters either. It amounts to a kind of academic pissing contest – writing to demonstrate how much you’re read to the detriment of developing anything interesting or enlightening to say.

Specific to the discipline of philosophy, that problem of narrow focus on texts causes problems too. It’s a problem of relevance, for one. If you focus all your interpretive energy on a text itself, you’ll find yourself straining to show how any of this cognitive gymnastics has anything to do with the life of someone who isn’t directly invested in those texts themselves. 

But there’s another problem in that focus on texts alone, which I sketched at the start of this post. You can actually mystify yourself – you can get lost. 

A friend of mine once attended a conference of Immanuel Kant specialists and had an interesting, but not very productive, time. All the professors has written papers defending their particular technical interpretations against the critiques of all the others. 

Their interpretations had staked out intellectual territory for themselves, but offered nothing more enlightening than sessions of meticulous nitpicking. It’s apparently even worse in studies of ancient Greek philosophy. 

There, the cumulative weight of literally thousands of years of scholarship means that arguments over the particular meaning of a single sentence (or even a piece of a sentence, or even a single word!) will take years or decades to unfold.

The thoughts have lost their connection with the world where they take place. Unrestrained, they collapse in on themselves. 

Definitely not that Napoleon. That's Marlon Brando. It
wasn't a good movie.

When I was a young undergrad of about 18 or 19, a lot of my professors would tell us never to count real historical events in our analyses of philosophical works. They presumed that we’d reduce the complexity of the books and essays we were studying to simple reflections and commentaries on the events that surrounded them.

‘The Phenomenology of Spirit is all about Napoleon.’ Some of us would really think this way about what we were reading. I’d never see them in another philosophy class.

You can’t reduce a complex work of conceptual engineering to some historical event to which it responds. But you also can’t reduce a complex historical event to some simple, dogmatic definition. Philosophical writing is about pushing people to expand and develop their minds, so they can handle more and more complex ideas and methods of thought.

That thinking is powerful when it’s useful thinking – when it engages the problems of the world and history in all their real complexity.