How Much Is On Me? Occupational Therapy, 13/10/2016

Well, that turned into a much longer break than I’d planned. Originally, I was planning to throw up the third post in that "Obsolete Democracy” series last Friday, take the Thanksgiving weekend off for a gathering with friends in St Catharine’s, then finish it with a fourth entry yesterday. 

Instead, those are going to come tomorrow and Friday, after a delay of nearly a week. 

I'm going to be honest on this space – it was the result of another mental health crisis. A panic attack whose repercussions I’m still dealing with. In my own person, in my relationship with my partner, and at my work. 

It’s been difficult to reorient myself, and income insecurity continues to gnaw at me whenever I think about it for too long. Which is unfortunate, because I need to think about it if I’m going to solve it.

What’s helping, is that I’m getting myself accustomed to some mild anti-anxiety medications – though finding the optimal dosage is probably going to take a while. Another thing that’s helping – if slowly – is my cognitive behavioural therapy sessions.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;

Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate

Through all its purples to the final slate,

Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,

Out of such mildew plucking neater mould

And spouting new orations of the cold.

One might. One might. But time will not relent.

And I’ve been reaching out to some old friends. Not just friends in general, but friends who’ve had experience with depression and mental health problems. And friends who’ve been more successful at the post-doctoral career transition than I’ve been so far.

My current mental health issues are the product of a career transition that’s honestly been rougher than I had always planned. Soon after my teaching opportunities dried up, I realized that I had fewer resources than I originally thought for my Plan B outside the university sector. And despite my investments in retraining, a corporate or public sector career hasn’t really taken off.

Several parts of my life are going well – my research, writing and publishing, and film festival work. But none of those are actually making me any money at this point, and those financial worries have compounded over the years. That kind of constant stress doesn’t do nice things to a person’s mind.

The blog is called Adam Riggio Writes. And I do. But even though Adam Riggio Makes a Decent Salary wouldn’t be as interesting to read about, it’s something that I’ve wanted for quite some time. And for the last four years, it just hasn’t come together. 

So the years of stress, worries, missed opportunities, failed chances have all added up. The result is a powerful sense of shame, and all the feelings of worthlessness that implies. 

Shame that my first chosen career, the one that I dedicated my 20s to training for, the one to which I devoted myself to the detriment of a lot of other aspects of a well-rounded life, fell apart. Shame that I’m nearly 34 and still hustling to get a career and financial solvency together. Shame that I'm a failure. A non-starter. Shame at my own economic impotence. Shame at messing up. Shame that I’m ashamed instead of being an optimistic go-getter who gets results.

And always the worries that there is only so much time. That the more time I spend struggling, the more like a perpetual failure and a loser I'll appear to more and more hiring committees and human resources evaluators. The continual message from my therapist is that I must focus on what's in my power to change. 

But the forces and decisions that make the biggest impact on all our lives lie beyond our powers. That's the source of my fear, stress, and anxiety. Worse is that others all too often judge our character as if those forces and decisions were in our control. We're blamed for them. Attempts to name them as beyond our control are written off as 'avoiding responsibility.' And we feel ashamed.

I know it can get better, that there are plenty of opportunities that I can still take hold of, if I can find them. But I also know that life rarely feels that way anymore. 

And I worry that being honest about my mental health struggles will alienate me, and drive away possible opportunities. “Why would I want to work with someone who has to take anxiety pills? Who has these mental health problems? Who admits to feeling stress and lacking constant confidence?” Everyone who suffers from any mental health issue is afraid of that.

And I’m sick of being afraid.

Obsolete Democracy II: The Origin of Most Welfare States, Research Time, 06/10/2016

Earlier this week before our interruption to yell at people about the Syrian war, I ended on a question about the dangers democracy may face in the post-colonial world.

“So in India – as well as former colonies across Asia and Africa – the state and its administration was well-established. Then civic institutions plopped on top.
"If the civic institutions of democratic representation and national unity are an afterthought to your administrative institutions, can you still be a democracy? . . . To Be Continued”

A lot of the states in the world that used to be imperialist colonies inherited institutions that were generally geared toward two activities. One was delivering services. The other was dividing up the population into categories and classes based on what services they’d receive.

Now in the time when these institutions were run by a bunch of racist Europeans, the population was usually divided to stir up resentment and hatreds, prevent them from forming social links strong enough to overthrow the empire.

Movies are sometimes the only ways most Westerners learn anything
about another culture, especially Asian ones. You don't exactly get a
lot of detail in between the Bollywood tropes.

So colonial states were built to discourage and break apart any civic nationalist solidarity before it could even form. That’s good management from an imperialist’s sense. That way, the population will be less likely to organize themselves to kick you out of their country. 

Once all the colonial empires did get kicked out of those countries, there was a bit of a dilemma. Here we had a state institution all ready to run, but it was built to segment the population into separate groups and treat them totally differently.

Remove the divide-and-conquer motivation from the state institutions,* but keep an administration that minutely identifies different classes in a population by need and situation. What you have left after that is a quality welfare state. 

* And not all of them did, to their horrifying detriment usually.

And this kind of welfare state ends up with a curious form of politics attached to it. The politics of community lobbying. 

Think back to the example of Kolkata’s Railway Gate shantytown in Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. They're able to maintain their existence as a thriving community of poor people on the side of the tracks because they formed a leadership group.

The People’s Welfare Association organizes to lobby for government services and coordinate how they’re distributed. And they rarely meet with elected officials. They meet with the administration officials and workers who actually get work done.

The shantytown and its concerns are on such a small scale compared to the entire city of Kolkata that municipal representatives don’t have the remit to deal with it. Let alone elected officials in any higher level of the Indian government. So they deal directly with government administrative workers.

Men hoping to join India's civil service line up expectantly. According
to Chatterjee, they're important organs of Indian democracy. I think
he's on to something really interesting here.

Civil servants. They have their welfare budgets and can largely direct it as their offices see fit. So if you’re a small-scale self-organized group like the Railway Gate shantytown, you can get the most effective results from your lobbying efforts. The officials give out the money and the services.

This is the kind of democracy that exists in a lot of post-colonial countries, where people are still beholden to multiple identities and solidarities, and no one national identity need take precedence. This is the democracy of community organization itself.

It preserves the desires, identities, and lifestyles of each peculiar group. And it creates solidarity within all these groups because of the social organization needed to thrive. The flow of money and goods from the general population to different communities within it helps build a social solidarity across the country that has nothing to do with the drive to conformity that comes with nationalism.

This is the ideal of what the lobbying democracy of the administrative welfare state can do. It can revive civic organization on a local, micro level to demand entitlements – the satisfaction of needs. 

Ideals are rarely achieved, of course. One obvious way this kind of democracy can corrupt itself is with literal corruption. 

The formerly democratic lobbying organization ossifies into a static office. The loyal leader of his people becomes a stodgy lifetime-appointed official himself. Lobbying for public resources for your community becomes bribery for government lucre. 

But the potential is incredible. A democratic culture of organization from the micro-level to lobby large and larger scale state institutions – there is nothing more democratic than the demand. The demand for a better life and the assistance to build one.

What happens when nationalism collides with this new kind of democracy? . . . To Be Continued

Iraq & Syria: A Spark that Lit an All-Consuming Fire, Advocate, 05/10/2016

One of my arts & advocacy projects is my work with the Syria Film Festival. This is an organization that gave me my first communications gig after I finished my business program, an internship for their public relations work.

Though Blumenthal doubts their legitimacy because of it, the White
Helmets are simultaneously humanitarians and publicists for
democratic activism. But advocacy and humanitarianism have
never been separate.

The friendships and professional relationships I’ve built in my work with SYFF have been ethically and professionally rewarding. And aside from my personal fulfillment, I’m proud to be part of an artistic and advocacy network that strives for a peaceful and free Syria – an end to the world’s most brutal ongoing war and an end to the culture and institutions of dictatorship that laid the conditions for that war.

So it burned me pretty hard to see Max Blumenthal’s recent articles floating around my social media networks. These amount to hit pieces on The Syria Campaign, a public relations firm whose focus is building support for humanitarian work in Syria – in particular, advocating on behalf of the White Helmets – and for an end to the Assad regime. 

None of these are objectively bad things. In a war – especially one as horrifying as Syria’s – humanitarian workers are needed. And the Assad regime from Hafez to Bashar has been a Stalinist totalitarian police state, organizing its institutional power along ethnic-religious sectarian lines. 

Ending that dynasty’s decades-long reign would be a chance for a new beginning. And with a population inside and outside Syria of highly educated, democratically-inclined people, that country would have a good chance of growing into an Arab democracy.

The problem is that we in the West have heard all this sort of stuff before.

Substance: Lobbying & Image-Making

Blumenthal does a fine job of tracing the links between the White Helmets, the Syria Campaign, and a variety of activist individuals and organizations who’ve worked with and drawn funds from the American government’s democracy promotion agencies like USAID, the Office of Transition Initiatives, and affiliated contractor companies like Chemonics. 

He’s found examples of individual members of White Helmet brigades who – when out of their humanitarian uniforms – have carried out terrible acts of violence. Who have tortured people who’ve been claimed to work for the Assad regime. Who have apparently picked up a gun with Al Qaeda affiliated organizations like Jabhat Al Nusra.

Seriously. You should go.

He concludes, after combing through the history of all these links, that the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets are not non-partisan humanitarians but are open agitators in the Syrian war. For him, that implies that their humanitarian work is a sham, a mere “public relations” move. 

The move that leads Blumenthal to condemn the Syria Campaign, though, is their new campaign to lobby for a no-fly zone over Syria. This would require a massive military intervention to enforce. Given the current state of Assad’s alliances, this would essentially require a shooting war between the United States of America and the Russian Federation.

That’s a situation that could easily escalate into a true nuclear war. That is something we should all be afraid of. I’d dare say it’s one of the reasons why the United States hasn’t intervened in Syria. Given Putin’s aggressive stance, a more nuanced strategy is needed to stop him without provoking him into authorizing nuclear weapons use.

Between a Quagmire and a World in Flames

Leave aside all the pragmatic arguments, though I can easily make them. Most of them are obvious – the necessity to play power politics when trying to unseat a brutal totalitarian regime like Bashar al Assad’s. 

Yes, you have to lobby with powerful states that have military capabilities to cripple and destroy the regime you oppose. Public relations, building alliances, building popular support in the countries whose governments you want to enlist to your goals. 

The power of the UN is that its neutrality lets them mediate between
even the most horrible actors. I remember stories in his biography
of Sergio Vieira de Mello of how he negotiated with the Khmer
Rouge. But that neutrality is precisely why the Syria Campaign
can't get on the UN bandwagon in the war. Revolutionaries can't
be neutral in their own fight.

Public relations – done right and with an ethical conscience – is the organization of democracy. It’s mobilizing people, taking part in the marketplace of persuasion, ideas, and competing social goals. 

Yes, it’s manipulative – but even the least amount of media literacy, which is near-universal today, gives the public power over advocates. A critical eye can still defend yourself against being a patsy, and hold tight to your freedom when others want to seduce you.

Frankly, it’s easier to act entirely on your conscience when you live far from a war zone. When you do, you have to make what alliances you can to raise your chances of surviving just a little longer. It’s sanctimonious of a Western journalist like Max Blumenthal to demand total virtuousness to the point of saintliness of humanitarians who have to work in horrifying conditions.

This is at the heart of why the Syria Campaign critiques the United Nations and UNHCR for working so closely with the Assad regime. The UN has a mandate to maintain neutrality in all conflicts – it has to be a non-partisan actor because its primary role is as the mediating forum for global politics.

So UN organizations have to work with even the most distasteful regimes. They have to recognize their legitimacy, despite their violence and terror. Even when a brutal government is under siege, the UN has to work with them. And they work with the groups uprising against that government too.

All too often, that need to work with the government of the day impedes the UN’s humanitarian mission. Because the UN and the UNHCR become dependent for access to populations in need upon the very leaders who are intent on slaughtering those populations. 

That is why the Syria Campaign, along with more than 70 Syrian human rights and democracy organizations, denounced the UN’s complicity with the Assad regime. Blumenthal describes their opposition to UN strategy and operations as a sign of their corruption, their being stooges of American military interests.

The Syria Campaign makes no illusion of neutrality in the war. They’re democrats. They want Syria at peace and Assad gone. They want a democratic Syria.

Seeing Shadows

That’s at the heart of Blumenthal’s accusation toward the Syria Campaign and White Helmets: You want regime change. 

Pictured above: Not Bashar or Hafez Assad. Remember that.

For the Western left, that’s a charged phrase. A phrase with a lot of deep and terrible meanings and implications. Regime change.

Since the late 20th century, the Western left has opposed the broad ideology of the American government and the circles of think tanks and lobbying organizations that surround that institution. It kicked into gear with protests against the World Trade Organization, opposing the imposition of global economic rules and institutions running according to what we now call neoliberal austerity.

That opposition gained a military dimension in the Bush years, with the massive protest movement against the American invasion of Iraq. That time made many in the left lose our faith in the global spread of democracy.

It seems to make no sense at first. Why would the progressive left give up on democracy? 

Because we saw it delivered at the barrel of a gun, with a plan designed by a set of neoconservative think tank dorks that was barely up to the task. Within months of the American occupation of Iraq, an Al Qaeda terror campaign began in Baghdad and Anbar, while a sectarian army arose in Shia territory.

No matter how sincere Bush, Cheney, and their crew were about the power of the American army to secure a democratic Iraq – and I have no doubt that they were truly sincere – all they achieved was six years of barely organized violence by the national army and rapacious piracy from leagues of mercenaries.

Through it all ran the not-very-secret word: regime change. The original American plan for Iraq was to install the exiled liberal party of Ahmed Chalabi as the democratically elected ruler of Iraq. Much of the faulty and false intelligence that the Bush Administration used to justify their invasion was supplied by Chalabi’s group and their affiliate lobbying organizations.

When Max Blumenthal looks at Syria, he sees Iraq.

In Syria, the revolution is televised. And ongoing.

It Began With Revolution

That’s why he denounces the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets as stooges for American military expansion and a new invasion of the Middle East. He sees public relations and media lobbying – its methods updated for the online media universe – as more of the same manipulation from liberal autocrats like Chalabi.

He sees the Syria Campaign and other activists calling out the United Nations for their complicity with the Assad regime as a new version of Bush’s railroading of the UN in 2002. A repetition of the old dismissal of the legitimacy of the grounding institution of all international law.

He paints Bashar Assad as the legal and tolerable – if horrid and distasteful – rightful leader of Syria, under siege from a superpower desperate to prevent its military decline. Just as Saddam Hussein was, the totalitarian bugbear of American neoconservatism.

But Syria in 2016 isn’t Iraq in 2002. Syria has already been embroiled in a civil war for years that began in a revolution against Assad’s regime. Blumenthal erases the will of millions of Syria’s people, seeing only public relations firms and shadowy manipulations of empire-minded deep organs of American government.

If you’re going to criticize American military intervention, there are plenty of ways to do it. Mostly because their efforts tend to self-destruct and fall apart through mismanagement. Or they’ll be out-maneuvered by a more ruthless Vladimir Putin, who isn’t squeamish about dropping bunker buster bombs on schools and hospitals.

Don’t forget that the unfolding violence of Syria’s war began – and continues – a revolution against a totalitarian tyrant. In a way, that’s quite an American story. It’s certainly a democratic one.

Obsolete Democracy I: The Post-National Nation, Research Time, 04/10/2016

Here’s an idea that isn’t said nearly often enough in North America’s political discussions as it should. It comes from Partha Chatterjee’s observations about the kind of social organizing that he calls ‘political society.’

It’s an insight that cuts to the heart of several of the stark, intense divisions among political activists of the left and right in the West today. That explodes our usual ideas about legitimacy, the rights of citizens, and the responsibilities of government. 

India's Parliament building

We’ve become so democratic in the 20th century that we’ve undercut the original foundation of democracy itself.

Let me explain. The original conception of democracy was literally that all the citizens of a community would gather together in an assembly to decide on the actions for the government. All the citizens would lead the community as a team.

That was no longer possible in the democratic structures of the nation-state with its massive territory. But we could do the same kind of deliberative leadership in representative assemblies. A few hundred or so people elected to represent citizens in different regions of the country.

We could still tell ourselves that representation and transparent deliberations in parliament brought the real concerns of all the citizens to the decision-making table. 

The argument’s been made that this representation was always a sham – that’s one of Antonio Negri’s major messages. But whether representation could ever actually bring the wills of thousands to a single room, we believed it.

And democratic assemblies did carry out these functions. Political parties represented genuinely different philosophies of how the state should act, and they presented themselves to the public as standard bearers of ideologies. They were the bearers of conversations about our direction as a society.

This is still how the civil state works, but it isn’t the only function of government anymore. The government has taken on so many more responsibilities, because one of the goals of politics has become general human uplift. We can no longer let the very poor remain poor. And that demand carries over to our government.

The government is no longer only about the philosophical direction of our community as a whole. It’s about human welfare. 

India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, in session

Libertarian political thinking today is defined by their opposition to this. It’s the ideal behind any right-wing political philosophy that focusses on restoring small government. The only legitimate function of government is the civic function: the discourse, the venue that unites a diverse set of populations into a nation.

Us Westerners, we take that civic function as the essence of the nation-state, the primary purpose of state institutions. Largely, that’s a historical matter. For a long time, I’ve thought most concepts of the essential in political thinking were actually historical contingencies. 

That’s because I think of pretty much all human existence as historical contingency. Even facts that are universal to humanity are historical contingencies – you just have to expand your view of history to periods of millions of years instead of a few hundred or thousand.

But reading Chatterjee calls to mind another reason for the historical contingency of our institutions’ primary responsibilities. That’s the real historical foundation and creation of many modern states. 

The institutions and purposes of forging civic national union were grafted on to existing frameworks that were entirely administrative. The people who ruled India for the 200 years before its emergence as a contemporary nation-state* had no interest in encouraging a common feeling and concept of civic nationalism across the country.

* In the post-colonial world, the term now has to have a very loose application.

Those rulers were the British. You don’t want your dependent colony to have a common sense of civic nationalism – that causes revolution. 

So in India – as well as former colonies across Asia and Africa – the state and its administration was well-established. Then civic institutions plopped on top.

If the civic institutions of democratic representation and national unity are an afterthought to your administrative institutions, can you still be a democracy? . . . To Be Continued

Anarchist India, Research Time, 30/09/2016

We in the West have a lot to learn from others. I mean, everyone has a lot to learn from everyone else – that’s just the nature of singularity. All of our experiences and life narratives are different, and we can all learn from each other. 

But speaking more specifically (and without empty hippie platitudes), I think Western progressive activists have a lot to learn from community organizing in India. At least, from my first tentative investigation into the curious new kinds of political associations that modern Indian society produces, we have a lot to learn.

We Westerners (as far as I can speak for a whole society spread over
four continents) tend to think of slums as sad, pathetic places. And
their people lead difficult lives. But revolutionary political creativity
can emerge from these places.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Western political thinking is stuck in a bind. In our political tradition, states first developed as civil organizations. Their purpose was to unify disparate people across wide territories behind a common mission and a common identity. 

The Western state was the material articulation of the spirit of the nation – such was the philosophy. And the institutions of the state were designed to build that communal spirit of nationhood in the first place. It was supposed to take real associations and societies of plurality and unify them, homogenize them. 

We’ve run into quite a problem with this, which is that national identity never matches borders exactly. People who identify with one nation live outside it, and we feel a strange legitimacy when a national state tries to protect nationals (even non-citizen nationals) outside its borders. Even when it results in aggressive expansion or subversive invasion.

The nation-state has been obviously obsolete since, as far as I’m concerned, 1945. So what kind of political institutions can be alternatives?

Chatterjee identifies – without using the phrase itself – the welfare state as a vibrant, functional alternative to nationalism and the nation-state. When the state and the government is a service provider, it focusses on identifying differences, not smoothing them into unity.

There are populations with different needs, different situations, and different histories. The state has obligations to help all these populations in its territory develop better lives for themselves. That results in a much more empowered citizenry.

Here’s an example from Kolkata: Rail Colony Gate Number One. This is a shantytown of about 1500 people in a Kolkata suburb on the side of railroad tracks. Everyone knows their settlement is completely illegal. They’re squatters on private land – political and ecological refugees, as well as economic migrants, from Bangladesh and East Bengal.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become the face of Hindu
nationalism, a label he's embraced. And while he's managed to
control the public image in the West of what India has embraced,
his power over a dynamic population of more than a billion is not
quite as considerable as the propaganda suggests.

Everyone – squatters included – acknowledges that they’re squatters, and so their community is legally precarious. It’s subject to forced removal at any time. But these very poor people literally have nowhere else to go. 

And that’s why the railway and municipal authorities let them stay – because they have nowhere else to go. Also, they’ve formed their own relationships with the surrounding neighbourhoods as care workers and day labourers. They’ve become economically integrated over the decades the Colony has existed.

The welfare state owes these people resources to live and improve their lives. Now, they way we think about the government coming to help in the West, we’d expect disasters to unfold. It’s become obvious in our culture that the government is a disconnected, distant, barely competent service provider. But that’s not what happened in Kolkata.

Community leaders in Rail Colony Gate #1 formed Jana Kalyan Samiti – The People’s Welfare Association. It’s an organization of community organizers in the shantytown itself, which coordinates with the government and other stakeholders in the neighbourhood for service provision and diplomacy.

As far as principles go, it’s an anarchist organization. Again, this has a very different meaning than mainstream Western ideas. We tend to think of anarchism as Black Bloc crust-punks who live in squats, beg or wash dishes for a living, and reject education or social advancement.

That’s a false picture of how anarchism as a philosophy works. In the Western academic world, anarchism tends mostly to be a negative argument about the oppressive powers of national governments and authoritarian institutions. 

But anarchism, in a positive sense, is network politics. Organizations arising from communities themselves, as people build networks that grow to become huge associations with core and periphery members. 

The leaders of the Rail Colony’s People’s Welfare Association are relationship brokers between the people of the shantytown, neighbourhood organizations, the rail company, and all levels of the Indian government. This Indian organization – to take it as one example – has shown us how to do anarchism right.

Politics as relationship brokerage for the betterment of everyone in the community.

The World Challenging the West, Research Time, 29/09/2016

I can’t quite remember how I got my hands on Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. Was it from my friend The Wiz liquidating a bunch of his books before his move to the USA? Was it a book giveaway at McMaster? It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad I have it.

One unfortunate hole in my education was that, no matter how much I read of current and historical political thinking, it was all Western. In so much of the humanities academy, non-Western thought is a minor, largely neglected specialty subject. 

Yet ignoring non-Western political thinking and problems means ignoring the situations of literally half the world’s population. 

We in the West tend to have a hard time understanding and living in
multiculturalism, except maybe for a few cities like New York,
London, and Toronto. It's a new idea for us. But India has had so
many commingling cultures, ethnicities, and identities as part of
its society for so long, that they're truly experts on multiculturalism.

As a Western person who writes about political ideas, I have something of an obligation at least to look into and understand the core concepts that drive political movements in the rest of the world. We can’t just act as though the history and traditions that have shaped the Western political mind-set apply universally.

If you want to take a really aggressive view of that false universality, you can call it cultural imperialism. I prefer to think of the belief in that false universality as ass-ignorant insularity.

But there are all kinds of different ways for non-Western political ideas to diverge from the presumptions of Western thinkers and people. This isn’t a matter of West v East. 

Collapsing all the diversity of the world beyond the directly European descended cultures into a single category of East oversimplifies so much that it’s completely inaccurate. India, the subject of Chatterjee’s thought, is itself an immensely diverse country.

There are caste, class, religious, ethnic, and cultural divergences, all varying with location within the country, all the variety that such a massive society of more than a billion people can muster.

I had dinner with my old friend Bombay Blaque tonight, who’s lived in Mumbai for nearly two years now. India is a wildly diverse society, a land of so, so many.

So of all the difference that could exist, what’s the first one that stood out for me? Chatterjee introduces his book discussing a key divergence in European and Indian political histories. 

I'm only a couple of chapters in to Chatterjee's The Politics
of the Governed, and I already feel like I'll need to invent
a bunch of new tags for my entries about his work,
because understanding India requires entirely different
modes and categories of political thinking.

In Europe, the civil nation was the focus of the state’s creation. It was to create a political body and political discourse that would unite the people as such – not as inhabitants of a town, or subjects of a kingdom – as the people of a nation. 

So the public function of a civil nation – how people primarily encountered their state – was as a legislature creating their laws and civil contracts. That’s how we Westerners think of the primary function and purpose of a state, because that’s how we developed out own political culture and thinking. But that isn’t how the modern state formed in India.

In India, the modern independent state exists in people’s lives primarily as a service provider – the welfare state came before the civil state. So the state isn’t primarily the vehicle for legislation to articulate the general will of the people as a unified nation.

Instead, the state in much of the non-Western world breaks down when it tries to institute national unity. Its primary function is to identify differences – needs, situations, problems, inequities, social situations, and ecological relationships – and provide these differences the resources they need to thrive. 

Of course, the state in many parts of the world doesn’t come nearly close to satisfying all these obligations. But what matters to people’s conception of their state isn’t what it achieves, but its purpose. When the welfare state comes first, the purpose of a state is primarily redressing real physical and cultural needs and grievances.

As the West confronts yet another growing wave of violent nationalism in its history, we may have something to learn from a political philosophy where the role of the state is redress and welfare.

There’ll definitely be more to come on Chatterjee. And as many other thinkers from beyond the West as I can find.

White Privilege in Miniature, Research Time, 28/09/2016

I wrote last week about the Shallow Pond Problem. It’s a common problem in contemporary moral philosophy – a seemingly straightforward way to apply abstract principles to large, complicated political issues.

That’s what you want philosophy to do, right? Take complicated practical matters to the most abstract level, where you can apply simple concepts and arguments to the problem and get clear answers for intractable problems. 

Looks innocuous, doesn't it. But don't be fooled by its simplicity. Or
maybe I should say, don't let yourself prefer the simple.

The Shallow Pond goes like this. You’re wearing an expensive suit while walking past a shallow pond. In the pond, you see a child drowning. Obviously, the ethically correct decision is to wade into the pond and rescue the kid. It ruins your suit, but ruining your suit is acceptable collateral damage for saving a child’s life.

That’s the simple setup. Here’s the application to complex real-world problems. Because your slight sacrifice (wrecking your suit) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (saving a drowning child), then your slight sacrifice (donating all you possess but a subsistence income) is obviously a worthwhile price for a great good (donating it all to charities that provide live-saving care to the desperately poor).

I've known professional moral philosophy academics who find this argument seriously compelling. Peter Singer first put forward the argument in a professional philosophy journal, but it’s inspired other philosophy professors to become activists / lobbyists on behalf of global poverty relief.*

* Though like most human projects, corruption and hypocrisy have followed. 

How effective those projects actually are at work doesn’t undercut the moral imperative, which is entirely conceptual. 

From the first time I heard the argument, I had deep suspicions about it. But I couldn’t always put my finger on it. I think back to my earlier days in the academy, and I remember one common factor in all these times that I felt suspicious of a straightforward, clear argument. But I couldn’t argue against it myself because I couldn't root my suspicions in reasons. It was just a feeling at the time.

I learned how to explain and understand my suspicions as reasons when I learned one deceptively easy way to argue against such seemingly obvious conclusions. It’s deceptive, because I don’t think a lot of folks realize how easy it is to undercut an obvious conclusion.

He's a good writer in that he can easily suggest complex ideas in very
simple writing, but I want Appiah to dive into the complexity!
I know he can.

Cut up the premises.

Last time I talked about Kwame Anthony Appiah’s arguments around the Shallow Pond, I did it in a spirit of disappointment. Because it was an annoying example of the academic’s mistake – considering replies to others’ objections to your ideas as actual elaborations of your idea.

I wanted to read cosmopolitan moral / political attitudes and principles in application to policies and examples, or work through other social problems with a cosmopolitan lens. I wanted to see the idea become complex, not defend itself against arguments that are from a whole other world.

And I mean that seriously. There are many ways you can divide philosophical thinking into categories. However many ways you feel like splitting them up, however many principles you can think of for categories. 

But for the same of understanding what I (and Appiah too) think of approaches like the Shallow Pond problem, let’s think of methods and goals. Two categories of philosophical thinking:

1) Simplifying complex problems to develop obvious, straightforward answers.
2) Developing concepts adequate to real-world problems, so we can better understand very complex situations.

I don’t consider simplifying complex problems as a sensible way to live. Thinking that complex problems always have easy answers gets people into ridiculously horrible messes. 

That's really all Appiah’s response to the Shallow Pond problem is. Incredulousness. Do you really think you can solve world poverty by throwing money at it? It seems like you can, but in a world as complex as ours, everything short of real systematic change is nothing but a patch that falls away after a while.

Speaking of global transparency and corruption, Trump-connected
consultant Paul Manafort is only the most recently-visible one of
literally tens of thousands of people who become multi-millionaires
skimming the money from the activities of massively corrupt
national leaders and wealthy businessmen around the world.

Look at one project in Pogge’s Global Justice Program – advocacy for global financial transparency to stop illicit financial outflow from poor regions of the world. Whether through outright corruption or corporate tax cheating, more than a trillion dollars leaves the holdings of local economies in poor regions of the world. Ending global poverty has a simple answer – keep that money in the local region.

But think about what you’d have to do to achieve that. Yes, you can build a system of international law and well-funded international agencies to support it. Yes, you can advocate for laws against such financial chicanery in the countries most victimized, and local agencies that enforce those laws.

You also have to change global corporate culture so that people don’t naturally gravitate to behaving as tax cheats and money launderers in the first place. So that everyone in the culture feels shame when they fail to pay taxes or pay their hosts and collaborators their fair share. 

Donald Trump bragged that not paying his taxes and stiffing his business partners made him a smart businessman. He’s an ordinary part of an international business culture where this stance is also ordinary. Imagine what you’d have to do to change that entire culture.

So yes, the statements are easy. But understanding what it would take to achieve them is tremendously difficult. How to build airtight laws, how to shepherd those laws through the legislatures of many different institutions and governments (which requires understanding the cultural, moral, and political dynamics of billions of people), how to isolate a moral principle in a society and develop activist techniques to push that principle out of popular favour.

Thinking complicated problems are easy to solve because stating the solution is itself easy. It's a key sign that you haven't dealt with very many actually complex problems in your life. If you want a definition of white privilege that won't get anyone's ethnic hair up on their backs, explain it in this abstract way.

The statements are easy. But the world is complex. I prefer to work in the thought that adapts us to the complex. We can get the work done that way.