A Paradox – Inclusive Elites IV: The Exclusion of Imprisonment, Research Time, 10/11/2016

Continued from last post . . . When I say the fundamental anti-democratic force in society is the police, I'm not necessarily referring to actual police institutions. Though most of them these days aren't exactly all that impressive in their commitment to the rights of the people.

When I say the word 'police' in this context, it helps to think of this as a verb. When police forces solve crimes, help prosecute violent offenders, and actually protect the people of their communities, they’re public servants. They aren’t policing in this sense.

Policing as the enforcement of rules is a brutal means of social control. It's the social control of direct violent intimidation and fear. The spectacle of the tank driving down the street, the line of riot police armoured so heavily as they walk through what was once a thriving market district looking more like robot soldiers than people.

I don't remember ever thinking that guy with the cameo in Home Alone II
is going to be President of the United States one day. Even though I
wasn't even in puberty yet. Definitely not.

One very dark bright light in the victory of Donald Trump for the American Presidency is that I doubt he'd build a secret police institution. His moves to crush dissent will be as blatant and visibly in-your-face as Trump’s entire personality and campaign.

Quite a few of my good friends in Toronto are Syrian immigrants, people who've grown up in a state that controlled its population with secret police. So at least the Trump Administration will likely not embrace this essential institution of totalitarianism.

So in a philosophical sense, policing is control by the explicit and open threat of violence. That violence can take many forms, like actual physical beatings, the insidious buzzing of a surveillance state, or the institutionalized destruction of lives through imprisonment and the social exclusion of former convicts.

Policing is the biggest and most bruising stick of all the ways to exclude people from a legitimate place in a society, for the reason that a person doesn’t follow as they should a set of detailed substantive rules of propriety. As a process and a social force, policing in this sense is the essential anti-democratic activity.

If the nature of democracy as a process – the ontology of democracy – is as the struggle for freedom, then in what does that freedom consist? It’s more substantive than the libertarian sense of freedom, which is the mere absence of state coercion (though that’s incredibly important).

And it isn’t the communitarian sense of freedom either. I’ve been reading some very good critical writing on this concept in a collection of essays by Chantal Mouffe that I picked up from my shelves a while ago.

Communitarian conceptions of democratic inclusion requires such a thick, detailed, and essentially static shared morality in a community that they paradoxically end up embracing policing in the name of freedom. Communitarian conceptions of freedom reduce to a strict and detailed set of social rules that are defined as the proper way to be free. And conformity to these rules means you’ve got to start some heavy policing.

No, real democracy is neither of these. It’s the struggle for greater freedom – developing new vectors for liberation and the movement along those directions.

Seen here is a related – but sadly much more literal – example of the
heavy policing we're likely to see over the next four years. Some of
the Trump apologist trolls I've seen in the last while have mocked
progressives' fears of his impulsive, violent tendencies when in
charge of the American state. When I say Trump will likely go to
war, I don't mean war against a foreign country. I mean war on the
people of America.

This is only possible in a society, a network of complex relations between people that, when everything is working as it should, empowers us to develop and progress along liberation vectors. It sounds like the movement toward freedom should tear a community apart if liberation means everyone is creating new ways of life all the time.

In Jacques Rancière’s analysis of this problem, he describes he democratic process as the struggles for including all these proliferating differences in a society’s morality.

People are caught between two possibilities if the choice comes down to liberal or communitarian visions of a free society. Yet each of those two possibilities seem to be parallel visions of the other.

Liberalism leaves us disconnected individuals, little more than a bare life bouncing off other such isolates. Our best hopes for life would be to escape being crushed by our institutions or eaten by our neighbours.

Communitarian conceptions of citizenship and freedom position themselves as the antidote to liberal poverty of the subject’s morality. They are correct that rights can only exist with the real support of a whole community. But bearing rights that a community respects doesn’t require comprehensive moral conformity.

In other words, I don’t have to be the same kind of person as you to respect you, and welcome you to my community. Common identity isn’t the reason to respect someone – it’s simply being a person.

That’s the foundation of democracy.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites III: A Full Human Life, Research Time, 09/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . So a quick recap that will actually be quick. Representative democracy lies to us in its ideology in a lot of ways. The most profound is the notion that the act of election constitutes some magical transformation of the will of individuals into the will of the nation speaking through the parliament’s assembly.

But representative democratic institutions fall short of democracy’s ideal in a more ordinary – and no less important – way. The huge amounts of organization and money required to contest an election to a representative assembly restricts those positions to people who run and network with political parties.

Nothing says "Salt of the Earth American people" like these folks.

There are usually norms that party officials shouldn’t jump too easily from their bureaucratic jobs to running for election. But those are mostly vague feelings of squishiness. A decent public relations job usually overcomes those.

And really, the problem is that political parties are big organizations of well-connected people. It’s difficult for folks who haven’t become prominent in their communities to gain power in these organizations. And that cuts off a lot of ordinary people from the actual corridors of state power.

Democratic institutions in industrial civilizations have to be run by elite groups and elite organizations. Even if you lay aside a lot of the usual conceptions of elitism associated with wealth, they constitute an elite stratum of their own – the networks of people connected with political parties and parliamentary institutions.

It's enough to make democracy seem futile. But democracy is an ethical ideal. It’s the sort of thing that motivates your action, not a concrete goal that you can actually achieve, instantiate, make real.

The completely free society is an asymptotic approach. Would the democratic revolutionaries of the founding of the United States – to pick a noteworthy example this week – have anticipated the huge number of freedoms people advocate for today?

Consider the freedoms that only become necessary in an industrialized civilization like ours? Freedom of financial security. Freedom of information flows through decentralized internet media. Or the social and subjective freedoms that are needed today for non-cis, non-straight, non-binary sexual and gender identities?

You bet your ass Ben Franklin would have loved partying in the
craziest gay bars in America. That's what freedom is all about.

Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have understood any of the many new vectors of freedom that have arisen in the last few decades. But once he got up to speed, he probably would have been loving every minute of it.

The different demands for freedom and the different vectors upon which people can liberate themselves have grown and grown. And this growing freedom is what democracy is. Just as the ideal of the comprehensively free society is the ethical being of democracy, the ontological being of democracy is the real-world growth of liberation vectors and the social and individual struggles to develop and move along these vectors.

The ontology of democracy is literally the social struggle to free ourselves.

So in that sense, while parliamentary institutions have a tendency to build new elite groups, they aren’t truly the enemy of freedom because they can still encourage the growth and development of liberation vectors throughout society.

Only someone who conceives of politics only as civic engagement and the contest for state power would consider institutions themselves inherently anti-democratic or anti-freedom. I’ve met some very smart people who still have this blinkered view of politics, and I think in a lot of ways that’s a failure of education.

So what kind of society and institutions can encourage these liberation vectors to proliferate? It helps to consider what the opposite of such social structures and institutions would be.

They would be institutions that constrain people, sometimes literally. Social structures that encourage strict moralities. We’re used to thinking of such strict moralities as religious, and most of them are.

Police arresting protestors in Baton Rouge earlier this year. Because
you know what to do with the police.

Just consider how stifling it is to grow up in a harshly strict religious community. There are only a few ways to live, you face ostracism or worse punishments for breaking the rules, and those rules can sometimes regard intimate practices like hairstyle, sexual practice, or clothing choices.

But such strict enforcement of moral rules can come from secular cultures just as much as religious ones. We’re accustomed to thinking of headscarves and body covering as signposts of religious oppression – largely because of pervasive racist ideas in our society about Muslims and Jews.

But the police officer forcing a woman to strip on the beach is just as much an oppression as a police officer forcing a woman to cover her face on a city street.

Those images expose the essence of what opposes democracy, when we conceive of it as a social morality that encourage the growth of liberation vectors.

The police. . . . . To Be Continued

A Villainous Rage, Class: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart, Reviews, 08/11/2016

Previous philosophical reviews of Patrick Ness' Class:
Episode One: For Tonight We Might Die
Episode Two: The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
Episode Three: Nightvisiting
• • •
Some critical notes to start my thoughts on this episode of Class. I think it’s a wonderful story, with seamless transitions in tone and style between over-the-top sci-fi spectacle, melodrama, and awkward comedy.

Even when they're disturbed by Cronenbergian alien incursions into
her own body, April and Ram are still pretty adorable. Casting
probably tested all the actors in the top ranks of auditions for
these roles for chemistry with each other.

Patrick Ness sometimes has a tendency to write some very cheesy, clunky dialogue. But he’s also very aware of this limitation of his, and is actually very good at lampshading his dialogue problems. The romantic dialogue between April and Ram is the best example of this I’ve seen in the show so far.

And if we’re going to take all of contemporary Doctor Who into account, he’s far from the worst offender in occasionally clunky writing.

Regarding the philosophical themes of the story, grappling with grief remains a significant part of the Class tapestry. Though it isn’t nearly as important here as in “Nightvisiting.” Actually, the scene where grief as a theme appears, Charlie’s conversation with Matteusz and Tanya about the Cabinet of Light, brings a much more interesting idea to the show.

Of course, I won't even be able to introduce the title of my section about this idea without warning you of some pretty significant

SPOILERS!!

No Royal Wants a Person’s Freedom

I’m not talking about something as ordinary as Prince William being a dick to chauffeurs or anything like that. No, “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” introduces a character dynamic to Class that has a transformative potential for the show.

Quill's storyline in this episode is fascinating in its own right. As plot,
it largely feeds into the following episode, but it's of a piece with the
subtlest trick of the Class storyline – How Ness makes you forget over
the intervening episode from the premiere to this week that Quill is a
freedom fighter forced to become an indentured slave.

The first episode “For Tonight We Might Die” introduced the strange dynamic of Charlie and Ms Quill – Charlie is the monarch of the kingdom that defeated Quill’s rebellion. As I said in my analysis of that episode, if the Doctor had appeared on their homeworld during Quill’s campaign, he more than likely would have been on her side.

Charlie would have been the sympathetic villain. Perhaps a villain who comes to see a path to peace instead of violence, defeat, and reconquest. But he’d be a villain nonetheless, the dictator of a government that oppresses and disenfranchises Quill’s ethnic minority.

And let’s be honest with ourselves – a monarch is a dictator. It’s just a dictator that we Westerners feel has a little more legitimacy than a military ruler or a totalitarian party-state. That nasty little concept of the king’s divine mandate can take a long time to wiggle out of our cultural imaginary.

See what Charlie does in this episode – acting more like a dictator than he ever has before. Faced with the potential awkwardness of their parent-teacher night, Charlie gruffly orders Quill to come up with some bluff.

Phil Sandifer’s brief review of this episode spent a moment lamenting Tanya’s relatively small role in this episode. But although she didn’t have too many lines, Tanya and Matteusz are the perfect characters to force Charlie’s darker nature into the open.

The most important aspect of Charlie's character that makes him
different from his friends isn't that he's an alien, it's that he's a monarch.

Matteusz comes from a Polish family, an immigrant community in Britain who until only a few decades ago lived under a police state. Matteusz’s parents would have been born and grown up at least into their teenage years under a communist dictatorship whose government included a powerful secret police institution.

He can recognize in Charlie’s talk of duty and a higher morality for kings and leaders the justifications of state violence that killed many thousands of Poles at the hands of the SB.

And Tanya, as a black woman whose parents are Nigerian and Jamaican, stands in the prime positionality to tell Charlie that his forced servitude of Quill constitutes slavery. His appeals to the different morality of Rhodia can’t stand up to their arguments.

It’s not so much that Rhodia’s morality is irrelevant given the total genocide of that society, though that is what Matteusz and Tanya mention. What carries the real power are their universal ethical objections – that Charlie’s stewardship over a weapon of mass destruction and keeping of Quill in servitude is a stand against freedom.

Once the democratic principle exists in any society, its force drives a universalizing impulse. Democratic inclusion will never stop expanding until there are no exceptions to the freedoms it lets you understand and demand. And his central scene in “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” shows that Charlie fundamentally stands against that democratic will to freedom.

Quite a big revelation about someone that’s been set up as a hero since the first few minutes of the show.

The words the Shadowkin often have to say make them seem like
they're made of burnt ham. But they also provide some of the
biggest laughs of an otherwise very serious episode precisely
because they're so cartoonishly evil.

Who Is April? A Regicide

At first glance, it might seem that Charlie’s conversation about his kingly ideas appear like a separate storyline from the main plot this week about April. But it’s actually an important thematic parallelism to April’s plot.

So on the surface, April’s storyline is a return to her conflict with Corakinus the leader of the Shadowkin – he wants his heart to stop phasing in and out of her plane of reality so he can regain his full health. His chief scientist’s shadow-technobabble shenanigans help strengthen the link between him and April.

That causes some entertaining and embarrassing fluctuations in both their personalities. April goes on a rant about the glory and necessity of dying foolishly in battle in the middle of a history class. Corakinus the king of the fearsome and hideous Shadowkin gets an urge to cuddle after the brutal, weird, violent sex of his kind.

But what’s really intriguing about April’s story is that so much of her rage doesn’t originate with Corakinus. Aside from the cartoonish anger of her rant about the Dunkirk evacuation, all April’s anger is rooted in the shit-storm of her father’s return.

Huw is a man whose alcohol abuse and mental illness literally destroyed his family, paralyzing his wife and almost killing them all. He was in prison, and is still subject to a restraining order. All the rage that April has bottled up for years to keep herself and her mother in a sane state spills out.

The fundamental trauma of April's family is entirely in the open this
episode. I think the most illuminating moment comes in Jackie's
supremely awkward conversation just after catching her daughter in
the afterglow of losing her virginity to the former captain of the
football team. She's horrified that April would form any romantic
attachment to anyone at all. When April exclaims that Ram isn't
like her father, Jackie responds that her father wasn't like her
father when they met either. Jackie represents that fatalism that
any emotional openness or vulnerability will end in betrayal and
violence.

She's a better vessel for the anger of Corakinus than you expect when you look at her. And I think that’s an extra element of what frightens her about what she’s becoming in this episode.

And the parallel to Charlie’s subtly brutal morality of punishment, power, and entitlement? In the climactic moment of the episode, April is raging at her father, and about to kill him with the Shadowkin scimitars she manifests when she’s channelling Corakinus’ rage. Her rampage is played opposite Corakinus’ own anger at the apparent failure of his new scientist/lover’s plan.

As she’s about to kill her father, Ram appears and says another of Patrick Ness’ clunky phrases – that she’s April and wouldn’t do this. At the same time, Corakinus is spouting dialogue in the Shadow world that’s barely one degree removed in pompous cartoon villainy from “You have faired me for the rast time, Arrec Barrdwin!”

So April uses some Shadow techno-magic to heal her mother’s spinal column and refuses to slice her father in half. Her giving gesture is a strong contrast with Corakinus slashing another subordinate’s torso to bits. You’d think, based on this, that April is fundamentally not an angry person. That she’s not violent, but a healer. And that’s true.

But she is also actually, genuinely violent. She’s not going to sit back and wait for another attack from Corakinus, especially now that she knows he’s coming for her and the Earth again. April is still enraged, filled with anger. But she’s not channelling her rage into killing the pathetic idiot that’s her father.

Ram is the voice of a more pure mercy in this moment. April’s motive remains her anger. But it’s an anger directed at the proper place – at the figure of an autocrat who rules through violence and control. Corakinus is the brutal king of the Shadows, and April dives into the rift intent on a righteous regicide.

And earlier in this episode, our ostensible hero Charlie has been shown to have just the same brutal streak as any king. If Class is taking care of its Shadowkin plot for the mid-season two-parter, then maybe this last conflict will be the heart of the season’s real climax.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites II: Entitled Segregation, Research Time, 07/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . It's a fundamental democratic concept of democracy – the leader of your government is not your master, but your servant. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s something we must accept if we’re to be thorough-going democrats.

Rulers and governments serve the people. And any obedience people give to governments, we do for pragmatic reasons or out of respect for our rulers humbly submitting to our ultimate authority.

Democratic philosophy, particularly following from Rousseau, thinks
of elections as expressing the will of the people in the actions of the
representative. But too often, elections are seen as ways to legitimate
an autocratic rule of law or justify the rule of a strongman, not to
point any fingers or post any pictures.

Having to run a country always creates tensions with the core concept of democracy. You need rule of law – popular obedience to rules – for any institution to run smoothly. Including civic and welfare institutions that manifest and guard the freedom and material dignity of a democratic society.

Yet it's always very easy for people who hold power from their positions in state institutions to gain a sense of entitlement – that their expertise in running the state justifies our obedience. Most dangerously, people in such positions can feel entitled to unquestioned obedience.

This is why we put extra obligations on those who hold power through democratic state institutions, in comparison to people who hold power in private institutions like large companies.

It’s difficult to do this with bureaucracies, but it often works through transparency. Like the Sunshine List in Ontario, that lists the name and salary of everyone on a government payroll who makes more than $100,000 per year.

Now, it's much easier to put obligations on our political leaders – we elect them, forcing them to reapply for their jobs to the votes of the populace ever few years.

I want to leave aside questions of representation. Representing the will of the people has been, throughout the history of democratic theory, the primary function of elections. But the metaphysics of how the whole process works is frankly a little shaky at best.

Ultimately, an elected official is one person who must channel the wills of thousands, millions, or billions of people if this metaphysics is to make sense. Ballot boxes, parliaments, and press conferences just don’t have this kind of power.

The presumption that citizens have an obligation to obey their
governments isn't a democratic principle, accourding to Jacques
Rancière, but the justification of a police state. One powerful film I saw
at SYFF about the terror of that principle is Suleima, an animated
short that dramatized the life of a real Syrian democracy activist.

No, elections are fundamentally about reminding an elite that their jobs depend on fealty to the wishes of the people. Because elected officials are an elite. They’re party activists, who are well-connected to all these institutions, and who have achieved enough success in their private careers to be tapped by a party apparatus to run for elected office.

Elections are the most intense methods we have of keeping institutionally powerful elites from getting too drunk on power, keeping them accountable to the public. Elections are the most effective means of enforcing accountability.

In most cases, of course. At least that’s the ideal. In all too many cases, elections are just seen as rubber stamps on the power of elites. An appearance of democracy and accountability so that an elite can continue to walk all over people’s rights and freedoms.

You can have elections in a police state. Even fair elections where the governing party stands a regularly decent chance of losing. Whether or not you have a secret police, you’re living under a police state if the bureaucratic and democratic office holders expect the people who obey them. And enforce that obedience.

Working with the Syria Film Festival has introduced me to a lot of good friends who have the real, lived experience of having grown up in a full-on police state. So while I’ve studied for a while that dynamic of enforced obedience in the abstract, my friendships over the last two years has taught me a lot about its visceral life.

Reading thinkers like Rancière, Mouffe, and Negri has given me a thicker understand of what democracy and freedom are fundamentally about – the relationship of power between a person and a government institution. And what the democratic impulse and idea does to the stability of that power relationship.

It blows that relationship to chaos. A chaos that we want. . . . To Be Continued

Hope Springs and Freedom Sings, Advocate, 04/11/2016

The more philosophical stuff will continue after this weekend. Today, I’m just writing a short post to add a little promotion to the Syria Film Festival – which opens tonight at the Isabel Bader Theatre at University of Toronto.

SYFF is an organization that’s grown very close to my heart since I became involved last summer. For one thing, it was my first (if still unpaying) gig in the communications field – an internship that I started a couple of months after graduating from my college program.

Though the internship’s term itself finished after the premiere film festival last November, I stayed attached to the organization. And I’m a core part of the organizing committee, though I admit that I haven’t been able to contribute quite as much as I’d like to.

Especially after getting a monstrous cold just a few days ago that knocked me out during the frenzied final preparations and promotions.

But I’ve made quite a few good friends here, and gotten involved in an organization that fits the utopian character of my political, social, and moral values. After all, SYFF is based on the notion that art, cinema, and images can help change the world. It’s a wildly unbelievable truth.

Consider the macabre image that launched the wave of Canadian support, grief, and love for Syrian people – Aylan Kurdi’s dead body washed up on a beach. I remember one committee member at the time remarking that the image would pass away within a news cycle or two.

I could tell it was different, that it had a singular and great power. I knew its power was potentially transformative for a lot of people in Canada. I was one of only two Canadian-born members of the core crew in SYFF’s first year, so maybe I had a better sense of how that image would drive people in my society.

But I’m also a film writer, and a lover of cinema. I understand the power of images. That image brought thousands of people out of refugee camps to my country where they can live in peace. That image brought a huge wave of publicity to our film festival.

In our first year, most of our films were pretty depressing. They were all documentaries – some short a couple feature-length – that followed the uprising and the war. A woman who defied her parents to join the revolution against Assad. An animated homage to the White Helmet rescue squads. Shorts about the unending limbo of life in Za’atari Refugee Camp.

I think my favourite film from SYFF 2015 was 50 Feet From Syria, a documentary about Hisham Bismar, a Syrian-American orthopaedic surgeon who travelled to a Turkish hospital just over the border. He treated refugees and performed emergency surgery on freshly wounded soldiers, revolutionaries, and civilians rushed over the border. It was unflinching in depicting the real, gory brutality of shrapnel and bombing injuries. It’s one of the greatest documentaries I’ll never watch again.

Jay Abdo – leaving Damascus, the Hollywood of Arabia, for the
Hollywood of Hollywood.

We have a few war stories in SYFF 2016, it’s true. Our Friday night feature documentary is After Spring, a powerful look at the brutal results of the 2011 democratic uprisings across the Arab world.

But we also have stories of hope. We have a film about the Syrian actor Jay Abdo, tracing his journey from being one of the most famous and respected character actors of Arab television and film, fleeing to America as a dissident, and restarting his career in American cinema.

Jay was a special guest at last year’s festival, and is returning this year to introduce and discuss his film. A few days ago, I did a detailed interview with him, which I hope to turn into several longer articles about SYFF, Jay’s journey, and a look into the world of Arab television.

I think the film I’m most proud of so far in SYFF 2016 is Syrian Eagles. It’s opening the festival tonight, and it’s the first film SYFF itself has produced. Our programming committee head – and well-experienced documentarian – Aisha Jamal directed it.

Syrian Eagles is the story of a local Toronto soccer team composed entirely of Syrian newcomers, telling their stories and their hopes in their new country. At its forefront is hope in the face of terror and war, and a new community of welcome and peace.

Art will change the world.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites I: Only the Best of the Best, Research Time, 03/11/2016

It feels intuitive that we obey the people in charge. Being in charge of something – a boss of a company, a manager of a department, a parent of a family – means that they’re to be obeyed.

It’s a tautology. The definition of being in charge means that you obey them. That your obedience is legitimate and expected.

Be suspicious of your intuitions.

Here's a warning about the intuitions that can grow out of speaking English, for example. Don’t confuse the two senses of authority. There’s the authority of expertise and experience, whose directions you obey because they’re the wisest person around to handle the situation you’re in together.

Some of my personal favourite undeserving authority figures in pop
culture are the products of Graham Linehan's mind.

Then there's the other kind of authority, which is that more tautologous sense. An authority is someone you obey because your proper relationship to them is obedience. All the comedy and oppression of our lives in big state or corporate institutions lies in this confusion.

It’s the central joke of modernity – Kafka did it best, but Graham Linehan and Michael Schur are pretty good at it too. People who have institutional authority of any kind who have no justification for your loyalty in their intelligence, know-how, morals, sanity, or any kind of basic life competence that would otherwise earn your respect.

Even though it's a recurring joke from The Castle to Brazil to The Office, it’s also a very serious political concept. It’s the core idea of our democratic drive – That there is no cause or even correlation between our owing obedience to someone in some institution and their actually deserving it.

This is a pretty new and weird idea. It’s freaky that our political philosophy instruction in universities usually starts with the ancient Greeks, and only with Plato and Aristotle. Neither of them had much faith in democracy as a form of government. While Plato was the most idealistic about it, they both preferred rule by the wise.

An elite who held permanent leadership places in our institutions and societies, but who actually deserved their authority. But that's a fantasy, because we’re dealing with human beings here.

I’m not about to make some cynical argument that democracy is the least terrible form of government. That puts too much focus on democratic institutions. No, we’re dealing with human beings here, which means that we can’t trust someone to stay in a permanent position of power and not become corrupt.

Just look at this man. Eric Trump barely even looks like a human. Now
imagine how many people's lives he controls with money. It's
disgusting – Literally revolting.

Even a benevolent dictator or kind lives in a palace of opulence surrounded by courtiers and governs a state and population of millions. A person won't necessarily remain wise forever, even if he’s wise and kind today. And their appointed successors won't be that wise.

If they fall into most elite human habits, they’ll become self-entitled egotistical twats. Like the Trumps, from Donald onward.

This is why populism usually takes the form of anti-elite resentment. The tension between having social and institutional authority and actually deserving it becomes too much in some circumstances.

Circumstances like a long-running economic stagnation after decades of policies that have promised prosperity for all in the name of solving the old system’s problems.

Democracy is the spirit of revolt, and democratic institutions should function to institutionalize revolt. Regularly churning people in and out of positions of power. It's a form of accountability, but it’s also a form of quality control.

Any institution creates elites and elitism – that’s a simple fact of the matter that only a few people can actually occupy institutional positions of power. That’s true even for democratic institutions like parliaments and accountable bureaucracies.

So if this is the bog we’re stuck in, what’s an actual democrat to do? . . . To Be Continued

We Can't Live With Our Scars, Class: Nightvisiting, Reviews, 01/11/2016

Check out my first two reviews of Class, of "For Tonight We Might Die" and "The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo." You can support more TV review projects like this and even bigger things down the road at my Patreon page.
• • •
Three episodes in makes me feel safe enough to offer a casual description of what Class is all about, at least in this first season. It’s grief. 

Exploring all the aspects of grief – how it appears in our lives, what scars and traces it leaves, how it shapes our personalities, the different ways to travel along grief’s line of flight. What grief makes of us and makes us become.

It doesn’t get more explicit in this episode, where,

SPOILERS!!

cited, a hideous alien fungus that feeds off the intense emotional energy of grief squirms through the bunghole of time and manifests in front of thousands of Londoners as their dead loved ones. It speaks with all of them to amp their feelings of grief, sadness, and loss as high as they can go, then wraps them up in its spores.

If I could say there was one issue I had with "Nightvisiting," it would be
that the dialogue was a little too clunky at times. Tanya herself had
some of the most dangerously expository dialogue, occuring in an
emotionally intense dramatic conversation that lasted almost through
the entire episode.

Our Stories Make Sense of Us

The major confrontation the creature has is its talk with Tanya, manifesting as her father Jasper on the two year anniversary of his sudden death from a stroke. 

But it also confronts several of the other cast members, or at least tries to. It appears to Ram as his murdered girlfriend Rachel, naturally, as her killing is the central traumatic event that drives his character. 

The creature talks about how much humans crave closure in their lives, that they let grief and mourning torture themselves so much more than any other species it’s come across.

The reason why is rooted in how we make sense of our lives. Humans understand ourselves by telling stories about ourselves. These are our histories, at all levels of human development, whether as a family, a community, globally, or as individuals. 

We want our narratives to be comprehensive, complete, and clear. Comprehensive in that a narrative offers a full view of what it describes. The story takes in everything that matters to the development it describes. 

This is different from a narrative’s completeness. Being complete is to be definitive – it’s the only story about a person or a development in a person’s life that you need to tell, once it’s been told.

And a narrative is clear when its meaning as it ends is unambiguous, delivering a transparent set of messages. This is “the moral of the story” if I can talk like a mediocre grade school teacher for a moment. 

The ending stuck with you precisely because it refused to be clear-cut.
Most of us had to figure out the true ending, unable to accept the actual
ending of genuine ambiguity. We hate ambiguity enough in real life,
where it happens all the bloody time.

I would say that clarity is the most important feature of a narrative in that introducing even the least unclarity or ambiguity to the meaning or end result of a story is more upsetting than a shortcoming in comprehensiveness or completeness. 

Think of how obsessed so many people were over the ending of Inception. There, the story’s clarity was carefully manipulated to encourage just that reaction among its audience. Constantly arguing and interpreting together whether Leonardo DiCaprio was or wasn’t still in a dreamscape became part of the West’s cultural conversation. 

In that case, it wasn’t a flaw of the story, but an attentively calibrated part of the story itself. The arguments we all had over the meaning of the story were themselves part of the story. It was how Inception literally incepted all of our minds.

Humans fundamentally want the stories we tell to be complete, comprehensive, and clear. This is ultimately true for the stories we tell about ourselves – which is how we make sense of ourselves entirely. We understand our lives by making ourselves into a story.

This is a narrative way of describing what in more ontological philosophy is called the principle of sufficient reason – everything that exists has a cause or reason for its existence that all fits together in a perfect, if madly complicated, order. That the world fits together is the fundamental premise of human reasoning.

My mother even says this as a platitude, and she’s far from the only one. So many times when I’ve faced unforeseen problems or crises, she says, “Everything happens for a reason” to reassure me.

For all that Tanya's Vivian Oparah gets the extra-moving melodramatic
scenes in "Nightvisiting," April's Sophie Hopkins demonstrates the
most virtuoso (and also underrated) skill of any actor: She has some
of the most stilted dialogue in the entire episode, explaining her
history with her abusive alcoholic father to Ram. It's a moment of
simultaneous exposition and emotional rawness, nearly
impossible to carry out at its knife-edge balance.

I respond that this idea only makes sense retroactively, after we’ve already dealt with whatever disaster has been foisted on us. In the moment, I still have to wade through whatever shit that I have to deal with. Mom, you're a Leibnizian who raised an existentialist, and I'm sorry about that.

Grief is so troubling to us because the event of sudden loss or sudden ending destabilizes that premise. For example, Tanya describes how she would check in on her father whenever he came home from a night shift as a police officer because his patrols were a time of danger. 

If one night, Jasper didn’t come home, it would have been terrible, but it would at least have made sense to Tanya. There would be a clear cause in the potentially dangerous work that he did to his own death. Dying of a stroke in the bathroom makes a mockery of that coherence in her life.

That's the real horror of an existentialist look at the world. You accept the fact that a cause isn’t the same as a reason and that our narratives of our life won’t necessarily (or even that often) have clear-cut meanings and results. 

What Our Grief Reveals

Grief is the emotional and subjective dissonance when our yearning for a rational order in our lives meets the fact of real complexity and chaos. These moments of crisis can be quite revealing for a person, as it shows what we depend on to make sense of our existences.

The most illuminating conversation the creature has is with Quill, where it manifests as her sister. This sequence is the most sustained sequence of character development we’ve gotten for Quill so far, as we not only get to see her people’s paradoxical familial relationships, but also a look into her own motives.

Quill’s grief over her family and people – wiped out in the genocide of Rhodia – manifests as an image of who she should be. Ultimately, it isn’t love for her sister that most tempts Quill to let the creature capture her. In human ways of thinking, the pain of sudden loss would be the most enticing lure. 

One criticism that Phil Sandifer's review of the episode mentioned was
that the notion of Tanya's grief over her father being the strongest such
feeling in London seemed a touch sloppy. But I prefer to think of the
creature's focus on Tanya being a matter of her regular proximity to
the time bunghole as well, a mild piece of metafiction that the
interdimensional dangers of the rift affect the show's main cast the
most because it's their job to draw the rift's fire. They're the front
lines on these emotionally vulnerable alien invaders. Sounds like a
fine part-time job while you're finishing up high school.

But for Quill, it’s the fact that she’s been rendered impotent in so many ways. What truly draws her in is the prospect of being a true warrior again. The real object of her grief isn’t even the destruction of her people, but her loss of how she conceived of herself. The loss of her dignity as a warrior.

Charlie always held such emotional distance from his own family that he has no real grief. So the creature can’t even really manifest to him. Charlie’s story doesn’t have a rupture of the sort that breaks his sense of who he is. His narrative remains coherent as the guardian of the souls of his people in the Cabinet of Light.

We’ve already worked through Ram’s grief in the last episode, so Rachel’s spectre freaks him out, but then sends him out on the proactive role that he took on by the end of “The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo.” 

And April has, like Charlie, already repaired whatever breaks in her narrative were caused by the violent abuse of her alcoholic father. The events of her father’s violence became the foundation of her personal strength.

As for Tanya, her defeat of the creature makes clear what seems to be another theme of Class in this first season. She severely weakens the creature by feeding it with her anger instead of the subjective breakdown of grief, so that Quill’s physical attack can force it back into the rift. 

It's literally an instance of a character using the force of her personality to defeat the story’s monster, just as Ram did last week talking the dragon into leaving Earth. So here we have the moral of the story – each of us can find the strength within ourselves to vanquish our demons and become who the world demands we are.