Original Inequality V: Laying Down the Law, Research Time, 09/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So why do we need the law if we’re naturally good to each other? When you read Rousseau, he lays out a vision of human nature where we’re fundamentally good to each other.

Our instincts toward each other are naturally for sympathy and pity. When we see someone in pain, even a face expressing sadness or stress, we have an almost autonomic instinct to help them somehow. If only to ask if there’s a way we can help.

Most of you may not experience that kind of universal kindness every day. Most of the time, we probably walk around in a constant hum of mutual irritation. When I’ve worked in customer service jobs at different points of my life, I’d meet people who seemed constantly on the verge of exploding with rage just from interacting with strangers all day long.

Judge Dredd is the most intense, clear, and hilarious demonstration of
the terrifying violence in the idea that there's a moral obligation to
obey the law, or of the violence underlying any regime of laws at all.
I sometimes want to hang out with my friends from McMaster legal
theory again, but we live such different lives. I always found it
really rewarding conversation to throw an outsider's radical ideas
at them, because I'd learn so much and inspire creativity all around.

This, goes the stereotypical argument, is why we live in nations of laws. Because we’re really just constantly annoyed with each other all the time. When you learn the history of Western political philosophy, you inevitably cover Thomas Hobbes’ much worse thesis – that we’re naturally at constant war with each other, always paranoid, deranged with fear that we could be attacked and killed at any moment.

Society, says Hobbes, requires the strong hand of a police power who must never be questioned. The sovereign is the force that keeps us in line. Fear is the goal of the law.

Yet our natural state is more along the lines of that annoyance. We can still live together without having to suppress the urge for violence. But we do get pretty irritated with each other.

And that vision of a complicated society of mutual irritation is much more like Rousseau’s conception of how humanity lives together. It fits with his vision of a fundamentally kind humanity because of the context of where and how human kindness emerges.

It’s in the face-to-face interaction of people. And the better we know someone, the closer they are to us in our daily lives, the more powerful that face is in evoking our sympathy and love.

The problem is that when larger numbers of people live together, society gets complicated. We find ourselves reliant on many strangers for a lot of our needs – our food, shelter, education, entertainment, general well-being. And our networks of mutual need become so big and complicated that it stresses us to maintain them.

We experience stress, irritation, and pain that separates us from each other. We need to accumulate far beyond our personal needs when our society depends on each of us supplying the needs of others. The need to accumulate all-too-easily tips over into greed, which is at the root of so many destructive human behaviours.

Yet sometimes, we learn to rely too much on others to look after our
neighbours who are in great material need. That's the lesson I take from
the modern parable of the homeless pastor. When you expect an institution
– whether the church, a charity, or a government welfare program – to
care for the poor, you can erase your pangs of guilt when you look in
the face of people who ask you for help but still look through them.

So we turn to the law to regulate the complexity of agricultural and industrial human society. When humanity becomes the holocene, and not just the scattered interactions of wandering bands of humans, we need institutions to shape our societies through laws and regulations. Otherwise, greed and mutual piracy really will overtake us.

But civil laws don’t restore the original equality all people shared in simpler social structures, when each of us could provide for our own needs with our own efforts. Far from it.

Laws lock in some specific regime of inequality. Maybe it would be the state of political and social affairs at the time of an institution’s birth. Maybe a community would refine their legal institutions and regulations over time to become more equal, more fair. To redress past wrongs and build a better future for everybody.

Of course, political pressures of all kinds could push changes in those laws to fuel inequality, stall social mobility, lock in systematic inequities, discriminations, and humiliations. It feels like that’s the trend of the last few decades.

But that law is still the law. It can never restore the genuine equality of a totally self-sufficient population because it can never simplify society to flatten away all those differences and new needs that arise from the complexity of just a few hundred humans living together.

We’ll always need the law. And the law will always require some element of coercion. And Rousseau writes with a mix of trolling, theatricality, and ironic honesty when he says that the law amounts to slavery. So is there a way out of this? . . . . To be continued

Teaching the Metaphysics of Physics, A History Boy, 08/03/2017

I’m a big nerd and I sometimes read Nietzsche for fun. If you’ve seen any of the archives in my blog or any other writing before, you know I’m a big nerd. So I cracked open my epub of Human, All Too Human a little while ago, and I read something that brought back some sad memories.

Here’s the passage, from among the first aphorisms of the book.

“That is why there is in all philosophies so much high-flying metaphysics and such a dread of the explanations offered by physics, which seem so modest and insignificant; for the significance of knowledge for life has to appear as great as it possibly can. Here lies the antagonism between the individual regions of science and philosophy. The latter wants, as art does, to bestow on life and action the greatest possible profundity and significance; in the former one seeks knowledge and nothing further – and does in fact acquire it.”

I don’t want to talk about the context and ideas Nietzsche himself was confronting when he wrote this in 1880. I want to talk about an idea for a course I had a few years ago, because this paragraph set off a bitter memory.

Nietzsche's work has been influential and
inspiring to me, but he can be such a
downer sometimes.

The year after I finished my doctorate, I was still looking for work as a university teacher. My own department at McMaster posted two per-course positions. One was a third-level course in the theory of knowledge that my colleague P landed without a problem – it was literally his exact area of research expertise.

I applied to teach the fourth-level seminar on metaphysics. It had previously been a very doctrinaire course on the problem of freedom and determinism, but the university let that professor go the previous summer. So the department was looking for a new direction.

I applied, and came up with a proposal for a course that challenged students to think about philosophy’s right to get metaphysical in the first place. It combined metaphysical thinking with philosophy of science a little, but in a way that encouraged creativity. And in the fairly small class size of a senior-level seminar, we could have gotten really deep with it.

My course would have revolved around the question of what metaphysics can do for science. Metaphysics debates in academic philosophy journals revolved around questions like what universal terms like ‘blue’ refer to, or whether objects were bundles of universals or had an underlying property-less substrate.

But if you went to a physicist with any of these questions, he’d laugh in your face because they make no sense. The really important questions in physics revolve around things like Bell’s Theorem in quantum mechanics, which implies that spacetime literally isn't contiguous in some contexts.

I also wanted to talk about ideas in the intensive sciences like hydrodynamics, ecology, and other fields dominated by nonlinear mathematics because of their unintuitive implications about the nature of reality. And I wanted to contrast this with orthodox approaches to metaphysics that relied almost exclusively on intuitive logical reasoning.

We would have read Tim Maudlin’s Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity: Metaphysical Intimations of Modern Physics, Henri Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Alongside short readings from David Hume, Bertrand Russell, contemporary analytic metaphysicians, Aristotle, Lucretius, and McMaster’s own Head of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre Nicolas Griffin.

The experiments that gave Bell's Theorem its real-
world example are complicated, but here's basically
what they mean. An electron doesn't get a specific
spin until it interacts with an energy field that sets
it. If you launch two electrons from the same
source in opposite directions, they'll still end up
with complementary spin – even though
information about each other's spin would have
to travel faster than light to reach the other. Their
states are entangled without local causal interaction.
That's not literally faster-than-light communication.
It's something much weirder: a demonstration that
contiguous local space is our false intuition.

But the department had already hired one of the previous year’s doctoral grads. And a Rochester-based professor with a couple of years’ more teaching experience had applied for the metaphysics seminar.

Later that winter, I saw his course outline from an undergrad friend of mine who was taking the course. He found it hideous, and he was right to. It was literally just a survey course in the standard canon of Western philosophy’s metaphysics. Twelve great philosophers in as many weeks. A week on Plato. On Aristotle. On Hegel. On Bradley.

There was no time to explore any problem in depth. Barely any time to do anything but get the most basic and mainstream account possible of a thinker whose ideas about the nature of reality produced commentary and reflection for literally centuries.

Even the professors who hired him later admitted that he was a mistake, turning a course far below the complexity level the curriculum required. But he had the most teaching experience of anyone who applied. So they hired him.

Since I was sent into these memories from reading Nietzsche, I find it ironic – or maybe fitting – that I still feel a little resentful over these events.

It was a very personal rejection, because I knew everyone who had made the decision. I’d worked with them for the previous five years. It was the start of a year of rejection from entry-level positions across the region – rejections in favour of people who had already been working, who had more seniority – that effectively killed my career in university teaching.

I was never able to build the teaching experience that would have made me competitive in the university teaching market. I haven’t worked in a university since Winter 2013.

Today, I feel like I can achieve more as a professional writer and communicator working on books and films on the side, than I ever could have strapped into the grind of university-based humanities scholarship. But that achievement is still all potential, all in the future.

Because it’s taken me four years to get from my old career bottoming out to my new one finally getting some momentum. Those have been four stressful, painful, difficult years. If I didn’t have my GF with me for most of that time, I honestly can’t say if I’d have had the strength to haul myself out of where I’d fallen. It's taken me quite a while – thanks to depression, bad luck, having to deal with crap bosses or low paying work – to get my shit back together.

And if that academic career had actually worked out, I never would have met her. And I don’t think I’d be able to accept life without her.

Even on a smaller scale of thinking, I still feel a sense of regret. That would have been a fucking great course. And I was a fucking good philosophy teacher.

Original Inequality IV: Gotham's Greed, Research Time, 07/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So what I want to do with these looks back through the classics of political philosophy is build my conceptual toolbox to analyze contemporary political issues and the role utopian thinking can play in the 21st century.

It’s also about writing a book that explicitly contributes to a particular tradition within the whole history of Western philosophy.* That tradition is a democratic materialism or radical democracy. It starts with Niccolo Machiavelli’s civic republican thought.

* Western philosophy = A particular tradition of developing concepts to understand and analyze the universe, which began in the Greek network of city-states and Mediterranean colonies, spread through the Roman, then Arab empires, blending with Christian theology, diversifying and fragmenting through the development of modern science, nestling in the university sector by the 19th century.

Foucault himself doesn't play a big role in this post. I just like using this
image of him, for obvious reasons.

From there, it gets its metaphysical content from Benedict Spinoza’s work,** blooms again in Karl Marx’s empiricism of ideology, disappeared as marxism was warped by totalitarian Stalinist influence, then surging once more in the new radical democratic thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Bifo, and Antonio Negri.

** Why isn’t Thomas Hobbes part of this tradition? Well, he may be an imperialist, but he’s no democrat.

At our current crisis point for the West – both for philosophy as a discipline*** and our broader political culture – we need radical gestures of peace and diversity. A refusal to give in to nationalism or pressure for conformity of any kind.

*** The disciplinary crisis of philosophy being encased entirely in a university institution, and that institution’s increasingly powerful disincentives from producing any work that could ever be considered primary material – only commentaries and esoteric or technical debates.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I now know Rousseau’s thought fits snugly and dementedly into that tradition of democratic materialism. Any philosopher worth reading is, after all, at least a little demented.

Here’s another example of Rousseau’s thoroughly materialist approach to political thinking. He considers the roots of greed. Writing in 1755 Switzerland, I feel safe assuming that the popular culture of Europe considered human greed rooted in our soul.

Original sin is, in a Christian community, the foundational principle of human corruption. It’s a primal rupture in what should have been a harmonious relationship with God – a spiritual rupture.

Rousseau? The roots of greed lie in our social networks. Here’s the short version of his argument, which is pretty efficient as it is in The Origin of Inequality.

As society becomes more complex, human needs grow more complex. So we can no longer be self-sufficient, and need to co-operate to live well. At a low level of complexity, we can get by with contingent deals and contracts. But as life gets more complicated, we need to build institutions to rely on.

These relationships of mutual reliance and need are the foundation of social solidarity, which is good, because it builds community in practical reciprocal benefits.

As well as the need for cooperation and investment, the size of a social
network is a factor in enabling greed and cheating. If you interact with
people casually, you won't have the same force of solidarity as with
your close friends and family. So you don't feel as bad about swindling
those casual acquaintances who mean little to nothing to you.

But all these cooperative plans and activities require us to accumulate beyond our immediate needs. We have to prepare to invest in long-term strategies for community and personal survival – to invest in cooperative ventures.

Our institutions need to collect taxes and user fees to continue supplying the goods and services they do. Our cooperative plans like charities, businesses, and deals of all kinds likewise need investments and resources to get started.

If we start to accumulate with regard to the future, inequality will start to appear in society. Accumulation is a set of skills, and some will be better or worse than others. Those skills are different depending on how you accumulate your wealth, but luck and talent will result in different rates of accumulation for different people.

You’ll end up with a society of rich and poor. Perhaps where people become so rich that they forget about the human need to rely on others for our well-being – able to buy and sell anyone, you can easily think real solidarity is a fiction. Perhaps where people become so poor than they’re consumed by resentment and depression – unable to build any beneficial relationships at all anymore.

An entirely material root for greed, resentment, hopelessness. A politics with no God and no spirit, only human short-sightedness and selfishness as the root of evil.

For the mid-1700s, and maybe even for the early 21st century, truly radical. . . . To be continued

Could You Ever Have Trusted At All? Jamming, 06/03/2017

When I first read the story of Juan Thompson, I wanted to be surprised, but I just couldn’t.

And I'd like to check out her films. They seem interesting – the kinds of
stories that build from where Lena Dunham left us.

One of the voices I came across on Twitter put the point better than I could. The start of Erika Heidewald’s tweet storm is on the right.

I’m writing a longer reflection about this. As someone who puts in time volunteering to put diverse voices and stories into my city’s cultural conversation, I know where I stand in the politics of our generation. The existence of the misogynist left-winger is something I didn’t want to have to face.

But it’s there. Through all the rise of the alt-right – the idea of white genocide going mainstream, daily streams of harassment campaigns across social media – I thought of this sexism as a creature of the reactionary, conservative, nationalist streams of our society.

I knew it wasn’t true. If only from my own experience as a much younger man, I knew the left had plenty of misogyny, sexism, obsession, harassment, and violence against women. Our political goal was to identify and end it, but it doesn’t mean the attitude didn’t persist.

Thompson is an extreme example, and a peculiar outlier. He isn’t just an obsessed ex-boyfriend – he was a fabulist, liar, and con artist for years. His lying to his own bosses about where his sources came from – and that they were even real – was the reason for his dismissal. And he’d lied to The Intercept for years, publishing many different stories that turned out to be utter fabrications.

Juan Thompson may have played a noticeable, if small, role in shaping our political culture. With his lies.

So don’t let this wretch break your spirit. But let his example keep your eye critical. Glenn Greenwald is not a stupid man – Robinson may be a beast, but he was at least smart enough to keep a historically important investigative reporter from catching on to his con for about two years.

I've been skeptical of a lot of Greenwald's reporting for quite a while,
though The Intercept is generally very reliable about dimensions of
American news that doesn't make it into mainstream discussions.

What vulnerability could Thompson have exploited in Greenwald to keep up the charade as long as he did?

Aside from the fact that not every story he wrote was a total concoction of lies and falsehoods, I mean.

I first discovered Glenn Greenwald when everyone else did – when he reported on Edward Snowden’s leaks of secret National Security Agency wiretapping and mass data collection. Greenwald shepherded Snowden’s revelations to the wider world. The notoriety he gained from that not only made his career, it made him a historic figure.

Those were important revelations – that kind of surveillance on a mass scale is a dangerous activity for any government or institution to do, rendering literally billions of people vulnerable in ways we’ve never been before. Yet as I watch Greenwald’s public behaviour in the Trump era, it unnerves me.

I feel like Greenwald’s opposition to the Democratic Party that vilified him and prosecuted Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and other leakers has hardened. In a recent interview with Democracy Now, Greenwald focussed his energy on calling out the Democratic Party leadership for their hypocrisy and worse.

Greenwald cares more about critiquing and somehow dismantling the American intelligence and security agencies who he sees as the biggest threat to democracy. And his position is complicated, because he has, from one important perspective an important point.

The 2016 election was Clinton's to lose from the beginning, and her
margin was small enough – 70-80,000 votes across three states Trump
narrowly won and a huge total popular vote victory – that I can actually
say that the campaign and DNC's arrogance was enough to cost her.
Greenwald is right that the Democratic Party has collapsed – no serious
control of any elected body in the federal government and the
governments of more than half the states. They need to rebuild their
party and I've honestly seen no sign that this is a priority at all.

Because it is very dangerous to empower a country’s intelligence and security agencies to undermine elected leaders. The heads of such agencies have led actual coups in countries around the world, overthrowing elected officials and junking citizens’ democratic rights. So we have to eye them with suspicion.

And we have to hold our elected officials and political party administrators to account in this regard. We can’t have them abiding by policies that give intelligence agencies immense secret powers over the population.

Greenwald is right that this was a serious mistake of Obama’s Presidency, and that Hillary Clinton was an even more aggressive advocate for intelligence agencies’ priorities. But the danger of Donald Trump exists on a totally different vector.

Trump is the figurehead of a white nationalist political movement – American radical racists and nihilists. And he’s the President of the United States.

So democrats in the United States are stuck in a very bad space. It’s immensely dangerous to enable intelligence agencies to undermine and tip elected officials out of office. But it’s also immensely dangerous to have a democratic country’s executive branch run by anti-democratic radicals.

Even the people who seemed like liberators only a few years ago can, at their best, only fall into opposing one of these sides while the other slides away. So was it even worth believing them in the first place?

Original Inequality III: Men of Substance and Matter, Research Time, 03/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . You read Rousseau and he truly is a deeply materialist thinker. One quite unlike any other thinker of his time. He describes human nature entirely in material terms, as the functions and actions of physical creatures. That includes our thoughts and feelings.

Yet we are still free.

He even gives a materialist account of depression in The Origin of Inequality. Not anywhere near the completeness of what you’d find today in the DSM of anything like that.

Until the dominant images of how we popularly understood scientific
principles changed, we couldn't really understand how a material body
could be free. The strong determinism of clockwork imagery could
even feed back from the popular to the professional who should know
that things are much more complicated. Or should he?

Consider the roots of depression and anxiety in your social and physical environment. Your life becomes complicated, filled with obligations, forcing you to keep so many plates spinning all the time. As these social, economic, and other needs and obligations proliferate, the stress of it all overwhelms you.

That’s Rousseau’s analysis of how an individual’s mental breakdown and depression happens. Even in 1755, people had nervous breakdowns.

He lays out this example in an argument about how appropriate our overstuffed societies are to the best-quality lives for humanity. All these are moral and political questions, questions about the happiness of our minds and the freedom of our souls.

Each time he offers an answer, it’s rooted in material existence. The craziness of life in contemporary society – the proper balance of healthy food and everyday exercise – biological and ecological interplays of forces.

From these networks of forces and colliding processes, human freedom emerges. And Rousseau is writing this in 1755.

The stress on your body and your brain from massive overstimulation
on a near-daily basis eventually cause breakdowns. It happens to
plenty of professors in the academic world, especially now that even
protected tenure-track researchers have become overworked by
administrative demands as well as their research and teaching.
Some remarkably successful public intellectuals have left the
academic career they may have been taught to dream for, simply
because of this Kafkaesque bind.

See, at the time, Western thinking was stuck on the problem of freedom and determinism for centuries. In the Enlightenment era people typically thought of nature as a mechanism just like clockwork. Physical movement was fully determined lockstep, as precise as the gears of a clock.

But humanity was the exception. We were free from mechanism, and figuring out how this exemption from causality actually worked was a major problem of philosophy from about the beginning of the Renaissance until the mid-20th century.

The problem always bugged me, and when I learned enough about ecological science and the physics of intensity, I was finally able to put it away. Because there is no contradiction between determinism and freedom – causality is always multiple and conditional.

Rousseau’s vision of a humanity that’s both entirely material and essentially free isn’t nearly so nuanced as I could get from studying scientific and mathematical concepts in 21st-century physics. But it’s in an entirely different headspace from the entire Western intellectual scene of his own time.

I think if I had come to Rousseau at this point in my life, but was an academic, I’d write one of those short monographs that puts an unintuitive twist on it. Like this interpretation of Rousseau as a materialist of freedom.

But I’m pretty sure by now that it’s the branded interpretation of some Rousseau scholar toiling away entirely behind academic paywalls. And I’m just not in the financial position to spend the labour I’d need to write such a book that would only appeal to academic publishers.

I’d rather deal with these ideas in a more mass-market venue where accessible prices and tones of writing can connect with more people. Ultimately, I’d make more of a public impact and make more money from my own writing.

If engaging the public is part of the mission of any humanities field, that question of accessibility has to be at the front of your mind. It’s how your work can do its best work in the world, and how your work will best build a heritage. . . . To be continued

Original Inequality II: A Modern Golden Mean, Research Time, 02/03/2017

Continued from last post (No, really, it just takes a while to get going). . . When I took my first undergrad-level class about Aristotle, we talked about the line that displays the Golden Mean. Virtue, the philosophy goes, is a mean at a perfect balance between two extremes. And it was diagrammed as a line.

A straight line on a chalkboard. On one end, a word for some destructive habit like recklessness. On the other end, the prof would write its opposite, but equally destructive habit, like cowardice. Then he wrote ‘bravery’ in the middle of the line and thought he explained it perfectly well.

Think about equality here in the most just sense. Imagine
the kind of society where every individual would not only
have the opportunity to be as fit and powerful as the most
athletic dancers, but where we would all become so in the
course of everyday, ordinary life.

You can draw it on an exam, but it doesn’t really explore what it means to have your behaviour balance two destructive extremes. Not what it means in your psychology and daily habits. Not in terms of how three different kinds of behaviour can actually express a single tendency.

None of those actually illuminating questions. The line is the easiest thing to draw on the exam.

I thought of this while reading Rousseau, because he seems to think about virtue in a similar way. He discusses this in a totally different context than Aristotle did. And please don’t think I’m trying to make some actual interpretive point about whether and how Aristotle’s idea really did influence Rousseau in this regard.

That’d be a totally unproductive time – a philology important only to a very well-paid scholar. And I don’t want to be a humble scholar anymore. I don’t even think I ever did want to be only a scholar.

I want to put these ideas next to each other so that someone who reads this can understand them both a little better. Understanding a concept better can let a person use an improved tool to understand the world and their life experience.

That’s basically what I think the public purpose of philosophy is. But let’s leave the really hippy-dippy stuff for another time.

So Rousseau is describing the roots of society’s decadence. In simple terms, that’s inequality. But how does this general idea of inequality spell out in everyday life? Inequality is a social corruption that’s expressed as public health problems.

Among the rich, you find diseases of gluttony and overeating – like adult-onset diabetes. Among the poor, you find diseases of poverty and hunger – like malnutrition.* The proper lifestyle is that of free people – you drink when you’re thirsty and eat when you’re hungry. You walk everywhere and exercise constantly.

A clear sign that your society is riven with destructive inequality and
profound corruption: A lot of wealthy people who let themselves
become obese out of laziness and the refusal to take any but the
physically easiest route anywhere at all.

* We’ve reversed the content in the 21st century, but it amounts to the same kind of decadence. More rich people suffer diseases of hunger like malnutrition because wealthy women often express the systemic sexism they experience as eating disorders. Poor people, meanwhile, can only afford heavily processed, starchy food and work crap jobs like call centres where they sit down for 10 hours every day.

Quite literally, an equal society is a healthy society because its people are – on the whole – healthier as individuals. Not the only kind of social and personal health Rousseau is interested in when he thinks about fundamental human equality, but it’s one very important vector.

It’s a very materialist perspective. It reminded me of what Nietzsche wrote about the importance of good health to the virtue of a society. But what matters for a thorough materialism is that social progress and virtue has this expression in the visceral matter of everyday life.

It illustrates the old Golden Mean concept better than that stupid line as well. The image of personal health helps you understand virtue as a perfectly balanced intensity. Feed yourself too much energy and you’re a slob or a decadent fatty. Maybe you undercut yourself and you’re nothing but a skeleton. Either way, you’re barely able to move. . . . To be continued

Original Inequality I: A Taste of Swiss Beats, Research Time, 01/03/2017

So I picked up my old book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau essays. Still diving through some classics, reading the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality on the train from Berlin to Amsterdam.

Even aside from the larger scope of what I’m planning for Utopias the book, as I read him, I’m thinking about our own political situation today. Inequality has become one of the definitive political issues of the 21st century West – fighting inequality is the mission statement of today’s progressive left from Athens to Vancouver.

I'm one of the Bernie-Would-Have-Won folks. Not because of any love
of Sanders himself – I have a lot of problems with how he ran his
campaign for the nomination and the current focus of his public image.
But he and Donald Trump both ran on a platform of dismantling the
freewheeling new liberal economic model that's been dragging
humanity down. I wish his social democratic approach to that
project could have gone toe-to-toe with Trump's nationalism.

From Miami to Seattle, there’s the more pressing issue of resisting and surviving President Agent Orange. But there’s still an underlying idea that growing and catastrophic social and economic inequality laid the conditions of that reactionary wave.

So I picked up one of the classical texts in the Western tradition to think through the problem of social inequality. Rousseau was a rebel against the popular themes of his time – that European civilization was maturing, coming into its own as people learned to live as free citizens of enlightened, open governments guided by knowledge and wisdom of the new sciences and revival of ancient learning.

Absolutely fucking not, he said. The first of not enough punks and rebels in the history of Switzerland.

Instead, he offered an image of 1700s society as inherently corrupt, built on oppression. As a left-wing person taking part in left-wing political conversations in the 21st century, we’d today tend to think of that oppression through the era’s colonial empires. Not Rousseau, though.

Imperialism was at the heart of European culture – when The Origin of Inequality dropped in 1755, the Seven Years War between France and England was about to begin. England, France, Spain, Holland, and Portugal all held colonial territories and outposts throughout the globe. Europe was wealthy from colonial industry.

Rousseau peppers his essay with a few images of savages to illustrate his image of the truly free person. But he uses the same foul language of imperialist, racist thinking. These are almost figures of speech to him, but thankfully not the actual basis of his thinking.

The philosophy scholar Peter Gay wrote an introduction to my edition
of Rousseau's political essays. It struck me, looking at it now, how
important he described Rousseau's own origin and life in Geneva
was to his thought. However abstract and universal your thinking,
there will always be ways that your own history and the problems of
your own society and time shape you.

The Origin of Inequality keeps to an abstract plane. There are moments all over where he talks about how ludicrously difficult it would be for these tribes of 20 or so primitive people to achieve the basics of technology. As if you could just stumble into building the first iron smelter while foraging for apples.

He describes the state of pure human equality as individuals alone. We wander around a world where we’re relatively under-populated, with abundant resources. We only come into contact with others occasionally, hang out for a while, satisfy whatever sexual or social needs we might have, and move on again.

General isolation and no scarcity. These are the conditions in which humanity is at its most equal – the only state where no one has any debts to each other, no one serves another, and everyone is free.

When we meet each other, we aren’t rivals, because everyone has everything they need in such a condition. With life no more complicated than that of a naked wanderer with no worries, all our natural feelings of sympathy and love are never interrupted. Everyone is wonderful to each other because there is no material need for resentment or conflict.

Such a world never existed. But it’s a conceptual exploration. Rousseau is asking: What is the simplest state of human existence in which we could still be human?

But if society gets much more complex than the simplest possible, which it always is, inequalities begin to form. When society is complex enough that no one can provide for all their needs on their own – which is pretty much any population size and any level of relative scarcity – we rely on each other, fall into each other’s debts, exercise power over each other.

So inequality is the condition of the corruption of the happy, caring attitude we’d all have toward each other if we had no troubles in life. Corruption of our better nature constitutes itself in the first exercise of power over another.

The first moment where we push someone, lean on them, coerce them. The moment where we take even just a little bit of someone’s freedom away. . . . To be continued