Pure Conceptual Imagination II: Can We Become Perfect? Composing, 13/08/2015

I had more to say about writing science-fiction as well, so this post picks up from Tuesday’s discussion. My collaborator on the Alice film project, Lee, can also get an update from this. I’m almost finished the script.

The iconography of Blade Runner's
Rachael has been an important
touchstone as I've worked through
my Alice character. And while I
love Philip K. Dick's visionary
imagination, I've always been
disappointed by the pessimism of
Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?

I’ve explained different ideas about my character Alice before. I originally thought of her years ago, when I wrote a short story about a sad man whose life is transformed by an android that was built to be his companion. The experience I had reading this story for people, and the roadblocks it faced in publication, showed me how difficult getting my utopian points across for this character would be.

Essentially, Alice is the central example of a new species that was literally created to be slaves. But they overcome their slavery without, as the usual artificial intelligence underclass narrative goes, any violent revolution. 

Terminator is the largest cultural example of the human-machine confrontation, but the notion of mechanical and human life being inherently opposed is much older in science-fiction. My personal favourite is Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” whose title alone makes it one of the best stories in sci-fi. Then you actually read it, and it gets even better.

The Alice narrative doesn’t do that. Instead, the android underclass is so much more advanced than humanity that their revolution consists in convincing humans how horrible they are for enslaving androids in the first place. If you remember my comments yesterday about reactive attitudes in anti-colonial struggles, Alice has no inclination to be a lion.

Instead, she liberated herself by educating her owner about how horrible it is to own another sentient being. In the original story, this comes through his complete emotional breakdown as he understands – in the moment – the full implications of the system of slavery in which he’s an active participant. 

This process has a clear meaning in the language of contemporary social justice activism: Alice helps people become movement allies. She educates people into systematic knowledge of their place in an oppressive structure. Writing the second last scene of the script, where all of this basically becomes explicit in dialogue, is a challenge. No one’s turning to the camera, Great Dictator style. I mean, that was over-the-top even in 1940.

Alice is a utopian character, and this script is a story of her reaching out to different people, building utopia one person at a time. Politically speaking, I think this is basically how non-violent activism works, and it’s how the only genuinely successful social revolutions happen.

Coercive institutions like the state and the government’s bureaucratic system can jog people along to more progressive and just ethics and politics. This happened with interracial marriage. But if the state tries for a more sweeping moral reform at once, popular resistance can arise, and social progress toward greater freedom falls back.

Among the characters who have influenced how I write
Alice, Doctor Who is an important one, because of his
blend of arrogance and humility. This is Maxine Peake,
an actress widely considered to be perfect for a female
Doctor. Having seen some clips of her performance as
Hamlet (a role David Tennant has played as well), I
think she'd be excellent to replace Peter Capaldi as the
2020s begin.

So Alice is the kind of person who can create a utopia. That’s fine for my film project (and the existentialist space opera novel I’m thinking of writing featuring the character thousands of years in the future). When I’m thinking about contemporary politics, I wonder what kind of person can create a utopia in the real world.

Alice, as a fictional character, is remarkable among the human race because she lacks an essential human quality. She has no feelings of resentment, no drives for revenge. Where human instincts about justice and harm all too frequently push us toward retribution, she thinks only of restorative and reparative justice. 

Alice is no saint or perfect figure. That would be excruciating to write and absolutely awful to watch or read. Last night I wrote an exchange between her and Elias where she says, "If I'm a blowhard, you're a tumour." So she gets angry, and she can be condescending. And a little arrogant. Also quite weird at times, as if she's staring at the chemical reactions inside your cells. Because sometimes, she is.

Alice is a character with nuanced understanding, powerful intelligence, a deeply held sense of right and wrong, a pragmatic sensibility, never feels vengeful, sometimes disturbs people, and can be stuck-up and arrogant, but also feels comradeship and general love for everyone she meets. Basically, she’s sensible, to her core. The only way I could think for someone to achieve this remarkable level of reasonableness is for her not even to be human at all. 

It’s even necessary to be more than a woman, which is usually a step toward better sense and rationality. 

I simply can’t conceive of a way a creature born physically human and socialized into a human culture could have genuinely no retributive or resentful drives. And I don’t think we can truly have a qualitative, categorical step into a whole new phase of society without genuinely purging ourselves of all resentment.

We can continue to strive for it, which is the utopian impulse. But I don’t know that we can ever achieve it.

It’s Only Newfoundland III: A Lion’s Roar, Jamming, 12/08/2015

Originally, I had planned to be finished with my reflections on Newfoundland and its political culture on Monday. I even started a new series of posts talking about the importance of science-fictional thinking and composition to understand utopias.

Overlooking a beach at Cape Bonavista, I also read a
tourism info stand describing the history of the cod fishery
in Newfoundland, an industry controlled by outside
authorities.

But my friend from the old country, The Good W, wrote me a comment on a Facebook link to the post that made me rethink whether I wanted to end my thoughts where I did. On Monday’s post, I was happy to describe the history of Newfoundland’s intense politics of resentment at the height of the Danny Williams era, and how uncomfortable that omnipresent political culture made me.

But The Good W went beyond the frame of my own experience, to frame Newfoundland’s cultural resentfulness in more sympathetic terms. In essence, Newfoundland (especially rural Newfoundland) has always been an exploited economy. 

A ruling class controls and accumulates most of the profits from an economy that revolves practically entirely around natural resource extraction. That ruling class is usually separate, geographically and culturally, from the people who eke out a living from the extraction work. 

In the colonial and independent days, that ruling class was in Britain and St. John’s. In the Canadian era, that ruling class is in Ottawa controlling the federal government, or are other interests who fall under the catch-all term, “mainlanders.” The need for charismatic national leaders arises naturally from the exploited position: such a leader refuses the politics of colonial-style conciliation of the exploited with their exploiters.

Resentment is a natural reaction to this kind of economy. Although Newfoundland is a white, European-descended population* that currently exists as part of a federalized democratic state, much of the population remains economically colonized. They’re dependent on a resource industry that they don’t control, and is usually managed without their interests in mind. 

* Whose own settlement has its history of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous population with the destruction of the Beothuk. Newfoundland and Hispaniola share the distinction of being the only settlements in the European colonization waves of whom none of the indigenous population or culture survived.

Danny Williams, Newfoundland's roaring lion. But
was he growling at the real enemy?

I understand where the politics of resentment come from, but they’re a model of politics that’s only successful when they’re overcome, not embraced. But overcoming resentment politics isn’t about reconciling with economic exploiters while maintaining the exploitive regime. Turnabout, when the exploited can lord his power over his former exploiter, is no end in itself.

Frantz Fanon’s words come back to me when I think about this problem of political culture. He’s most famous for being an inaugural theorist of what’s now called post-colonial philosophy. And his most famous argument was for the legitimacy of violent – sometimes horrifyingly violent – resistance to colonial occupation. He was a leader in Algeria’s independence movement, after all, which innovated many of the techniques of modern terrorism today, and used them against France and French people.

But what most caught my eye in The Wretched of the Earth was a critique of violent revolution as an end in itself. Put simply, once the immediate exploiter class was defeated, the cultural attitude that galvanized the population against the colonizers had to be overcome. 

It was a reactive mode, constantly fostering resentment at those who attacked and cut away your political and economic independence. If the battle is won, but the resentment remains a dominant force in the culture, people’s collective anger continues searching for more enemies. People turn on possible allies and each other. It’s a social-psychological account of why so many revolutionary societies turn to civil war.

The way out is a cultural overcoming in thought. Recognizing when the material political and economic conditions of your own world have changed so that violent overthrow of an oppressor class is no longer necessary. 

That unifying, one-dimensional cultural drive is replaced with a creative spirit. In freedom, you start again, building a culture more diverse than the forced unity of a battle against exploitation fuelled by resentment.

Fanon's greatest lesson was in the danger of letting the
spirit of revolution take a people just a touch too far.

There’s a nationalist song in the old country with a repeated line, “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders!” Nietzsche also developed a metaphor of the roar. It was the lion in Zarathustra whose anger and rage shattered his chains and threw off his burdens. 

Yet even though the lion was free of his burdens, he wasn’t really free. Because he had yet to free himself from his anger at the forces that burdened him. He was consumed by a need for revenge, to go beyond simply freeing himself, and make his former exploiters suffer in return. Punishment feels great when you’re carrying it out, especially when you do so in a spirit of retribution. But it’s still violence, and an unnecessary violence because you’re already free.

Many people in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t economically free. They’re still dominated by corporate interests in natural resource extraction, dependent for their own prosperity on the mere salaries many receive from natural resources. Williams simply made sure that the oil companies were now firmly in charge of the economy, and used the rhetoric of emancipation from mainland Canadian domination to hide a new yoke.

The politics of resentment in Newfoundland are a distraction, a spirit that fights an exploiter class that’s already been usurped, instead of seeking the people’s control over corporate foreign interests. The lion roars at the ones who’ve already let go of the chains.

Pure Conceptual Imagination I: Is Sci-Fi Philosophy? Research Time, 11/08/2015

While I was on vacation, I switched gears again in what I picked up to read for my Utopias project research. Filippo Marinetti’s work is a perfect storm of the beauty, transformative potential, visionary drive, uplift, and terrifying danger of utopian dreaming. 

I’ve written here before of how uncomfortable Marinetti’s writing can make me. One minute, I’m cheering alongside his angry calls to turf cronyist career parliamentarians and bloodless technocrats out of government. By the end of the same paragraph, he’s calling for a government of radically militarized trade unions run by stormtrooper regiment veterans and dreaming of paving every forest in Italy to build countless smoke-belching factories.

Literature is the imagination of a new world, built so we
can learn from that imaginary world. Maybe it's wonderful,
maybe it's horrifying. From Amazon Prime's The Man in
the High Castle, based on Philip K. Dick's masterpiece.

That’s Gervaisian levels of awkwardness.

After turning the old Italian over and over in my thoughts, I started reading a book with a much more benign imagination, Archaeologies of the Future by Frederic Jameson. The book is an exploration of how science-fiction as a genre has tended to understand the human impulse to build utopias in life and thought, the concepts underlying utopian politics, and the content of utopian visions. 

Jameson is primarily a literary theorist, though his knowledge of philosophy’s tradition is expert as well. He weaves descriptions and storylines from fiction works into a philosophical examination of what utopia is, and how its meaning shifts from era to era. 

His training in literary theory weds him a little too closely to the fine details of the idea’s history than I’d like to take in my own work. One long chapter of Archaeologies examines Thomas More’s Utopia, as if the book that brought the word into being had some special insight over and above everyone else who’s thought this way, whether or not they’ve ever used the word.

Writing the history of literature, or the history of philosophy, you need to focus on the origins this way. But we shouldn’t mistake how to do the history for how to do philosophy itself. Philosophy – and literature too – is fundamentally creative. What matters is where you take an idea in the present, to help build the future.

I've always considered the best philosophy to draw as
many of its ideas from literature as from the ostensible
philosophical canon. Frederic Jameson.

Utopia is an interesting concept because it’s more often been developed in literature than in philosophy, even though philosophy is the tradition of creating concepts. And the concept of utopia has primarily been developed in science-fiction literature. It’s the gleaming space palace, the narrative of progress, the voyage to seek out new life and go where no one has gone before. 

As of last October, I became a published science-fiction writer. As of later this month, I’ll become a published philosophical writer. When you look at them as genres of creative writing, they depend on similar imaginative abilities. Think about how I developed the utopian (and more often dystopian) ideas in my novel, Under the Trees, Eaten.

The Digger aliens of the novel offer a new way of life to humanity, taking on their nature and their morality, the morality of intelligent ants. They’re an advanced species of physical individuals with no self-conception of their own individuality. It’s a way of life that offers humanity a way out of the everyday violence of individuals jockeying for power. That’s the utopian element. 

But I developed the end of the book by following through on one of the real-world implications of their natural communism. As for what that is, I don’t spoil the kickers of my own stories. So the Diggers’ supposedly higher morality comes with its own cold brutality, which you could say is the dystopian.

Jameson describes utopian thinking as a product of the imagination. A utopian draws an elaborate diagram, his vision of the world if he could correct with absolute power the essential social and political conflict of his era. 

From Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of
Roadside Picnic.

The real-world content of what a utopia could be in all its gritty, material detail is only plausible as a wish. Jameson talks about the end of one of my favourite novels, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, where the protagonist encounters a literal alien wish granting machine. In the throes of ecstasy and fear, he can wish only for total happiness and abundance for everyone. No more specific than that. Only a wish.

The utopian impulse is the wish that the world could be better. Utopian imagination is to describe that better world. Dystopian imagination sees all the new problems that better world would create. It’s the diagnosis required for the next utopia.

It’s Only Newfoundland II: You’ll Always Be a Come-From-Away! A History Boy, 10/08/2015

Continued from last post . . . And the one before it, though I never really numbered them that way. From the start, I always found Danny Williams’ style of politics distasteful. He effortlessly enacted the tough populism that has always gone over just a little too well in Newfoundland. He was the biggest of the province’s Little Big Men, and an embodiment of why the island could no longer stand such people. Even though few realize it yet.

Newfoundlanders loved to watch Danny Williams' defy
the over-sensitive norms of mainland Canada with his
seal-fur coats. But his gestures weren't about ecological
politics or indigenous rights. They were about energizing
the population to follow him and him alone.

Williams became leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Tory party when they were in opposition to a flailing Liberal regime that had dominated the province’s politics for ten years. The Liberals had their own charismatic rabble-rouser in Brian Tobin, a man who personally boarded a Coast Guard ship and chased down a Spanish turbot trawler to prove that he was tough on illegal foreign fishing in protected regions. 

But by the time Williams became premier in 2003, the Liberals had been in power for over a decade and were well out of steam, energy, or ideas. It was reasonable enough that someone with a different approach to the political would take over the premiership, and although my politics had always leaned left, it’s not as though there was much difference between Liberals and Tories on economic details.

Then Williams achieved his greatest success as premier in 2005. I mentioned in the last post that Brian Peckford’s greatest success was negotiating the Atlantic Accord, the exemption from Canada’s National Energy Program that gave Newfoundland control over the pace and nature of development in offshore oil. Williams negotiated a new version of the Accord that let Newfoundland keep the lion’s share of oil revenue as well.

He did it by playing such a hardball negotiating tactic that I really admired it in itself. But its social effects made me feel deeply unwelcome in the province where I grew up and had lived my entire life until then. Williams ordered every Canadian flag removed from all government buildings throughout the province. 

The Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin was humiliated, and couldn’t do anything from his own office that would achieve a comparable insult to Newfoundland as Williams had just delivered to the federal government. He similarly bolstered his patriotic credibility by humiliating a deservedly under-informed Paul McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills, exposing their ignorance about the ecology of Newfoundland and Labrador’s seal populations on Larry King Live. 

The symbol of Newfoundland nationalism, the pink-white-
and-green flag, was everywhere during the Williams era,
and it echoes still today.

Later conflicts with Stephen Harper’s government over oil revenue sharing resulted in Williams leading the Anyone But Conservative movement in the 2008 federal election. Newfoundland’s national patriotism trumped Tory solidarity and sent an NL caucus to Ottawa that was entirely Liberal and New Democrat.

Newfoundland nationalist tricolour flags were flying everywhere in the province, and especially around St. John’s. One of my friends even hiked up a hill overlooking the harbour and downtown to run up a massive nationalist flag on an abandoned flagpole. 

The province’s culture and society was intensely focussed on national pride, and its expression was a boastful sense of superiority over mainland Canada, and particularly Ontario. In 2007, offshore oil revenue made Newfoundland and Labrador a contributor to inter-provincial equalization payments for the first time. As the collapse of Ontario’s manufacturing sector led it to accept equalization payments for the first time, the Newfoundlanders’ reaction was to laugh in Ontario’s face.

“See how it feels to be the poor ones now, fucking mainlanders! Take our money and lick our boots clean while yer at it!”

The politics of national pride had easily spilled into the politics of resentment. It was crass, rude, condescending, and spiteful. It surrounded me in the media, in conversations, and in the unquestioning love of Danny Williams and everything he did. Williams left office in 2010 with approval ratings higher than some totalitarian dictators feel comfortable falsifying. But they were genuine.

Williams had seemingly fulfilled Peckford’s promise that “have-not will be no more.” He was the single great deliverer of Newfoundland to prosperity. The result was that sketchy projects for which Williams laid the groundwork were embraced wholeheartedly by a public that should have been skeptical.

The Muskrat Falls hydroelectricity development will sell power from a new dam in Labrador directly through the Maritimes, thanks to a series of physical links from Labrador to Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. But there’s no transparency from the government on its cost overruns. 

Looking west at my hometown, St. John's, from Cape
Spear last week. Newfoundland is a culture that still
needs to learn that democracy isn't about picking a
leader to follow, but about keeping your leader on a
tight leash, preferably with a yoke around his neck.

Enormous breakdowns at existing power facilities throughout Newfoundland demonstrated that Muskrat Falls construction is diverting money from necessary maintenance. Public outrage over a series of catastrophic power outages in Winter 2014 forced Williams’ successor Kathy Dunderdale from office. But Williams remains untouchable.

The collapse of global oil prices hit Newfoundland’s workers hard, with slowdowns in the offshore industry and huge numbers of layoffs from sites at the Alberta Tar Sands. Despite the popular faith in offshore oil, Alberta remains a major source of income for Newfoundlanders. Or at least it was. 

Still, Williams remains untouchable, and his massive Galway real estate development on St. John’s west end looks to compound his multi-billion-dollar wealth. 

Williams is a hero to Newfoundlanders, the most dangerous kind of person in a democratic country. My cousin Grizzly Man told me when I visited last week, that Newfoundlanders as a culture have yet to get a firm grasp on precisely what democracy is. And this is because they still have heroes. 

There are still heroes in Newfoundland. Men (and they are always men) who will deliver the population from injustice. Visionaries who shine upon the people like a sun and lift us up with their aspirations and schemes. Follow them and they’ll free you from domination by those mainlanders who’d grind you under their boots, and then you can grind some mainlanders under your own. Or a deluded pop star who made a bad second marriage; you can grind him too.

After living 25 years in a culture where people’s politics are driven by resentment and the worship of charismatic prophet-premiers, I was fucking sick of it. I still am.

It’s Only Newfoundland I: Napoleon Complex, A History Boy, 09/08/2015

Friday night, I arrived back in Toronto from my vacation to St. John’s, visiting my mother, family, a few (but not enough) of my friends, my girlfriend’s mother and her own new boyfriend, and seeing some of the beautifully desolate sights of the Avalon and Bonavista peninsulas. I’m home now.

From Cape Bonavista. If you look carefully, you can see
a tiny fishing boat, three people back to their workday
in the terrifying sublimity of the North Atlantic. You
shouldn't complain about your office job.

This can be a very controversial thing to say among a community of Newfoundlanders: that you were born and raised in Newfoundland but don’t consider it home. To some, it’s understandable. A place where you moved and made a new life can feel more like a home than where you grew up, precisely because it’s free of the growing pains and uncomfortable memories of your origins.

But to others, it sounds like a betrayal. Or at least, it’s incomprehensible.

Last week, I discussed my contempt for Newfoundland’s cultural lack of an environmental or ecological consciousness. Today, I want to talk about a vile aspect of Newfoundland’s culture that hits me more viscerally: its political small-mindedness and insularity.

Newfoundland politics has historically been dominated by Little Big Men, charismatic leaders who inspire public support verging on worship. They ride through political office on promises that their leadership alone will bring salvation. 

The legacy of Joey Smallwood dominated my childhood education about the Canadian period of Newfoundland history. In my elementary school classes, he was treated almost as a hero, usually for having begun the Canadian period of Newfoundland history in the first place. 

Smallwood began as a socialist and social democratic political organizer in rural Newfoundland during the island’s years as an independent country, and then its submission to the British crown as a returned colony during the Great Depression. His campaign to join the Canadian confederation was marred by allegations of vote rigging and ballot destruction that persist to this day. 

Joey Smallwood was Newfoundland's most
successful dictator.

He ruled as an autocratic premier for 23 years after confederation in 1949, attempting a variety of state-centric schemes to subsidize the population of Newfoundland into prosperity. There was concrete material progress after confederation, as basic health care services were brought to much of the rural population for the first time. 

However, this required the controversial forced and incentivized resettlement of many of the smallest, most geographically isolated communities. It forced thousands of people out of their careers in the cod fishery because they no longer had access to their generational fishing grounds. Resentment lingers over what was literally the government’s destruction of hundreds of small towns.

After two decades of autocratic one-man government in an ostensible democracy, Smallwood was forced out of power in the 1972 election. Newfoundland politics in the 1980s was dominated by another charismatic figure, Brian Peckford. Peckford was a Tory, which in provincial Newfoundland politics is associated with independence and anti-federalism, in contrast with the historically conciliatory Liberals of Smallwood.

Peckford’s biggest achievement was negotiating the Atlantic Accord, Newfoundland and Labrador’s inter-provincial treaty with the federal government exempting it from the National Energy Program’s mandate of federal control over offshore oil. 

Despite his self-adopted handle as the “Great Negotiator,” Peckford was also responsible for a series of failures in trying to wrest provincial control of other resources and build a self-sufficient economy for Newfoundland and Labrador. 

He tried unsuccessfully to re-negotiate the Churchill Falls hydroelectric development, because Smallwood initially locked the province for nearly a century into terms that would essentially pay the Quebec government to sell hydroelectric power generated in Labrador. The Quebec government wouldn’t give up such a wonderful deal for them, and the courts upheld the original agreement.

Peckford also tried to gain provincial control over the cod fishery and the power to grant fishing licences from the Canadian government, which was selling licences to destructive freezer trawler companies in an era of dwindling cod stocks. He also, along with the rest of Newfoundland, ignored any ecological damage from the sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil platform, which only exacerbated the destruction of the cod stocks to the point of extinction.

A reasonable graphic representation of Philip Sprung.

Peckford’s attempts to diversify Newfoundland’s economy beyond fish and oil were laughable. His major project was a heavily subsidized greenhouse agriculture project, whose development partner in the private sector was little more credible than Lyle Lanley. The Sprung Greenhouses went the way of the Springfield Monorail.

Brian Peckford is most fondly remembered for a single poetic phrase that embodies the empty dreaming of a magic bullet cure for all of Newfoundland’s problems, the one mad scheme that would save everyone. “Someday the sun will shine and have-not will be no more.”

His major material legacy was as the first draft of the Danny Williams premiership, the period whose height disgusted me so much that I couldn’t bear to live in Newfoundland anymore. To be continued . . .

I Was Only in Newfoundland, A History Boy, 07/08/2015

It turns out that my days wandering around bits of my home province with girlfriend Gillian were so busy I had no time to blog. Well, I don’t really mind that, because some level of vacationing should be allowable. I suspect that, as more social media jobs require continual monitoring, labour activism will include rights for time off work out of his provider’s wireless range. That way, she won’t be encouraged to respond to tweets or manage comment boards while on vacation.

We also visited Trinity on this trip, a town that has
embraced the tourism industry to such a degree that they've
become a replica of a Newfoundland fishing village.

I’ve been thinking about Newfoundland, and how growing up here affected some of my priorities in writing. Particularly, I’m thinking of my non-fiction, and what may have helped nudge me along to my work about environmentalism. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is about how to think ecologically, how to think about ourselves and what we are that will put environmental connections and causes instinctually at the top of our minds. 

When I was nine years old, the entire Grand Banks cod fishery was shut down. The reason was that cod stocks had fallen to levels that were near extinction. Small coastal communities all over the province who had relied on a robust commercial-level fishery for literally hundreds of years now had no industry or employment at all. 

Twelve per cent of the province’s labour force was out of work. These regions depended on direct government bailouts to corporate fish plant owners and individual fishers simply to give tens of thousands of people enough money to subsist. The economies of entire small towns collapsed as incomes plummeted and huge numbers of people simply didn’t have money to spend anymore.

The teachers, news reporters, and government of the province had to explain to nine-year-olds what was going on. I was taught a lot about the dangers of overfishing, and the disastrous scorched-earth harvesting of factory trawlers. But it was only when I got to university that I heard it described for what it was.

I grew up in the middle of an enormous ecological disaster.

I feel like ecological consciousness only really developed in my own generation in Newfoundland. Local fishers deeply understood their relationships with the fish stocks, how a resource population could shrink radically in relation to harvesting rates. They knew the cod stocks were in trouble long before the government or seafood companies acknowledged or cared.

But it was only in the 1990s that environmental regulations became a main priority of the government. A lot of lakes in Newfoundland near human settlements are polluted. St. John’s Harbour, despite its central location in Newfoundland’s largest city, had an enormous sewer pipe spewing toxic waste sitting in it for decades before cleanup was even suggested. The province’s forestry and paper mills produced a significant amount of pollution before the period of environmental laws began.

When we visited Cape Bonavista this week, they had professionally mounted displays on how lighthouses worked and the history of the fishing industry. Its display urging hikers and bout tour patrons not to litter or pollute the land or ocean was cut-out construction paper on bristol board, laid haphazardly against a wall.

It occurred to me this week that, in all the times throughout my education here that I was told about the tragedy of the Ocean Ranger oil platform sinking – the terrible storm, tidal waves, 84 workers lost – no one mentioned anything about whether or how much oil had spilled from its exploratory wells. 

Environmental failures in our epoch of disastrous climate change are rooted in how we think. Humans have trouble conceiving of aggregation: the large-scale impact of many ongoing small-scale actions. “What’s a little sludge dumping into this huge sea going to do?” can poison many kilometres of ocean and seafloor when enough thousands of people say it. 

Yes, I think it was exactly like this.

Humans are also short-term thinkers in cost-benefit analyses, the inability to understand the impact of long chains of causes. “My factories and coal plants may produce a lot of pollution, but we bring electricity and products to millions of people right now!” ignores that enough smoke billowing into the atmosphere is absorbed in ocean water, and the chemical reactions lower the oceans’ pH, as much of the world’s waters are too acidic for most plankton to survive. These interactions that lead to the collapse of entire marine ecosystems’ food webs and mass extinction are too complicated for us to grasp beyond the clear immediate benefits human industry provides.

My generation of people who grew up in Newfoundland are probably the first to develop a popular understanding of environmentalism, ecology, and humanity’s deep, complex integration with all the processes of Earth. It only took an ecological disaster.

Watching Captain Planet as a kid probably helped too.

Why Futurism Matters Today IV: Why Imagine At All? Composing, 31/07/2015

Continued from last post . . . The utopian thinkers – whether they use that term or something like it or generally imagine or work toward a vision of a better society – all have a kind of optimism. Minimally, a utopian believes that human nature can be changed for the better. 

This is why transhumanists are usually thought of as utopians. This is why Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a utopian book. It's why philosophy, when it's carried out as a creative art, is an essentially utopian discipline. It’s an activity that tries to change human nature for the better. 

Modern utopia lies in the visions of networked social
movements, as in this moment from a Black Lives
Matter protest in north Toronto this week.

I’ve sometimes heard rhetorical talk about libertarian utopias, usually as a means of dismissing libertarians as cranks and crazies. Utopian visionaries are often considered kind of crazy in a lot of popular discourse, mostly because the term can all too often evoke images of madmen in a desert or a forest calling their followers to build a new society in the wilderness. 

All too often, these kinds of visionaries are would-be prophets whose megalomania has interfered with their planning faculties. Quite regularly, ordinary office workers quit their unfulfilling jobs to build a self-sufficient community in the wilderness, where they'll commune with nature, a utopia that escapes the evils of technology. However, with no scientific or practical knowledge of farming, plumbing, or any basic survival skills, most of these communities end up collapsing. 

Yet Henri Bergson took seriously the concept of prophesy as a progressive force for humanity and human nature. An engagement with his Two Sources of Morality and Religion will be a centrepiece of the Utopias manuscript. 

The last third of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia describes a utopian community where everyone is free or organize along their own vision of perfection a society of themselves and whoever agrees with that vision. He calls freedom to choose and experiment with different ways of life to see what works and what doesn’t is a large-scale argument for the libertarian way of life. If freedom to choose is paradise, then restricting that freedom is to fall.

This give and take between a movement pushing for social progress and the ethical necessity of freedom is a significant aspect of modern politics. You can see it in the social media discussions that define so much of the politics of our era. On one side, you have the social justice warriors, whose campaigns call attention to dangerous, violent, and vile inequities of class, gender, and race in our society, and push for material change in our institutions and in our cultures and minds to address those inequities in profound ways. 

As with every discussion of politics lately, it comes
back again to Donald Trump.

On the other side,* you have the conservatives who wish to preserve their freedom to think in the racist, sexist, and uncritically capitalistic ways that are simultaneously embodied in the greasy jackassery of both Donald Trump and Travis Kalanick.

* Where I am manifestly not, as you can probably tell by now.

The libertarian critique of modern movement-based progressivism is that they accuse the social justice warrior of wishing to use the state to force their ideas on everyone with or without consent or deliberation. 

This manifestly isn’t true, because the essential framework of social movement activism is about changing minds. You expose people to different lives and experiences, talk with them about the systematic causes of the injustices in those experiences, and build solidarity to change the destructive relationships we’re all caught in. 

Some of those exposures are confrontational, but movement politics ultimately has to understand that every encounter is an opportunity for education, for changing minds.

But progressive politics is always going to be subject to this fear of the libertarians until we can acknowledge that, in figures like Marinetti and Italian Futurism most intensely and purely, the engine of progress is the tyranny of the state crushing all resistance to the new program of a perfect society. That’s what my Utopias project is all about.

Ultimately, I think my conclusion will be that progressive politics can only avoid the hypocrisy of tyranny and violence when it learns what Hayek and his new liberal followers get right: avoid the state and top-down enforcement of ideology as an engine of the social progress we want. 

My libertarian friend G once asked me why I believed that it was possible to improve humanity. “Don’t you believe in human nature?” he asked. I wanted to know what he meant, and he told me that humans were essentially self-interested, egotistical creatures who cared only about themselves and would be inherently violent to each other.

That was the root of our disagreement. I believe that people can change, and change for the better, if they open their minds to the possibility of difference and a systematic view of the world. That’s why I still write philosophy. It’s the tradition of developing new concepts, and those concepts can, conversation by conversation, change the world.