The Renegade Generation of Philosophical Writers, A History Boy, 18/12/2015

This is a repost of the essay that recently went online at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. You can read it here, or there, depending on how you feel. My thanks to Jim Collier for publishing my updated Collective Vision manifesto, and for taking me on at the Reply Collective four years ago.

• • •

As one of the earliest members of the Reply Collective, I’m immensely proud of all we've accomplished in just the last five years. More than that, I think our greatest achievements, and our most difficult work, still lies ahead of us. 

The roots of this difficult task are in the institutional context in which many Reply Collective contributors work for their paychecks: the university system. I am not one of these people, and I think many other Collective members will face the tough choice and attendant hardships that I did over the last few years. It’s the choice between increasingly stressful instability and underemployment in universities, or the uncertainty of taking your skills and experience to other sectors.

People have always made these kinds of career changes. But the pace appears to be picking up speed as the university system changes. Stable employment in any sector is not a guarantee, but for younger entrants to the university faculty labour market, it’s become a fantasy. Running away in the TARDIS is more likely.

The combination of administrative bloat, faculty austerity, and labour over-production means that most university teachers today have merely adjunct status. They're precariously employed on contracts that last no longer than the length of their courses, and are paid at a rate well below the poverty line. Yet they are expected to work full time, and contribute to research in addition.

Researchers at prestigious universities are losing their research capacities and even their jobs as government funding for pure research dries up and the post-secondary sector relies increasingly on private industry partnerships that are hostile to critical work or research that cannot be immediately monetized. As well, corporate partners change a university's teaching mission from critical education to customer service, privileging student satisfaction instead of challenging accepted beliefs.

In such a terrifying climate, organizations like the Reply Collective are more important than ever. They must be the new home of creative research and writing now that universities are making themselves incapable of progress. 

When I was a doctoral student in a philosophy department, colleagues and professors had a particular way of discussing teachers and grad students who started working in the business or non-profit world instead of the university sector. These people had “left philosophy.”

Their presumption is that no longer working as a university teacher meant that you were no longer involved in philosophy, or any of the research disciplines where you had trained and worked in the university sector. 

The Reply Collective offers an alternative research and writing community to the lonely and dejected isolation of the “independent scholar.” I, for one, no longer even consider myself a scholar. Scholarship is a vocation that can only be sustained in university infrastructures, a largely library-bound career as an interpreter of great texts for an audience of other professional scholars. I no longer write philosophy to publish it in the prestigious professional journals with paywalls and subscription rates so high that even some universities can’t afford them.

Instead, I write to be read. Although my writing career still has a long way to go, I write to be read by a popular audience. This doesn’t mean somehow “dumbing down” content that should properly be technically dense and conform to the standard outlines of the professional journals that are never circulated for the public to read.

It means being free to experiment with genre and style to find new ways to engage professional knowledge disciplines with the broader public and public concerns. I admit it's a bit easier to do this from philosophy, because so much of that discipline’s best work is more purely theoretical and interpretive than many of the social sciences. 

Here are some of the experiments I'm trying, both at the Reply Collective, on my own website, and in other creative projects. These are just examples of possible progressive directions. Don’t treat this as instructions, but to inspire directions of your own.

New (and sometimes weird) approaches to book reviews. The Reply Collective offers opportunities for multiple-author reviews, and experiments with form come from dividing the writing labour in different ways. My solo reviews have sometimes gotten more experimental, with mixed results. But that's what experimentation is for.

Applying conceptual creativity and exploration more typically associated with boundary-pushing philosophical works to blogging and journalism. Recently, I’ve applied my recent training in professional communications and media studies with my long-established skills at philosophical analysis to journalism on the politics of my country, Canada. And for more than two years now, I’ve published a daily blog chronicling all my research activities for long-term projects. 

I’ve recently begun work as a freelance communications consultant for small businesses and charities in my city, Toronto. One major advantage that I bring to my clients is my ability to synthesize and probe ideas and real-world developments for implications that remain invisible to people whose only training is in business. Operating without the lifelong presumptions of the business world lets me see through the buzzwords and trends that too many of my colleagues (and competitors, happily for me) chase without forethought.

Thanks to my professional connections through the Reply Collective, I've published a polished version of my dissertation as Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. Though it's currently part of a scholarly line, I’m preparing for a softcover release when I can begin to promote it more widely to audiences of individual readers interested in a stimulating and trippy book that simultaneously works as a philosophical analysis of environmentalist morality and ecological science, as well as a handbook for activism-by-example.

I’ve also published fiction that expresses and probes the philosophical ideas of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, as well as developing independent film projects that, while largely realist, apply the Nietzsche-inspired ideas of that book to their narratives and characterizations.

At our best, humanity handles crisis through creativity and regeneration. The university as an institution once offered a secure home where research specialists could produce and disseminate knowledge to progress and improve the human situation materially, technologically, maybe even morally and spiritually. But the modern university’s corporate business model has irreparably corrupted its capacity for social progress. It is all too easy to think of this demographic of surplus professional university research and teaching labour as a Lost Generation, whose lack of institutional support will see their talent wasted. 

I refuse such pessimism because it is pessimism and resignation. Instead of a Lost Generation, we can be a Renegade Generation, creating new flexible and decentralized institutions to create and spread critical knowledge that will not be vulnerable to the temptations of corruption and compromise with values of greed and callousness in the name of hyper-efficiency that defines too much of our modern world in business and education. 

We will free thought by thinking freely. It begins with each of us.

Save Us VI: How to Save Ourselves, Research Time, 17/12/2015

Continued from last post. . . . But it started here, and included this, this one too, and also this.

His argument that Modernity is essentially a worldview of total relativism and the impossibility of truth lays down precisely the role Leo Strauss will play in my Utopias manuscript. The symbol of the fear of humanity's smallness.

Steve Fuller and I may fight a lot, and snark at each other on Twitter, and got into quite a few philosophical dustups over the course of the longest book review ever written. But he taught me a valuable lesson about medieval Christian philosophy, theology, and culture.

Happy Xmas, everybody.

He taught me that this was a culture that believed the entire universe to be an open book. We just had to figure out the right way to read it. Nature is God’s expression, analogous to the Bible and the life of Jesus. Just as we become more divine by understanding the Bible and Jesus' life, we become more divine by understanding nature.

Metaphors and religion aside. Human knowledge is capable of understanding the universe. We just have to figure out the best methods and frameworks to do so. 

I say there can be many such methods and frameworks. They can vary by context, or what particular problems have to be solved, or some other fulcrum. Maybe we’ll drop some or add some or transform some over the years. Maybe we’ll discover that some need to be combined, or some need to be fragmented. 

The universe is really complex. We change and it changes. Our modes of knowing change as we better understand what we apply them to, and they change as we adapt to changing conditions in the world. But we can know it.

When I dropped the “metaphors and religion” there, I took you to my philosophical perspective about knowledge and the universe. This optimistic, practical, adaptable pluralism about knowledge is basically Gilles Deleuze’s solution to the problem of relativism.*

* The historical chain goes like this, very roughly. 1) Medieval theology: God made the world and made us to understand it. 2) Modernity: Human knowledge’s pinnacle is the absolute. 3) Post-modernity: There’s no absolute, and therefore no true knowledge. 4) Pragmatism: A form of knowledge is valid if it achieves the results we want. 5) Speculative Pragmatism: Knowledge has many forms and applications, and is valid if it helps us understand the world.

As for Strauss? He’s a retrograde. But an excellent representative of retrograde thinkers everywhere who think no knowledge is valid unless it expresses at least some of THE absolute. Basically, either religious or secular people whose only standard for valid knowledge is a religious or secular version of Category 1 or 2 above.

But Strauss is even more extreme, which makes his argument in Natural Right and History even more useful to me rhetorically. Because his analysis of Thomas Hobbes’ mechanistic view of reality centres the relativism that he thinks destroys knowledge in modernity itself, he can function as the ultimate conservative.

I fully admit this might be a ridiculous metaphor that
won't help anyone understand what I mean at all.

He and Heidegger both become – if you’ll let me make a completely weird metaphor that may not make any sense at all –  these weird neutron stars of arch-conservatism in the Utopias book. They emit totally different kinds of signals that resonate in a weird way, which expresses the same conclusion.

Only a god can save us. Either the universe itself changes, and takes us along with it, so that human nature becomes less destructive – God intervenes to save us. Or we return to a universal belief in a divine natural law that grounds the eternally true rights of man – we submit entirely to God to save ourselves. 

Modernity turns from this. As does liberalism, the definitive political philosophy of modernity. Liberalism is inadequate in many ways. Most notably in our current economic politics, its extreme individualism makes us hostile to our ethical obligations toward each other. 

In that, we have to move beyond traditional liberalism, to preserve its virtues like freedom of speech and thought, and the ideals of democracy, while overcoming its deficiencies.

And in this broader context about truth, knowledge, and our relation to the divine, we should be thankful for another aspect of liberalism, the West's first philosophy of freedom. 

I say Strauss feared humanity's smallness because of his presumption that human knowledge needs a divine or eternal ground (absolute and universal human rights, in the case of what I've been reading in Natural Right and History) to be valid. Without access to the eternal, we're eternally small, insignificant, and ignorant.

Modernity is the cultural way of thinking about ourselves as not really needing that eternal grounding. Knowledge can grow and progress. In giving us the tools to understand ourselves as free, liberal thinking gave us the ability to free ourselves from our limitations.

Save Us V: The World Is Lost But I’m Found, Research Time, 16/12/2015

Well, that turned into a couple of nice false starts. But here we are at the actual start of what I wanted to say about Hobbes when I was writing my follow-up to the Only a God post.

What Leo Strauss has to say about Hobbes is rooted in Strauss' own attitude about truth. The problem of truth – particularly the natural universal rights of man als Männer – is the conceptual core of Natural Right and History.

Here's the pragmatist answer to the problem of
relativism. Many truths doesn't mean there are no truths.
Each truth is partial, limited to a particular unique
domain or set of concerns, and only God knows the
totality of all that truth. But God isn't exactly
forthcoming with the answers, so we have to figure
all this out on our own.

Okay, so what makes truth a problem? 

See, Strauss is a textbook example of someone who thinks that saying “There’s no one absolute eternal truth about X" is the same as saying “There’s no truth at all about X, and you can believe whatever you want about X.” When X is the list of human rights, shit gets serious.

It’s the fear of moral relativism, but in a context where anything that falls short of moral absolutism is total relativism. And Strauss’ analysis of Hobbes is how he roots moral relativism in thinking that goes back well further than the usual suspects like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The real relativist, as far as he's concerned, is Hobbes. The reason is intriguing, though. It has to do with the implications of a thorough mechanism for knowledge in Hobbes’ thinking.

Before I lay this out, I want to say that these aren't my views at all. I’m walking you through how I understand Strauss’ argument. I think that argument is fascinating as a set of ideas and inferences, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

If everything that exists is a mechanism, then humanity has no powers to progress beyond what we can already do. That includes our thinking. We can only think, plan, and act in a way that’s peculiar to human existence alone. So we can only understand the world in human terms.

If we want to understand everything in the world (the ostensible goal of scientific inquiry), we’d have to understand everything in the world on its own terms. But we only have human knowledge frameworks to work with, so can’t know the world in itself. 

So humans gaining knowledge of truths beyond human experience or thinking is impossible. Reason is impotent. But action isn’t. Mathematics is a human way of knowing, but it does allow us to study how mechanisms work and manipulate them.

The heavily oversignified central illustration of
Hobbes' Leviathan.

Non-human mechanisms are permanently alienated from humanity. But we can use our knowledge of mechanism in the abstract (mathematics and the derived applied sciences) to wrench those alien bodies to behave according to human possibilities.

This is the mind-set of Modernity.* The book of nature is in a language we can never know. But we can burn its pages and remake the world in the human image. Strauss thinks this is a disastrous path, and so have many environmentalists over the years.**

* The epoch, that is. 

** Further notions that environmentalism should properly be a conservative dogma, as it was back when it was called conservationism, and resulted in the creation of America's national park system. But in the 1960s, the movement became critical of big business because of pesticides and pollution, so became the province of hippies. Environmental consciousness still hasn’t recovered the same political power it had in John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's day, and I don't know that it ever will.

If humanity is so lost in the world that we can only find ourselves, then we'll make sure we can be found everywhere by steamrolling our nature, our character, our way over everything. That’s modernity, says Strauss. 

So we have to figure out a return to the pre-modern mind-set when we rooted philosophical thinking and argument in real endpoints: the actual, absolute, universal answers to our questions.

Hoo boy. To Be Continued . . .

Save Us IV: The Real Idea, Research Time, 15/12/2015

See, the interesting thing about this esotericism idea is that it’s basically the presumption that there are hidden meanings in texts. There’s a conspiratorial twist to it, because it seems Strauss talks about a true hidden meaning, what the author was really trying to say.

The esoteric conception of writing seems to be that a great author is always subversive, but hiding his subversion to avoid persecution from a hostile public. So while he might appear to be a particularly nuanced thinker of his current epoch's mainstream, he’s actually a radical pushing ideas that the masses and the powerful would find horrifying.

A provocative thing to say, that Strauss' vision of
interpretation makes philosophy into a tradition of
conspiratorial thinking. Hard to put Spinoza in the
same category as David Icke.

Investigating this hidden meaning, and what it could be, is interpretation. This is the bulk of what philosophers today do: they study the great works of their field's history and interpret them. 

Most of the interpretation that goes on in today's academic world* is ersatz at best, empty wheel-spinning too often, and masturbatory at worst.

* I was quite happy that Kastely’s Plato book wasn’t one of these. While it didn't have a concrete political program in today's context, his interpretation of Plato himself as a radical democrat – almost an anarchist by some lights – at the heart and origin of Western philosophy is a message we should all hear.

Professors in the humanities are under intense career pressure to publish as much and as quickly as possible. They have to demonstrate research productivity with regular articles in the most prestigious journals. 

Peer reviewers at such journals are under pressure to reject as much as possible because of a high volume of submissions, and to maintain a reputation of prestige that comes with a high rejection rate. 

So the easiest way to pass these gatekeepers is to write an interpretation with enough formal rigour to pass muster as an argument, and that otherwise fits the general paradigm of inoffensive historical scholarship. Original, but nothing that really challenges the profession’s conventional thinking.

This isn't just what professors face when they have to
grade their papers, but also when they become editors
of the most prestigious journals in their fields. They
have high rejection rates to maintain their prestige, but
because they're so prestigious, they get an enormous
number of submissions from ambitious young
professors desperate for a publication credit that
could make or break a tenure-track job application.

Yet here you are writing in a tradition whose landmark works actually did challenge and change conventional thinking. This is a paradox I'm glad I've stepped away from.

But take Leo Strauss seriously and you face the idea that philosophy is a tradition of conspiratorial trickery. The great works of philosophy changed their culture’s way of thinking, but were only successful because they made a radical new way of thought look like it followed naturally from the ordinary.

If a writer expressed his radical ideas too blatantly, the shock would make the population reject the change. Socrates is the example. He was the most confrontational, nakedly honest philosopher in the tradition.** And that total honesty got him executed for political crimes, as a subversive challenging Athenian morality and tradition.

** I think Spinoza comes close, but his most radical work The Ethics was weird enough to be blatantly radical but still escape reactionary wrath. Besides, he had already alienated the entire Dutch public with the open atheism of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

This is what I think is so valuable about Kastely's book.*** He not only makes Plato an esoteric thinker – hiding a radical democracy in a work, The Republic, that’s typically taught as Plato’s totalitarian vision of the perfect society.

*** And what I tried to express in my dialogical review last month. But I think I let the dramatic aspects of the dialogue overcome the more philosophical examination. It’ll be better next time.

He’s an esoteric thinker on a mission to redeem his old teacher, by incorporating him into a method that could be more successful at challenging popular morality and political culture than open confrontation. And this is supposedly Plato's real mission.

This is an idea of Strauss' that breaks with the usual talk of interpretation. It gives interpretation a precise, correct content. There’s something to discover in a great philosophical work that was there from the beginning.

Strauss quite likes this idea that there’s a single real true meaning always out there for us to discover. The idea that there is no such truth is one of the notions he considers to have destroyed political thinking and philosophy generally. The stereotype is that this idea came with postmodernism.

But in Natural Right and History, Strauss argues that it comes from Thomas Hobbes. To be continued . . .

Save Us III: You Hide to Stay Alive, Research Time, 14/12/2015

I had to put Leo Strauss down for a while. Normally, I like to read a book all the way through, but two related things about Natural Right and History made me step back from it. 

One was that after the first two chapters that laid out some directly original political thinking, the book delved into exploring different epochs of Western political thinking. A long chapter on ancient Greek thinking had many ideas that were quite useful to me and my current project. Same with his chapter on Hobbes. But as I moved forward?

Is this small, unassuming man who you'd
barely notice if you bumped into him on
the street really a revolutionary? Maybe
his anonymity and the ease with which
you can dismiss him is a revolutionary's
greatest weapon.

Related to that is a curious idea about how Strauss actually wrote. The notion that Strauss is the hidden (in plain sight) Yoda of neoconservatism doesn't seem to fit with most of his writing and teaching, commentaries on the classics. 

But Strauss also wrote a book on esotericism in writing, and there's a curious comment about John Locke in Natural Right and History that fits with this. Basically, Locke looks horribly inconsistent in that he wrote many books that said the Christian books of revelation contained all the moral teaching you’d need.

Yet it also wrote the Treatises on Government, two books that justify liberal democracy, at least in his prototypical theory, with entirely material and practical grounding. Christ and the Christian God are nowhere to be seen.

So Strauss talks about this idea that, in politically turbulent times, it makes no sense to speak openly and frankly about your political views if they displease the ignorant / deceived masses or the state / rulers and military. 

You have to hide your true beliefs to avoid the fate of Socrates: arrested and executed for laughing in the face of popular morality and encouraging others to do so. Every open revolutionary faces the same danger: the consequences of the revolution’s failure. And most revolutions fail.

So philosophical texts that seek to change people's minds, causing a genuinely transformative social revolution, can’t do so explicitly. Readers will resist you when their views are directly challenged. And if the politically and militarily powerful of your society are directly challenged?

This weekend, I attended the JAYU Human Rights Film Festival as a representative of the Syria Film Festival. They closed this year's screenings with a film called Trials of Spring. It followed several women’s rights activists in Egypt, through the 2011 revolutions and their aftermath.

The main leader in focus was Hend Nafea. She took part in many protests against the government of Egypt: against Hosni Mubarak, the interim military government, Mohammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and finally against Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Over those three years from the revolution until mid-2014, she set up organizations to provide legal aid to activists arrested by the regime, fight against a pervasive climate that permitted all intensities of violence against women. She was one of the most visible and important leaders of popular resistance to oppression from both the military and the Islamists.

An explicit revolution will always have enemies,
because you will have already declared from the start
that you actually are revolutionaries.

In 2014, the Egyptian courts, controlled by Sisi’s military government directly, sentenced her to life in prison, so had to flee to the United States. Nafea continues to advocate and network with others working toward a democratic Egypt.

She spoke her mind explicitly, and was punished for it, like millions of others across Arab and Persian societies after the 2011 revolutions. Only Morocco and Tunisia have secured anything like democracy. 

King Mohammad of Morocco was happy to transition to a constitutional monarchy, and Tunisia was lucky to have had a strong labour movement and a weak military. Everywhere else, there’s been crackdown and mass murder.

What would Strauss say? “See what you get?!” or something along those lines. Yet he was a revolutionary himself, apparently, without making a noise. His revolution would change the culture such that the autocracy would collapse naturally, without anyone knowing a thing. Before I can really understand what he means by this, I need to read more about esotericism, what kind of revolution this would be. 

I have to figure out how a person can look utterly inoffensive, and yet spread idea that constitute a genuine revolution. Until I can get my hands on some books about this idea, and where Strauss engages the idea itself – giving away his key – I feel like I won’t be able to understand precisely the meaning of Strauss himself.

Until then, there’s still plenty to learn about different aspects of political philosophy. Particularly, some of his ideas about Hobbes – who's important to the Utopias project in his own right – are quite illuminating. 

So if I may continue from the last post . . . 

Success in Growth, or The Ones Who Call Him Zoolander Will Never Listen Anyway, Jamming, 13/12/2015

I'm a member of the New Democratic Party. My campaigning in southern Etobicoke this summer and fall was all over Twitter. Sometimes, older members of my family will tell me I shouldn't mention this on the internet, because employers would discriminate against me for my political beliefs.

But seriously, as much as the 100-year-old people who joined up back when it was the CCF rant about socialism, the NDP isn’t a hard left-wing party anymore. At least not in the old communist sense. 

Justin Trudeau having a great time at Pride Vancouver.
He is epochal now. Deal with it.

I was damn disappointed in this election, though. I genuinely think the NDP would have made the best government for Canada, or at least, we should have held the balance of power in a Liberal minority to make sure their policies remained in line with what was best for the people.

Instead, I found myself in conversations – in real life and online – with people who had been lifelong supporters of the NDP. These people accused Tom Mulcair of being a hardcore, right-wing, pro-austerity conservative. They thought the NDP had betrayed all its basic values, and were voting Liberal.

I've written about the party’s failures to communicate before, both here and at Rabble. That’s not what I'm talking about today.

Instead, I want to talk about successful communication. That's why I want to talk about Justin Trudeau.

We all know the narrative now. Trudeau thrived on being underestimated. While everyone thought of him as an empty-headed pretty-boy who was coasting into parliament on his father’s name and legacy, he was networking with leadership circles all over Canada to build an enormously diverse team of politicians.

People who may never necessarily have thought about running for parliament, especially for a decimated Liberal Party that looked to be dying off, were inspired to join the Trudeau banner. They worked their communities, their neighbourhoods, and peddled the message of hope that was at the centre of Trudeau’s campaign.

Justin Trudeau combines his father's intelligence and
Machiavellian deviousness with a genuine love of
interacting with everyday people.

And they won. It was the same with everyone who voted for them.

A few years ago, I read a book by John Ibbitson called The Big Shift. It was about Harper’s plan to remake the Canadian state so that its services would no longer supply the progressive social programs that a century of Liberal dominance built. And the people would love their new, more cruel, more harsh country.

But they didn’t, even as Harper kept winning larger parliamentary shares until his majority in 2011. Once Harper had a majority government and no longer had to wheedle and downplay how radical his changes to the Canadian state institution were, Canadian people came to hate it. 

Harper’s strategy to stay in point in the 2015 election smacked of obvious desperation. Double down on demonization of everyone opposed to you, or even a little critical of you. The opposition parties, the media, social movements. They were all mocked and insulted in Conservative party communications. 

Hate and resentment are the last acts of desperate people. It stirs up a paranoid, spiteful base, but it doesn't appeal to anyone who isn’t already filled with the hatred you’re encouraging.

I probably won't make it to the NDP leadership
convention in Edmonton due to work commitments, but
I will support Tom Mulcair stepping down. I think he's
a good leader, but his public image has been completely
ruined by the conservative messaging of the 2015
campaign. He has no more credibility to lead the NDP
against a Liberal government that's already positioned
itself in the public eye as more progressive than he is.
Mulcair may talk about being "the progressive
opposition," but Canadians don't believe him anymore.

The NDP were softer in tone, but ultimately no better. Worse, since our campaign made two mistakes instead of Harper's one. NDP campaign communication staff tried to rile up our base with messages about the evil and destructiveness of Harper and his cronies. And at least they targeted those properly.

Yet the mass media messages turned the NDP base away at the same time. We were trying to appeal to conservative-leaning people, especially with balanced budget messaging. 

But conservative people will never support the NDP, even the modern social democratic version. Many of them still believe all the hype about New Democrats being communists. 

So the NDP played it super-safe, aiming to sound like reassuring, conservative voices when the people were desperate for genuine radical breaks from the Harper years. 

The NDP communications and campaign leadership painted us as compassionate conservatives because they thought the key to victory was winning over people who were already regular voters, but simply voted Conservative last time. 

The result? Our vote collapsed in absolute quantity and in share of the total. Frankly, I’m amazed we pulled through to the degree we did.

Trudeau is the victor. Hands down. It’s impossible to ignore. And he will dominate Canadian politics for the next 20 years. At least. I hope the Liberal Party is able to control the corruption that will reappear once they become Canada’s “natural governing party" again.

To all the conservative supporters who hate his smooth media image, or who think they can rile up hatred for him because his childcare workers are government employees:* you dismiss him at your peril and you do not understand.

* And not the real reason you should be upset, which is because their pay is still shit.

Because Trudeau did more than simply win an election. Voter turnout this October was 68%, the highest turnout percentage since 1993. There were 17-million ballots cast. More ballots than any other election in Canadian history. His victory was built on inspiring people who had never voted before to cast ballots.

My conservative friends would be horrified at the prospect,
but I seriously think that Trudeau's potential impact on
Canadian society can be even greater than his father's.

That means more people were inspired to vote, to take part in choosing the leader of the Canadian state, than ever before. They voted Trudeau and Liberal. Many of those were young people, who will carry their party preferences forward for most of their lives. 

The campaign galvanized them. All those media appearances that conservatives think are a sign of Trudeau’s empty-headed vapidity? These mass media images lock down the loyalty of an entire generation of politically engaged Canadians.

Until we realize the magnitude of all this, the opposition to Trudeau and the Liberals, whether from social democrats or conservatives, will fail.

Justin Trudeau set entirely new terms of politics in Canada. He made a whole new epoch. We now have to learn it and get used to it.

Save Us II: Only a God, Research Time, 11/12/2015

Continued from last post . . . You know, I remember at the height of the Greek debt crisis in international news, a lot of journalists who thought they were very witty would joke about ancient Greek philosophy. 

Lakewood Church in Houston is the largest church in
the United States, regularly drawing crowds of more
than 40,000 to its weekly sermons. So I'd say that
North America is still a pretty damn Christian place.

But that pagan culture no longer has any direct influence on the Greek character. For about 1600 years, Greece has been a Christian country. Christianity changed the philosophical landscape of Europe categorically, but a lot of ideas and concepts from the pagan world survived and defined the Christian world-view.

When I was reading Leo Strauss talking about these Greek concepts of humanity’s corruption, it reminded me of Christian ideas.

I’m not a Christian myself. But I was raised in the West, Newfoundland in particular, so the Christian religious and philosophical tradition influenced my culture pervasively.

Even though I write and think in my nonfiction work from a perspective that keeps God out of things,* I did draw on Christian imagery about Eden. Edenic thinking describes humanity as inherently corrupt. In environmentalist thinking, this is usually part of a dualistic way of thinking of nature and humanity.

* This isn't the same as an atheist perspective, though in short form, that's how I explain this part of my approach. Basically, since Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity deals with human politics and scientific principles, I see no need to bring God into things. 

There’s the natural on one hand, and the human or technological on the other. Nature is a positive pole in an Edenic thinker: beautiful, harmonious, self-sustaining, godly. Humanity is therefore the negative pole: ugly, destructive, violent, debased spectres of death. 

The version of the story of Eden that I remember best
from my childhood.

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity argues against this way of thinking about the world and humanity. Not only because it's untrue. That’s the least interesting part to me. But I argue against it because, even though many environmental activists and philosophers think this way, the idea’s message is that activism is useless.

If humanity really is inherently (that is, essentially, inescapably) corrupt, then the only way that nature will be safe from destruction is when humanity is gone. There's nothing we can do to make ourselves better, or live in less destructive ways. 

Humanity is fallen. No, check that. Man is Fallen. In the very nature of our being, we're corrupt. So aspiration to be better is inherently futile. Strauss paints this notion as the centre of Machiavellian thinking in the modern tradition of political philosophy. 

The Machiavellian idea: the primary goal of politics isn't raising ourselves and our communities to some more noble way of life or set of virtues, but simply keeping us all alive in a hostile, violent world. 

This idea forms the basic core of modern political thinking, in combination with the Hobbesian idea: the only reason communities even come together in the first place is to avoid violence. Any higher goal of justice is impossible.

It’s also that side of ancient Greek political thinking that describes human justice as a diluted form of the divine. Human justice resembles true justice, but is limited in accord with our abilities. Humanity is permanently debased.

Martin Heidegger was remarkable in
expressing so much of conservative
Christian philosophy in the context of
a thoroughly atheist existentialism.

Is there any relief from this hopelessness? Not really. This is why Calvinism is so bleak. It's a form of Christianity that defines humanity's relationship with God through the Eden story: the essence of humanity is a corruption that we have no power to heal on our own.

So the only way out of our corrupt nature is through the grace of God. And we, being inherently corrupt beings, have no way to earn this Grace. We're infinitely distant from it. All we can be is what we are. Grace is an intervention from beyond being. A crack in reality to save us.

I reject this simply because it is so pessimistic. It makes us passive, hopeless, depressed. We dwell only in our corruption, fixated on the permanently abject status of our debased nature. 

If we accept this, we’ll never work toward justice, because we'll consider justice infinitely, categorically, and ontologically separate from human possibility. And I have a very complex, nuanced argument why I can’t accept this.

Because fuck that. To be continued . . .