Politics of Epistemology – StuartParker.ca

“Begging the Question,” the Kingdom of War, Newspeak and the Myth of “Cultural Marxism”

Mao’s Linguistic Reform and the Perverse Effects of Deleting Words
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong embarked on a number of projects to remake Chinese society, some with disastrous consequences, such as the Great Leap Forward. But not all of these projects are remembered as atrocities or even failures. One of the best-reviewed of Mao’s initiatives was a major linguistic reform, which standardized Chinese characters, enabling them to be type-written, radically increasing the efficiency of publishing and circulating documents and making literacy more accessible. This was paired with the standardization of the pinyin system for transliterating Chinese into Latin characters, making Chinese easier to teach and learn as a second language.

Still, Mao could not resist also making this project serve his authoritarian ends of reshaping the human mind and soul to a proper communist one, albeit with Chinese characteristics. So, as many characters in the alphabet were being deleted, modified or simplified anyway, it was pretty easy to delete from the language most of the characters that referred to Confucian ideas. If, Mao reasoned, he could destroy people’s ability to write about pre-revolutionary political concepts, to even refer to them, this would result in his revolution attaining total ideological hegemony.

But this is not exactly what happened.

Because Confucianism had become so deeply ingrained in Chinese cultural life over two thousand years, depriving people of the ability to talk about it shut down people’s ability to describe how it continued to condition people’s values; the ways it conditioned their social behaviour, their parenting practices, their theories of justice and merit became harder to describe, to criticize, to even notice because the words for what was happening had been lost. The reform affected society almost randomly; in some places, Confucianism lost its power to structure people’s lives but in others, its power actually intensified.

The Murder of “Begging the Question”
It is dangerous, then, to deprive ourselves of the language needed to name, to describe, to criticize social practices, especially if those practices are widespread and possibly harmful. And one did not need to witness Maoist China to see this as a consequence of authoritarian linguistic reform. It had already been predicted by George Orwell in his descriptions of the pernicious functions of Newspeak in 1984.

That is why I became increasingly concerned a little less than a decade ago by what seemed to be a programmatic campaign of linguistic engineering by news anchors and reporters on Anglo American TV, a practice that was surprisingly culture-wide, FoxNews and MSNBC being equally likely to engage in it.

When delivering a monologue about the implications of a story, the reporter or anchor would say, “…and this begs the question:” and then ask an obvious question about the consequences of the news just reported. They could say “prompts the question,” “raises the question,” “makes us wonder,” etc. but suddenly “begs the question” became the sole term, as it has remained up to the present.

The reason this should concern us is that by redefining “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” the thing to which “begging the question” used to refer is no longer linguistically accessible to us. There is no alternative term for the logical fallacy to which this term had referred for centuries prior to this act of linguistic sleight of hand.

And I do not think it is a coincidence that “begging the question” has become an increasingly common form of illogic in our public square since we have lost the ability to name it.

1421: Still a Really Bad Book
So, what did “begging the question” use to mean?

Let me offer an example that will meet an additional need I use this blog to meet sometimes: giving bad reviews to books and movies I have had a beef with for decades but never got around to denouncing before, in this case, the 2002 publication 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

The author, Gavin Menzies, exemplifies a phenomenon common enough that members of my profession have recognized that it will always be with us: a highly successful, intelligent man retires from a long career for which he has received recognition and accolades and, upon retirement, decides that he is a fully qualified historian who does not need to learn anything about the historian’s craft, or the set of skills that were drilled into me during the ten years I spent receiving my three history degrees, culminating in a PhD.

I generally have no problem with amateur historians and am actually glad to be part of a profession where everyone does feel qualified to do my job, irrespective of their credentials. It’s a better class of problem than its alternative. Nevertheless, Menzies exemplifies one of the more odious characteristics of many amateur historians, especially highly confident male retirees who join up: he has all kinds of criticisms of the assumptions, practices and methodology of my profession, despite having absolutely no idea of what any of them are, nor having taken even a minute to investigate what they might actually be, in an evidence-driven way.

Having no idea about how professionals do historical research or analysis, except that they do it wrong, Menzies proceeded to base the analytical framework on a logical fallacy known, until ten years ago, as “begging the question.”

When someone begs the question, what they do is use their argument’s conclusion as its premise. Menzies traveled around the world to locations he had visited as a British naval officer and asked the question, “if we assume that the Chinese came here in a large treasure ship in 1421, can we find evidence supporting this hypothesis, provided we do not consider other possible explanations?” Menzies read extensively in the fields of history, archaeology and paleontology looking for evidence confirming his hypothesis and, lo and behold, found a bunch.

Because Menzies’ methodology was so brazen and irresponsible and inconsistent with other evidence, few academics even bothered to review his work but a handful did, not to specifically dispute his individual claims but to point out that his work was actually part of a literary subgenre they named “cult archeology,” a set of practices of evidentiary cherry-picking used by non-academic historians to hypothesize pre-1492 transoceanic voyaging by Eurasians, a genre that reached its crescendo in the Victorian era and early twentieth century, when there were a lot more books on Mu, Atlantis and Lemuria in mainstream bookstores.

Allow me to offer two examples of Menzies begging the question in 1421:

By making the 1421 global transoceanic voyage by Admiral Zheng He both the premise and conclusion of his book, Menzies “discovers” that the prehistoric mylodon did not die out 11,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinctions but survived up to the sixteenth century. Why? Because Chinese sources reported that their mariners had encountered dog-headed men during the fifteenth century. Given that the mylodon’s original habitat was in a region of South America he believed Zheng visited, Menzies concluded that the mariners had mistaken this large, bipedal ground sloth for a dog-headed man.

Of course, if Menzies had not had this ready-made explanation and had he actually bothered familiarizing himself with pre-modern ethnographic and geographic literature, he could have easily found a less audacious explanation i.e. that encounters with dog-headed men had been a common trope in such literature since before Herodotus wrote about their presence in Central Asia. Indeed, dog-headed men were such an important intellectual fixture in Eurasian literature and thought from China to Great Britain that one of the most popular Catholic saints, Christopher, was understood to have been a dog-headed man, who lived for over two-hundred years before being executed for losing a debate to the Emperor Decius because he could only bark. The self-evident truth of the dog-headed men’s existence was used to address important philosophical questions about whether humans were subject to a single creation followed by a diffusion or whether the different peoples of the world were autocthonous.

Another example of Menzies begging the question was his handling of conquistador Bernal Diaz’ firsthand account of the conquest of Mexico in which he participated as one of Hernan Cortes’ men. Menzies makes much of Diaz’ description of an elite market in Tenochtitlan where he reports there are chickens for sale. How could chickens have got to the New World, Menzies asks, unless transported there by Zheng in 1421!? After all, there were no pre-Columbian chickens.

An author with an iota less of a commitment to cherry-picking could easily have generated an alternative explanation simply by reading and thinking about the rest of Diaz’ description of the market without a premise requiring confirmation. The description lists all kinds of other plants and animals unique to the Eastern Hemisphere whose meat, skins and feathers were available at the market… because Europeans had not learned the local names for these creatures nor made up new names, themselves. Consequently, jaguar pelts were identified as the pelts of African and Asian great cats; turkeys were called chickens; etc.

“Cultural Marxism:” A Pernicious Cherry-picking Project
Because we no longer have a term that refers to begging the question, now that “beg the question” means “ask the question,” people are getting away with a lot more question-begging in the public square because we can no longer precisely name their act of logical sleight of hand. One such movement is one to which I have found myself uncomfortably proximate in recent years: the critics of Wokeness who blame a force they call “cultural Marxism.”

James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, among the most prominent propounders of this theory are, like Menzies, accomplished professionals and thinkers who have been successful researchers and analysts in disciplines I couldn’t just take up now that I’ve retired from the historical profession. I couldn’t assemble a clinical psychology trial like Peterson, nor could I even read, never mind evaluate the system of symbols Lindsay used in his work as a mathematician.

By the same token, I am not calling these men charlatans, exactly. But as a person whose PhD and peer-reviewed publications are all about how one tracks the history of ideas and figures out where they have come from forensically, their lack of interest in the actual methodology of intellectual history strikes me as, if not dishonest, at least irresponsible.

Since the formation of the Tubingen Institute for the historical study of the Bible in the 1840s, scholars have worked for generations to develop a set of principles for figuring out what prior texts were most influential on a later text and how that influence was exerted, and how to determine the facticity of historical events texts claim to chronicle. The “principle of inconvenience,” e.g. why we think the Jesus movement split off from the John the Baptist movement, the principle of “multiple independent attestation,” etc. have formed a robust set of practices for doing the kind of work Lindsay and Peterson purport to be doing when they pronounce authoritatively on the origins of Woke doctrines.

But really, they are begging the question.

They have already decided that the works of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and a particular faction of Marxist interpreters known as the Frankfurt School are the authors of every distinctive, pernicious Woke doctrine. And, by cherry-picking from these texts, and massaging the meaning of excerpts they are absolutely able to find every single problematic Woke doctrine within this corpus. So, they declare, “there is the culprit!” without, of course, looking for other possible origins and influences and without ascertaining how influential, widely read or agreed-with the texts they cite actually were. Nor is any real investigation made of the methods of transmission, diffusion and popularization of these ideas. One does not have to worry about such things when your conclusion is also your premise.

Alternative Explanations of Woke Manicheism, Starting with Mani
Obviously, having now hurled the grenade, it is incumbent upon me to offer at least one example. Lindsay and company argue that the Woke idea that the world is divided between two groups engaged in a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and evil, one in which it is foreknown that “the oppressed,” i.e. the good guys who are currently losing, will ultimately and axiomatically triumph over the oppressors comes from the Marxist idea of class struggle.

Our first clue as to the outrageousness of this claim should come from the word “Manichean.” This worldview was popularized from North Africa to Central Asia to Western Europe by a guy called Mani in the third century CE. His religion, named after him, was called Manicheism. Like contemporary Wokeness, it included basically three kinds of people: the Sons of Light, the Sons of Darkness and a subset of the Sons of Light, interpreters of the cosmology and those fully aware of the structure of the universe, known as “the Hearers,” in a system nearly identical to the Woke worldview that divides the world into the oppressed and the oppressors. The term “Woke” was coined by Wokes to describe themselves as the modern equivalent of Mani’s Hearers.

Manicheism has all but died out but many worldviews resemble it. Indeed, Christianity, especially Calvinist branches of Christianity have a very similar formulation and also see the world as being divided into the same structure and the same teleological history in which the world is currently in the hands of the iniquitous who will be overthrown by the good when Jesus comes back.

Even before Manicheism, worldviews like this were known. Persian Magianism gave rise to Zoroastrianism, which is considered to have been the main influence on Mani in fashioning his own religious system. And this kind of thinking strongly conditioned new religious movements and heresies, up to the present day, from Cathars to Westboro Baptists. And of course we find not just a Manichean worldview but a “hearer”-type tradition within Sufism, the elite Muslim mystical tradition that sat atop the Ottoman Empire from 1299-1922.

In fact it seems not merely audacious but breathtakingly selective to attribute the binarism of Wokeness to an ideology that has only existed since 1848, given that these ideas have structured several major world religions for millennia.

French Algeria and the Kingdom of War
So, let me offer an alternative explanation not just for the generalities of Woke binaries but for its specificities and peculiarities, many of which do not actually fit with Marxian ideas of binary social conflicts.

A major influence on Wokeness, Lindsay acknowledges, was French continental philosophy from the 1950s through 80s in the areas of postcolonial theory, poststructuralism and queer theory. A major early influence in this set of intertwined intellectual movements were veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, in which communists and liberals opposed to the Algerian colonial project made common cause and forged new political alliances with conservative Muslims who also desired an end to the colonial project. France had ruled Algeria since seizing it from the Ottoman Empire in 1840 and sent hundreds of thousands of French settlers to colonize it.

Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodernism and the practice of deconstruction was likely one such Franco-Algerian who supported the uprising, as was Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer. Frantz Fanon, father of postcolonial theory, moved from the French colony of Martinique to aid the rebels in Algeria as part of a larger project of decolonizing the French Empire.

Perhaps, then, before looking to the Frankfurt School, we might ask what the war that dominated the French public square, news media and politics from 1954-62 as the major poststructuralists came of age, might have contributed to their thinking.

I would like to suggest that far more than Marxian class struggle, the Zoroastrian struggle against darkness or Christian eschatology, the thing the Woke binary most closely resembles is the core of militant Islamic political theory: the idea of the Kingdom of Peace versus the Kingdom of War.

The idea on which the medieval caliphates were based was that since Mohammed, the world has been divided into two communities: the Kingdom of Peace, the places where Muslims control the government and the Kingdom of War, the places where Muslims do not control the government. The cause of all war, in this formulation, is the continued existence of the Kingdom of War, the places that insist on not being governed by Muslims. All the violence people experience when they reside in the Kingdom of War is not caused by acts of military or criminal aggression whether it emanates from individuals or collectives, from other states in the Kingdom of War or from the Kingdom of Peace is axiomatic to the Kingdom itself. People experience war and violence in the Kingdom of War not because of specific aggressive and violent decisions or acts but because being a victim of violence is inherent to and axiomatic from residing therein.

Does this not sound a lot more like the Woke theory of violence, of oppression, of democracy, of submission than anything Fred or Karl cranked out in the nineteenth century? And unlike the Frankfurt School of Marxism, such an explanation comes with a ready-made story of diffusion and popularization.

As some of you know, this essay is just the first part of a major research project by Los Altos Institute to dismantle the theory of cultural Marxism and show it for what it is: begging the question.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | January 22, 2024

“Can You Secede from Reality?”: The Oil Industry’s Fake Autonomist Idyll

The 1920s were a watershed decade in so many ways. They remain, in many ways, the tragedy to the farce of the 2020s, according to Karl Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” aphorism. Among other things, it was the first decade in which we can truly say that the oil industry began functioning more as a horizontally integrated cartel, in contradistinction to its previous sixty years as part of vertically integrated industrial production systems, its interests largely subordinate the manufacturing sector it served.

It is as a horizontally integrated cartel and not as a set subordinate extractive corporations dominated by the manufacturing sector that it made its alliance with the auto industry and began its long-term project of shaping and controlling public opinion in North America. Ideas and practices that would culminate in the “car culture” of the 1950s began being shaped in the 1920s.

Given that the Greenhouse Effect been discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s and passed peer review for the first time in 1896 and Standard Oil and its Rockefeller owners were among the most hated entities of the American corporate world by the 1920s. Even a century ago, America’s oil men already felt a strong impetus to build new tools to control public opinion. And so they did.

One initiative of America’s oil men was a monthly journal, mailed free to every Evangelical, Pentecostal and non-denominational church in America, covering a wide variety of issues, designed to provide independent clergy with little education or denominational support, a Christian analysis of the issues of the day, to assist them in their preaching. The journal was called The Fundamentals and it is this journal’s impact that introduced the term “Christian fundamentalist” to our lexicon.

In 1925, against the backdrop of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Fundamentals broke with the mainstream Christian belief that read the six days of creation described in Genesis metaphorically as referring to periods of millions or billions of years of slow geological change, often inclusive of evolution, as long as evolution did not pertain to or explain human beings. Instead of backing this reading, as propounded by Scopes prosecutor, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, the editors of The Fundamentals took a more audacious position.

Back in 1844, one of the most popular religious movements in America was the Millerites. Pastor William Miller, their founder, believed he had calculated the precise date of Christ’s return. On that date in 1844, thousands of Millerites donned white robes and stood on their roofs waiting for Jesus to descend from heaven on a big disc. A day came and went and the bewildered Millerites tried to make sense of their lives. Ever since, October 22^nd, 1844 has been known as “the Great Disappointment.”

As with most movements caused by social contagions that experience a concurrent crisis of popularity, visibility, humiliation and failure, most former Millerites came down off their roofs, folded up their robes and went back to their former lives and mainline churches. But a handful devolved into tiny warring factions that sought to explain the failure and come up with a new date for Christ’s return. Two survived into the twentieth century (and, for that matter, up to the present day), the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists.

Unlike the Witnesses, the Adventists have developed a whole pseudoscience to underpin their worldview including something we today call “Young Earth Creationism,” invented by George McCready-Price, an Adventist minister in rural New Brunswick. It is McReady-Price from whom we get the idea that creation was precisely one hundred forty-four hours long and that dinosaurs cohabited with humans but were not loaded aboard the Ark (no doubt due to space constraints).

From an obscure denomination numbering only a few thousand adherents, at the very margins of Christianity, the oil men cherry-picked this doctrine, which they saw as the beachhead for inculcating anti-science belief favourable to the fossil fuel industry. As Young Earth Creationists believed (and still do) that fossils can be formed in a decade or two, the geological science underpinning the creation of oil and coal could be occluded from the worldview of the devout.

Another aspect of oil industry propaganda that formed part of a larger whole was the repackaging of petroleum dependence as rugged individualism, independence and autonomy. In the 1920s, when Anglo America had a comprehensive and effective rail grid that provided frequent passenger train service both within and between communities, most of our forbears did not need automobiles to meet their transportation needs.

Furthermore, it would be another three decades before the Eisenhower Administration created the Interstate highway system, meaning that the network of properly paved and maintained roads was smaller than the area covered by the continent’s rail grid, much of which had been financed through government subsidies. The oil industry’s response to these three entwined challenges, a) a comprehensive passenger rail system, b) a road system substantially inferior to rail and c) ongoing government subsidies to repair and expand the rail grid, was ingenious.

They marketed the car as a nostalgic return to the age of the horse, the autonomy, the freedom, the ruggedness, etc. The marketing campaign that introduced sport utility vehicles at the end of the Cold War was just a pale retread of the original automobile marketing strategy. Magazine and movie palace ads in the 1920s depicted first-generation rubber-tired automobiles parked in improbable locations, overlooking stunning vistas of natural and pastoral beauty.

In other words, from the beginning, the auto industry was pivotal, instrumental and first-on-the-ground in re-narrating the era of the Anglo American frontier from being an embarrassing, poverty-stricken, hardscrabble life from which people had escaped into an imagined idyll of valour, beauty and, most importantly, independence—autonomy.

America is full of idylls, of imagined pasts, of utopias unrealized. But such utopias often wither with time. The idyll of Joe Rockefeller and the oil men who gave us fundamentalist Christianity persists, sometimes existing in our collective cultural unconscious and sometimes bursting to the surface, as it is today with Western Canada’s autonomist movement.

“Autonomism” entered the Canadian political lexicon in the early 2000s, following the defeat of Québec’s second independence referendum in 1995 and the proclamation of the Clarity Act by the Jean Chretien government in 2000. Action Démocratique du Québec, the province’s third party, staked out this position, which its successor party, Coalition Avenir Québec, inherited and rode to victory at the polls in 2018. This was hardly the first time in Québec history that a party had won an election on a platform of increasing the province’s power and independence. Indeed, this was the rule in twentieth-century Québec politics, rather than the exception, since the 1930s, from the premierships of Maurice Duplessis to Lucien Bouchard.

This desire for greater independence within the Canadian federation has not been confined to Québec. Voters in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have long mirrored the Québecois desire for greater autonomy. However, these movements have proven less politically successful for a variety of reasons, chief among them, their populist stoking of anti-Québecois bigotry to win seats in the rural West. Alliances between Western and Québec movements for greater independence have been as short-lived as they have been numerous, generally ending in betrayal, fragmentation and resentment, such as the Anglo-Québecois split in the federal Social Credit Party in 1963, to the collapse of the Gang of Eight in 1982.

Today, however, we see a different situation. Danielle Smith, the autonomist premier of Alberta and Scott Moe, the autonomist premier of Saskatchewan are conducting themselves differently than the Western decentralists of the past.

First, rather than seeking to form a common front with a large coalition of provincial and federal politicians inclusive of leaders outside the West, Moe and Smith show little interest in reaching outwards beyond their region or upwards into parliament. A key reason for such coalitions in the past has been a tendency on the part of mainstream Western decentralists to use methods recognized by the Canadian Constitution to increase their powers, i.e. a coalition of at least seven premiers to amend the Constitution or a majority of parliamentarians to cede a federal power to a province.

Second, even though the primary site of conflict with the federal government, for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Québec is energy policy and Québec’s government holds polar opposite views to those of Saskatchewan and Alberta, an apparent shared social conservatism among the three governments appears to have restrained autonomists from bashing the people and governments of other provinces.

Third, and most importantly, unlike Québec, which uses legal, constitutional tools like international law concerning partition referenda and the Notwithstanding Clause to advance separatist and autonomist agendas, Alberta and Saskatchewan have passed clearly unconstitutional laws through their legislatures that are best described as “nullifier” bills, the kind of legislation Anglo America has not seen since South Carolina’s efforts to unilaterally nullify the federal government’s jurisdiction over tariffs and trade two hundred years ago.

I believe that this fantasist nullifier approach to law-making is part of a larger epistemological problem. Although I am currently making major revisions to it, my 2011-12 writing on the epistemology of “authenticity” bears repeating here. While it is not the newest, most popular or most pernicious deviation from Enlightenment rationalism anymore, “authentic” epistemology dominates the United Conservative and Saskatchewan parties from which Smith and Moe hail.

In addition to being closely aligned, financially, with the fossil fuel sector, the prevalence of authentic epistemology means that Western autonomists tend to believe that any abstract claim made by untrustworthy people must, axiomatically, be false. If untrusted, corrupt and/or industry-captured public health officials say Covid-19 is a danger, it must, axiomatically, be relatively harmless; if these officials state that vaccines mRNA vaccines are effective in reducing mortality, they must be either useless or dangerous. Similarly, if Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg and Klaus Schwab state that anthropogenic climate change is a genuine and immediate threat to life on the planet, it must, axiomatically, be true that climate change is not happening, if it is, it must not be human caused and, if it is human caused it must be necessary and good that we change the climate’s planet as fast as we can.

It is in this environment of woolly thinking and dysfunctional epistemology that modern Western autonomism has emerged. Central to this thinking and helping to culturally and economically bind it together is its adherents’ nigh-mystical conflation of fossil fuel use with freedom and independence, in other words, autonomy not only at the level of the state but of the individual and society.

Amplifying tropes of autonomy, individualism and self-assertion that have suffused a century of oil and auto industry propaganda, the movement reasons about personal prosperity and freedom and the horizon of possibility for an autonomous Western Canada in a way more akin to sympathetic magic than any recognizable theory of causation.

The autonomous region of Alberta-Saskatchewan, whether inside or outside the Canadian federation, believes that it can make the price of oil rise by flooding the global market with more of the gnarliest, shittiest, greasiest, hardest-to-mine oil on earth, the cost of extraction often becoming prohibitive when oil prices fall, as they do when production levels go too high.

Subscribing to the broadly-shared fallacy that the laws of supply and demand apply to everything except whatever Canadians are most upset about that day, be it oil or housing, these folks seem to think that a bunch of wells that are not currently profitable at today’s oil price will somehow become so if only they increase the supply of oil, despite the fact that—as any freshman economics student will tell you—doing so has a 100% chance of doing the opposite.

Perhaps, one might think, that this oil could be made marketable and its by-products (i.e. plastics) manufactured into industrial goods with an aggressive campaign of state-financed import substitution industrialization. One would think the autonomists would be proposing government loans and grants to build oil refineries, plastics plants, etc. and begin working towards true autonomy and independence. Such a plan might even be financed some sort of tariff on industrial goods from the hated Greater Toronto Area, which seems to have been passed the baton of hate by Québec in the minds of discontented Westerners.

But no. These governments are interested in just two forms of industrial investment: carbon capture boondoggles and more oil pipelines for unrefined bitumen and fracked natural gas. In other words, the only things for which autonomists support industrial investment are things that forestall the emergence of a local industry by subsidizing the extraction of raw fossil fuels. And, to further inhibit the growth of an industrial sector, they favour lower tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In other words, the whole thrust of the industrial strategy is to make the region less economically independent, less autonomous.

Another thing high on the wish list of autonomists is paring back not just the size of the region’s protected areas but the list of prohibited activities therein. Already, UNESCO has warned Canada we are already in imminent danger of Wood Buffalo National Park losing its World Heritage Site designation due to pollution of the park from fossil fuel extraction upstream. This downstream damage is happening all over Alberta, with local oil wells and fracked gas wells befouling farms and ranches and trapping local farmers and ranchers in a vicious cycle of permitting a new wells on their land to replace the lost revenues from declining yields.

In other words, not only do autonomists favour less industrial independence; this desire to become nothing more than a single-industry state extends to all areas of economic activity. And so, autonomists plan to intensify and accelerate policies that are already hammering other industries. You see: the tourism, hunting, ranching and farming sectors are just places where people work, not places where people interact with the material manifestation of freedom itself.

And it should surprise no one that these almost petrosexual beliefs about oil are concentrated in the regions where Young Earth Creationism and other venerable pseudosciences are most popular.

In other words, total abject dependence on and control by one industry is the so-called “autonomy” Alberta and Saskatchewan want, absolute thrall to a hated and unstable industrial complex, prone to boom-bust cycles and more strongly implicated than any other sector in the extinction event we are causing. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

Or so it would seem. It turns out, from talking with many autonomists, that my representation of these ideas mistakes fanciful thinking for hypocrisy. As first observed in 2009 by a political analyst whose name escapes me, the Tea Party movement and its relatives, the Trump movement and today’s Prairie Autonomists are the first social movements since the death of Mao Zedong to believe that backyard steel mills were both desirable and possible. Several folks with whom I have spoken appear to imagine that oil wells will be like drinking water wells, effacing questions of scale or refining. They imagine, because they are imagining their aspirations for freedom, that petroleum, because it is freedom, will be abundant and available for use by regular folks.

In other words, autonomists are not really imagining a real place. Because I believe that, lurking within the movement is a deep reservoir of post-political despair. Like so many other political movements, autonomist policies are synodal, in character; they seek to describe the order of heaven, not to change the order on earth. And that is why, unlike the government of Québec, their self-emancipatory laws are not really about emancipation from Canada but from reality.

Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | February 18, 2023

Wokeness, Intersectionality, History’s “Wrong Side” and the False Progressive Consciousness of Time

From the moment the word came into being, the term “progressivism” brought with it a false consciousness of time. The great global meta-ideology that arose in the 1890s packed with it a set of false, mystical beliefs about the nature of time and how it interacted with human societies.

When I say “meta-ideology,” what I mean is that progressivism has never been an ideology; rather, it describes a set of beliefs that underpin multiple ideologies from Marxism to Comtian Positivism to Modernization Theory to Postmillennial Protestantism. These various belief systems came to be collectively categorized as “progressive” following the publication of Francis Galton’s Eugenics and Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, both of which sought to transform the recently published works of Charles Darwin from a scientific theory of biological evolution into a social science based on the junk science of race.

Reasoning by analogy, Galton and Spencer decided that human civilizations would, like terrestrial lifeforms, gradually evolve into increasingly complex, refined, intelligent societies, and that every “race” was, just like Darwin’s species, slowly, inexorably evolving towards perfection. The intellectual hegemony of progressivism was evident in the encyclopedias and atlases of a century ago, in which a diagram akin to a number line appeared on the opening pages showing the different races whose civilizations comprised the world in order from darkest to lightest.

On the far left, there would be a diagram of a black-skinned man with a protruding jaw and a large, sloping forehead and below him, “Caveman” and “100,000 BC.” On the far right would be a light-skinned man in a morning suit and top hat with the caption “Englishman/German” and “the present.” Between these two were other faces depicting the great Progressive Chain of Being, going something like, “Negro… Indian… Red Indian… Chinaman,” and below each face would be dates “4000 BC… 2000 BC… 0 AD… 500 AD.” In this way, progressives reimagined all racial, cultural, political, artistic, scientific, technological, military, really any form of difference as a differences in the progress of a race. There were no other peoples in the world for white Europeans, just themselves at different moments in the past.

While not all progressives conflated their worldview with the junk science of race, there nevertheless existed a meta-consensus across almost every major ideology that the more “advanced” a society was, the more complex, the more technological, the less violent, the more secular, the more just, the more educated, the less superstitious, the more egalitarian. In this way, political disagreement could be recast as a difference of opinion about how to achieve progress, not about what progress looked like or whether it was good.

There is something beguiling about an ideology that tells you that your future victory is both inevitable and fully knowable, that the ultimate triumph of good over evil is baked into the structure of the universe itself.

This idea was not just a consequence of Darwinism but of the whole cultural zeitgeist that permitted Darwin’s work to be so rapidly accepted. After all, progressivism’s most popular aphorism was composed Unitarian Universalist minister Theodore Parker, who died the year Origin of Species was published. Parker’s church, the one in which I was raised, was so progressive that its ministers took to blessing the openings of new factories and railroads. And the saying, often falsely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” The shortened version quoted today tells us much about how this idea underwent a kind of karma to “instant karma” transition.

How, then, did one comprehend the victories of one’s political opponents if one were a progressive? Obviously, one’s opponents had done something unfair or unnatural that had temporarily reversed the flow of time itself. If Marxists did well in an election, liberal progressives would bemoan or slide back into despotism. If liberal progressives did well, Marxists would understand this to heighten the contradictions in capitalism and produce a kind of slingshot effect whereby the magnitude of today’s defeat was commensurate in size to that of tomorrow’s inevitable victory. One’s adversaries’ victories were ephemeral, one’s own, inevitable and permanent.

Over time, the march of actual, real history with all its messiness, ambiguity and surprise began to challenge the progressive theory of time. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 shook the world as one of the most educated, secular countries of the Middle East suddenly became a theocracy. But more influential on people’s thinking in the long term was the mid-1970s reverse in the gap between rich and poor, which began widening again. In the 1990s, it was joined by the gap between male and female wages and, around the same time, black and white. More and more concrete indicators of “progress” began to disappear.

As societies took stock after crossing Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the twenty-first century,” the forces of progress and progressivism were in disarray. Marxist governments and parties were a spent force. Parties of the right the world over began to purge progressives, driving right-wing progressives like David Frum, Kim Campbell, Arlen Specter and Hugh Segal into parties that still espoused progressive beliefs.

Although I have spilled much ink about the economic and political effects of the Third Way movement in social democratic and liberal parties in the 1990s, I have said little about their impact on discourse. In both parties of the right and parties of the left, the universal neoliberal policy consensus effectively foreclosed any genuine political debates or contests of investor rights, privatization, austerity and the other aspects of the emerging neoliberal order.

This meant that for parties of both the right and the left, politics had to be expressed in largely immaterial, cultural terms. Parties of the right created moral panics around abortion, the rights of linguistic minorities and announced that they would be defending Christmas against the putative war against it by progressives.

The War on Christmas is, in key respects, the core of the efforts by progressives to regroup in the twenty-first century. It is not exactly that the beleaguered forces of progressivism holed-up in their Third Way parties opposed Christmas or conducted any kind of intentional war on public Christmas celebrations. But it is true that a state or large corporation appearing to favour Christian religious observances over those of minority faiths began to be understood not as a minor inconvenience or a harmless breach in church-state separation. No, it was an offense, an affront, almost a form of violence against religious minorities that were not Christian.

Oddly, though, it was not representatives of Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism who spoke out against public Christmas celebrations, nor was it members of small autocthonous movements in the Anglosphere like the Handsome Lake Church or Nation of Islam. No. Those who rose to the bait and combatted conservatives in their efforts to “put the Christ back in Christmas” were progressive white secularists, either atheists or practicing their “spirituality” outside of organized religion.

While it might seem silly to engage on an issue on which conservatives enjoyed not just majority support but broad indifference to the issue among non-supporters, this behaviour seems more rational if one considers the discursive straitjacket in which progressives now found themselves. The idea that every political triumph is actually a wind-assisted victory is a great one when you’re on a winning streak. But it becomes worse than useless when one is taking an absolute pasting. Perhaps, if one keeps losing, this might indicate one is on “the wrong side of history.”

For this reason, left progressives (and now suddenly all the progressives were in parties of the left) necessarily had to transform their political program into one that did not just contain victory in the future but victory in the present and recent past. In essence, progressivism necessarily sanctifies the past and present orders as manifestations of a divine will, a secular faith more effective than any religion at collapsing what God intends and what God permits into a single thing.

Necessarily, then, left progressives joined right progressives in seeing the expansion of free trade agreements, economic migration, investor rights as positive forces; globalization was progressive; nationalism, regressive. Similarly, right progressives soon joined left progressives in celebrating gay marriage, the rise of “gender medicine,” increased parliamentary representation of women and minorities and the secularization of public space; civil liberties were progressive; tradition, regressive.

For something to be progressive, it was necessary that it have a nigh-uninterrupted record of incremental victories, one building on another. But as our societies have become more divided and volatile, these things are growing fewer and further between. As with the Third Way politics it produced, progressive culture switched from deciding what is desirable and figuring out how to make it possible to figuring out what is politically possible and arguing for its desirability.

We can see this in the politics that preoccupy progressives and the cultural left today: condemnation of and sanctions against Israel, reduced regulation of sex work, reduced drug prohibition, more gender medicine for kids and adults. Why would these be the things that capture the progressive imagination in ways that climate justice, wealth inequality, etc. do not? Why do people wrap themselves and festoon their identities with signs of their politics on these issues? Because these are the things towards which evidence shows incremental, inexorable progress. If they become our primary proxies for human goodness and development, the false time consciousness of progressivism can be maintained.

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But this was a strain, an effort. Progressivism could not carry on in this state. Something else had to shift to save progressive time consciousness. Enter: Wokeness.

It is weird that “Woke” has taken less than a quarter of a decade to change from a compliment to a pejorative. That stated, both those who cling to the title and those who use it as an insult share a belief in the immense power of the term. And I concur.

“Wokeness” fundamentally changes progressive time consciousness and functions as a countervailing force against the ever-narrowing optic of possible futures that progressive time consciousness has been producing.

What the term “Woke” implies is this: the reason that major problems in our society have not been adequately addressed is that nobody noticed these problems or tried to solve them until very very recently. This is revealed in the less powerful, less seductive term that preceded “Woke” in the progressive imaginary, “Intersectional.”

Although its creator Kimberlé Crenshaw has never made such a claim, those who purport to be adherents to intersectionality believe that until Crenshaw published her two articles on the term, one in 1989 and one in 1994, no one had ever theorized or even thought about how class, race and gender oppression function synergistically. Intersectionalists argue that all feminism before 1994 was “white feminism” until an obscure legal scholar published an article on the ways in which gender and racial oppression interact.

In the mid-2010s, whenever I argued with people who demanded that I support intersectionality, I would argue that Friedrich Engels, bell hooks, Richard Wright and others had much more sophisticated, descriptive models of how race, class and gender oppression interact than Crenshaw did. The rebuttal was always the same: before intersectionality, nobody had considered these synergies of oppression, never mind carefully and painstakingly theorizing them. The fact that Engels wrote a book in the nineteenth century arguing that class oppression originated in patriarchy was so far outside the discourse that Intersectionalists could not integrate this datum into their progressive worldview; it was beyond the pale, outside the discourse.

Instead, they chose to believe that prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, all feminism was white supremacist; socialists and communists never considered race or included racialized people; all racial equality movements were nationalist; etc.

Wokeness is simply the generalization of the false Intersectionalist premise to all politics. In this way, failure, regression, the lack of progress on human equality can be redescribed as arising from the fact that, until a generation ago, no political philosophers or political movements had theorized, desired or worked for true human equality.

In Woke time consciousness, everything is happening for the first time! Everything is unprecedented! While progressive time consciousness had been slowly, relentlessly, circumscribing possible fields of political action and possible loci of victory, Wokeness can reverse this declension with one single grand fallacy: the belief that no one has ever really wanted to or tried to pursue social justice until just a minute ago.

And the best thing about Wokeness is that it can be individualized, personalized, consistent with the neoliberal subject, which comprehends all political failures as failures of individual virtue.

Because of this, the ability of Wokeness to short-circuit progressive time consciousness radically opens the horizon of future possibility in the progressive imagination. But, at the same time, it circumscribes and distorts that field because it casts future justice in terms of personal individualistic fulfillment or punishment.

Consequently, new “rights” and “freedoms” are attached to it that make no social sense and are indicative of a pathologically narcissistic or solipsistic consciousness, like the right to control who others perceive one to be, the right to be sexually attractive to whoever one is attracted to, the right to be talked about as one imagines oneself, when one is not even there, the right to move in and out of a protected class of person, based on mood. Even the fallacious conservative idea of first responders being replaced by ephemeral associations of one-person militias is an increasingly Woke proposition.

Furthermore, political outcomes are, themselves, radically individualized. Woke political “victories” are about removing a TV ad or billboard from one’s field of vision, silencing words one does not wish to hear, firing individual malefactors, blacklisting others, throwing folks out of restaurants and storefront businesses for wrongthink and beating them in the streets if they won’t shut up. While Wokeness turns the past into a slate grey canvas devoid of detail and the future into a colourful panorama of wild shapes and exotic, unique beings, it has no theory of how to translate a series of putative victories into a possible future. And it shows no interest in developing one. Political action in the present is disconnected from the project of creating a just future.

And because it is still part of a nominally progressive time consciousness, one need not ask whether these outcomes pass tests of human decency or rational strategy. Wokesters do not even understand themselves to be perpetrators of these acts; “history” is doing this violence with the back of its hand, running roughshod over those on its “wrong side.”

This kind of time consciousness is the death knell of revolution. It replaces progressivism’s inability to fully embrace a true sense of hope in the first place with a false, cartoonish, childish, counterfeit hope. A mockery of hope itself.

At the very time we most need to be reading the literature of the Cold War, writers from the authoritarian states of Eastern Europe and Latin America, we are instead enthusiastically throwing in with the very project they denounced: the political project of Forgetting.

Because we must be able to remember a different past in order to imagine a different future, Forgetting is core to every authoritarian project. That is Milan Kundera’s argument in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one of the deepest, most audacious literary explorations of the totalitarian project inspired by the Cold War dictatorships. That kind of thinking is desperately needed today; we need to go back and read our Kundera, our Isabel Allende.

Because if we allow the past to become nothing more than a fading, half-remembered dream of the Woke, darkness will fall.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite | July 30, 2021

The Tory Party’s Climate Change Vote Is Scarier and Means More Than You Think

There is so much to unpack from this weekend’s Conservative Party convention vote on climate change that one struggles to know where to begin. So, first, what happened: the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Erin O’Toole, and his surrogates, placed a resolution before the national convention of his party to affirm the scientific truth that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an apparent effort to be cast by the media as a moderate and modernizer within the party, he used his platform as leader, not just in the convention hall, but in the media in the days leading up to the vote, to strongly promote a “yes” vote in support of the resolution. The resolution was defeated.

This is fascinating, first of all, for anyone studying the changes in epistemology wrought by the twenty-first century. If there is one thing to characterize the Trump era it is the collapse of the separate categories of “knowledge” and “power” into a single category. To quote OCAD professor Eileen Wennekers, “Covfefe points us to the master discourse of the Trump Administration. What it means is that when Donald Trump says something, it becomes a word.”

To be clear, the party that received the largest share of the popular vote in the last election (from just over one in three Canadians) just held a vote on whether a piece of science is true. This is of a piece with a larger trend across the political spectrum of completely conflating knowledge and power. Of course, a political party has the power to determine which physical laws are true. For decades now, the US Republican Party has believed that how zygotes, embryos and foetuses work is something to be determined by democratic voting rather than scientific investigation.

But this has spread to include a whole galaxy of physical laws now determined by democratic votes—the Anglo American conservative universe is full of science created by voting. Energy from solar power is impossible to store and cannot be generated on cloudy days. The Australian mega-fires were a combination of targeted arsons committed by climate change activists and false-flag operations that used special effects to simulate fires. And windmill cancer continues to kill Europeans by the thousand every year.

Progressives have taken a different direction. Science is now made by government-appointed experts. Prominent progressive activists and journalists now propound the theory that the political jurisdiction in which one lives determines how Covid-19 transmission works. If one prefers the views of better-published, more qualified scientists over those of BC’s chief medical health officer concerning the utility or masking or the susceptibility of children and adolescents to Covid variants, one is “against science.” Even when the only public figure in North America who concurs with her views on these subjects is Donald Trump.

What makes Bonnie Henry infallible is the fact that she is the most senior public health government official in her jurisdiction and has been given a title and powers reflecting this. If the medical chief of the province’s oldest hospital disagrees with her, this does not mean that there is a debate over medical science. It means that Royal Columbian Hospital’s chief doctor has turned against science itself.

In other words, while progressives prefer autocratic, state-based authority to determine scientific truth and conservatives prefer democratic, party-based authority to determine scientific truth, both of Anglo America’s main political groupings concur that power can be converted directly into knowledge.

And that is just the first remarkable thing about this vote.

Until this weekend, whenever a fellow activist talked to me about how their party convention was going to vote on an important environmental or social issue, my response would always be the same, “Look at all the provincial and national party conventions in English Canada since 1993. Tell me of one vote on a policy resolution that has materially affected a party’s platform or policies it has enacted in government.”

That’s because, until this weekend, there was none. The only convention votes that have mattered since 1993 have been the selection and deselection of party leaders. Period.

As I have written extensively elsewhere, through a combination of changes in federal and provincial law and changes in political parties’ organizational structures over the past generation, Canadian politics has diverged from other democracies in systematically draining the power out of parliamentarians and party members and concentrating it in the office of each party’s registered leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, resolutions by party members could force changes in platform and government policy, these are routinely ignored. Whereas, in the twentieth century, party members or legislative caucuses needed to approve party platforms, this is now done by head office staff and the office of the leader. Whereas, in the twentieth century, candidates were chosen by the mutual agreement of local members and the party leader, local agreement is now an optional formality.

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Given this situation, one must ask two questions: (1) Why did Erin O’Toole place a resolution before his party’s membership and campaign for it to be passed, when he could just as easily have kept climate change off the convention floor and then written his desired policy into the party platform unilaterally, (2) What are the implications of this concession of power to party members?

First, let us be clear: nothing has changed legally. O’Toole still has the power to write the defeated resolution into his party’s platform. The only reason the convention vote has power over him is that he sought and campaigned for the approval of the members. It is his choice, not some institutional or legal change that has given meetings of his party’s membership this power over him. But this is now a real power. By arguing that he required this vote in order to campaign effectively in the next election, O’Toole has turned the democratic vote of his members into something necessary and real.

So why did he?

Likely, O’Toole has been observing how the “rally around the flag” effect under Covid has made our leaders even more infallible than they were previously. Party activists, at least in parties like the BC NDP and BC Liberals, understand themselves, when they attend a convention, less as decision-makers and more as members of a lavish theatrical production. A party activist’s job at a convention is to bust out of their role as an extra and get a brief speaking part at the microphone, praising their leader and his wise policies, irrespective of their private thoughts on the matter.

O’Toole must have expected that Tory convention delegates would behave like members of other parties and work from the script he had handed them. But they didn’t. Instead, we witnessed the building of an impressive coalition against the resolution led not by oil industry shills but by Campaign Life Coalition, the largest anti-abortion organization in Canada.

The Religious Right has long chafed under the authoritarian leadership of the new Conservative Party that they worked so hard to create in 2003, a leadership that has shown a surprising loyalty to Canada’s cross-partisan consensus to keep women’s reproductive rights out of parliament. Stephen Harper, Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole have all been effective at isolating, marginalizing and cutting off support from the anti-abortion movement when it came to voting on their key issue.

But what this establishment did not see coming was the emergence of a larger Trumpian coalition of forced birth advocates, climate change deniers and other stigmatized groups fronted by an issue other than abortion. In this way, the Tory establishment has found itself stuck in the 1990s, when these groups were separate and smaller, as compared to the present-day reality where, for many, climate change denial, assault weapon legalization and putting women with insufficiently documented miscarriages on death row are politically inextricable from one another.

This moment in Canadian politics should worry both left-wing and mainstream Canadians. A populist revolt against the autocracy of Canada’s political structures is happening. Rank-and-file party members are standing up to their leaders and building alliances to challenge the power of our country’s political class and the consensus they embody.

The problem is that this revolt is taking place on the political right; there is no sign of it on the left. The sense that people can organize together and, through democratic voting, challenge elites and their agenda is coming back to life in Canada but inside the our party of the right.

While this, combined with an imminent election defeat, likely marks the death of O’Toole’s political career, it marks the very opposite of death when it comes to the Tory party. As we have seen again and again, movements that mobilize and engage regular folks with the idea that they can confront power and make change ultimately triumph over movements that do not, whether or not they immediately seize state power.

This weekend is a sad and troubling moment when it comes to the climate crisis, to women’s reproductive rights and to the pursuit of economic equality. But it could be a good day for democracy in Canada, if rank-and-file New Democrats, Greens and Liberals tear a page from the new book Tory members are reading.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | March 21, 2021

The New Censorship and Its Limits

Anyone with an anti-American or vaguely left-wing worldview has probably begun noticing that the content warnings, automated suspensions, topic bans and other online speech suppression publicly justified by the need to censure Donald Trump and limit the spread of hoax Covid cures are now being broadly directed against expressions of socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist positions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other platforms.

While continuing to curate a subreddit focused on the anal rape of women, Reddit has told gender critical feminists that their discussions are no longer welcome. Articles based on reputable, credible climate science are now tagged with the same “potential hoax” flags used for the bleach cures for autism and Covid. Even good natured joke posts like “fuck America” or “Americans deserve what’s coming to them” have resulted in Facebook bans for up to forty-eight hours. Pages like The Left Chapter, Michael Laxer’s hub of socialist organizing in Canada, have been removed from their members’ Facebook feeds by a supposedly automated decision for which there are no stated reasons and no right to appeal.

Criticisms of China’s WeChat platform grow increasingly hollow as we see our speech not merely shaped by algorithms but corralled into discourses acceptable to social media firms’ owners.

How did it come to this?

First and foremost, the self-identified left has internalized and more completely believes in what, until recently, were understood to be conservative values in the 1980s. As Brexit exposed, the free trade, investor rights and dependence on rightless foreign labour are now understood to be progressive values. Nasty conservatives want to re-erect barriers to neoliberal globalization because they are cruel and racist. Therefore, we must support the very treaties that helped to create neoliberal austerity in the first place, the logic seems to go.

Because of this, progressives understand late stage monopoly capitalism the same way the original progressives, Teddy Roosevelt’s crew, understood it in their day: universal public services should not be provided by the state but by regulated monopolies and oligopolies with state-appointed oversight boards and commissions. These boards and commissions’ job would be to guarantee minimum service standards to customers and minimum profits to investors.

The return to this system through the sale of highways, power utilities, auto insurance companies, communications utilities, etc., often by progressive governments, has caused many progressive folks to see nothing as intrinsically unjust about the social media monopolies sitting in private hands. In fact, given how unjustly they have been treated by regulated monopolies, like their local phone, electrical or cable company, many see the absolute autocratic dictatorship of a charismatic individual as preferable to the faceless, bureaucratic regulatory bodies that have failed to bridle the greed of regulated firms in any meaningful way.

Second, this internalization of essentially capitalist theories of justice as, in some way, socialism-adjacent has also been paralleled by a decline in the critical vocabulary of the putative left. In this case, the ability to identify a commons must precede any efforts to socialize one. Yet, when many progressives defended Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump, they often argued that the authority of Twitter to remove Trump’s account was absolute because the online space the platform had created was its own private property and not a common carrier, i.e. a part of the communications commons required to carry everyone’s messages without discrimination.

The fact that the organizing energy of folks opposed to the private, commercialized, conservative, manipulative and censored character large social media platforms have taken on has been almost entirely directed into creating alternative, cooperative digital commons is, on the one hand, heartening. Clearly, there is some residual of Antonio Gramsci in the effort to build socialist institutions outside the state. But the flip side of this, soberingly, is that negligible organizing energy has gone into amending the telecommunications legislation in countries around the world to make these commons at least more subject to public regulation and, ideally, expropriation and socialization. Instead, progressives have, again, naturalized a profoundly conservative and undemocratic state of affairs.

Third, and most importantly, there is an epistemological split in our society. Free traders and protectionists exist in parties across the political spectrum now. Advocates for big government and limited government, same deal. Increasing rates of permanent and temporary human migration, again, no longer divisive. Nor is public borrowing. What increasingly animates what Sam Kriss terms the “reverse identity parade” that electoral politics has increasingly become is how one makes knowledge.

Progressives make knowledge using scientific expertise. What I mean by that is that progressives make knowledge by assessing who the highest-ranked or most authoritative expert is according to their criteria and then unquestioningly believe what that person says, until such time as someone demonstrates themselves to be more authoritative. The personality cult around BC’s Chief Medical Health officer Bonnie Henry is a great example. Many physicians and epidemiologists have criticized Henry’s mask skepticism and claims about the safety of schools for exposure and transmission. Henry’s followers tend to defend her on the basis of her rank. Dissidents are wrong because they are lower than Henry with respect to political and titular rank. If one prefers the opinions of the Chief of Medicine at Royal Columbian Hospital to those of Henry, one is quickly branded as being “against science.” Because science has become synonymous with expertise: i.e. the credentials and state power one possesses on the basis of one’s putative knowledge.

Conservatives, on the other hand, make knowledge in an increasingly participatory way. “Do your research!” is a slogan now associated with the false belief that vaccines cause autism in children. Pioneered by Glenn Beck, conservative talkshows function as how-to demonstrations for organizing variegated data to produce a foregone conclusion. Because the right’s enemies are amoral supermen, number in the millions and effortlessly translate their intentions into real world events, an answer like “George Soros” or “Black Lives Matter” or “Antifa” can function to explain any event. In this way, modern remedial conspiracy theory is less “pin the tail on the donkey” and more the Aristocrats. The entire joke is filler and the punchline is both foreknown and unrelated.

Because of the horrifying amount of not merely false but seemingly deranged belief out there in the form of QAnon, Covfefe, anti-vaxx, bleach therapy, climate denial and young earth creationism. And because these beliefs are clearly winning the epistemological battle, new and more drastic measures must be taken to suppress them, the thinking goes. Because FoxNews is permitted to broadcast outrageous, lethal, society-crippling lies, with Newsmax and other crazier broadcasters nipping at their heels, progressives think that we must impose new and more stringent rules to ensure the veracity of what appears in TV and on social media.

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And because efforts to bridle the power to lie of Fox and others have consistently failed in the Senate and Federal Communications Commission, centrists and progressives have become the chief apologists for the direct censorship powers wielded by Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. The problem, in progressive minds, is that these CEOs have been too timid in their efforts to control the claims and ideology permitted on their media. The idea seems to be that in the absence of the state, the billionaires must step in.

This is a grave error.

Last year, I wrote an essay about the 1980s Doctor Who story Castrovalva. In the show, the villain, the Master, creates a pocket dimension and populates it with simulacra, giving the environment and the characters detailed invented personal histories. The hero of the story is the librarian Shardovan. Although he is one of the simulacra and the books are all forged by the same hand, he becomes a skeptic simply because he detects the logical inconsistencies within the official histories, first material inconsistences, then logical consistencies. The climax of the episode occurs when he confronts his creator and accuses him of not being who he claims to be.

A number of people have so focused on how this essay fits into the theory of identity I was developing at the time that this intervention was primarily an epistemological one.

Both good stories and accurate social science derive their quality from their ability to describe how human beings think, feel and react to one another. The author of the false history of Castrovalva would have faced a choice: either write stories that are self-consistent, in which events hit together and makes sense on their face or write stories that are consistent with observed human nature. One cannot do both without capturing the desire of the human soul to be free. No matter which way the stories were written, they would have struck a false note to any person endowed with basic empathy and critical thinking capacity.

It is my argument that FoxNews, Newsmax, Breitbart, Rebel Media and their ilk should elicit the same reaction from folks with remotely functioning critical thinking skills and basic empathy. If a person with a healthy sense of empathy and basic critical thinking capacity watches FoxNews for a week, they will know that the station is telling lies, even if they have access to no other news source. In fact, a person with these two basic things should, over time, be able to figure out what is actually happening by only watching Rupert Murdoch’s equivalent to the Jonestown loudspeaker.

That is because FoxNews and its allies are horribly inconsistent. Donald Trump both organized and did not organize the riot at the capital. The riot at the capital was both patriotic and unpatriotic. No officers were killed there. The officers who were killed were no big deal. No officer death is ever acceptable. Barack Obama is a communist. And an atheist. And a Muslim. Anthropogenic climate change is good. Anthropogenic climate change is not happening. The seas are not rising. The seas are rising because we threw too many rocks in the ocean. Robert Mueller is a traitor. Robert Mueller is Donald Trump’s best friend.

No person with functioning empathy and critical thinking skills is going to be susceptible to the kind of disinformation centrists and progressives think the new censorship will protect people from. And the reason this fear seems all the more real because critical thinking skills are on the decline everywhere. The progressive embrace of expertise is a mirror image of the right’s embrace of QAnon. And they share a cause: the kind of self, the kind of soul human beings were called-upon to construct during the Enlightenment is under attack. It is being remade.

Whether moving in progressive or conservative circles, not only do we see a decline in the practice of reasoning aloud in conversation. We see the normalization of the emotional reactions of people suffering clinical narcissism. It is expected that people learning that another person has special talents or knowledge they do not will be experienced as an attack. It is expected that not being seen as one ideally imagines oneself is an injury, an attack. We determine what viewpoint is correct by assessing who has the greatest emotional stake in being right and the status needed to force that recognition. We imagine the words said about us must be the same as the words said to us. As I wrote nine years ago in Age of Authenticity, these post-Enlightenment selves are larger, more porous and overlap others. For these selves, truth is located at the centre of the self, the place most walled-off from material reality. One’s epistemological foundations are to be found on an inward journey, not an outward one.

Combined with the reduction in teaching and the lack of cultural confidence in basic critical thinking and reasoning skills, a growing portion of our population will espouse belief in incoherent nonsense. Changing or reducing the supply of pre-fabricated nonsense will make little to no difference. That is because modern conservatism has an intellectual do-it-yourself-ism that easily enables folks to substitute their own homemade batshit crazy ideas, with the same base ingredients of racial animus and confusion.

That social trend can only be arrested by dealing with the problem of the consumer, not at the level of the producer.

If Breitbart or FoxNews had existed in the 1960s, most people who believe them today would not only have disbelieved them. They would have found them laughable, funny, absurd. Even the John Birch Society and Lyndon Larouche activists would have found their explanations unusable because of the conspiracy theories would not be self-consistent with their last retelling. Too many details would be missed or wrong. And Alex Jones and his crew, the belief that every piece of errant data is a false flag or a “crisis actor,” would likely be institutionalized under the more muscular mental hygiene statutes of the time.

A population this addle-minded cannot be protected from thinking crazy things by censorship. It can only be protected by rebuilding not just our capacities for empathy and logic but for the cultural institutions that have nurtured and reinforced these things. We must re-democratize civil society institutions. We must increase the amount of zero-barrier free education available to regular folks. We must renew our democratic institutions like the FCC and CRTC to convert social media into socialized common carriers. We need to reform our education systems to prioritize critical thinking and logic and understand the inculcation empathy part of that project, not oppositional to it. We must throw off orthodoxies, new and old, that seek to shut down our capacity to think aloud together.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite | February 15, 2021

The New Babel or How the Echo Chamber Became Its Own Opposite

In the Jewish Bible or Old Testament, one of the most memorable stories is that of the Tower of Babel, a story of human hubris. The people of Babel used their vast wealth and power to build a great tower that symbolized their hegemony over the lands they ruled. They build the tower so high and, consequently, placed so much of the world under its sway that the Lord confounded the languages of the people and destroyed the tower, shattering Babel’s hegemony.

Today, the story is taking place in reverse. The world over, new forms of authoritarian rule are arising through an increasingly close alliance between social movements that hold ideas of liberty and equality in contempt and an increasingly powerful oligarchic billionaire class. Prominent in this billionaire class is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and he, like other media and communications oligarchs are making the construction of these new Towers of Babel possible by confounding the language of the people.

Our communities are becoming, as a consequence, increasingly separated by political alignment and identity. Political content and political debates increasingly dominate media that previously were focused on familial or aesthetic connections. While Facebook rewards people for performing all kinds of difference from one another, political difference often produces the greatest rewards. Of course, this is not limited to social media. Attempts by news organizations to draw audiences from across the political spectrum are all but over.

For many years, now, people have been saying that this is producing political “echo chambers,” except that this has entailed redefining what an echo chamber is. Supposedly, an echo chamber is one in which one says something and it echoes back verbatim, perfectly. Allegedly, in an echo chamber, one hears one’s own words, one’s own views repeated back.

Except that is not what echo chambers actually are, or were before the second decade of the twenty-first century. Echo chambers are actually the opposite. Echo chambers have long been used in music and other fields to make conventional sounds seem uncanny or incomprehensible. Sound is issued into the chamber from a voice or instrument and it begins a chaotic (in the mathematical sense), escalating process of echoing and reverberation with sound overlaying sound overlaying sound. After a few minutes, in a real echo chamber, there are no longer distinct words or sounds, just the complex interplay of increasingly distorted, unrecognizable echos.

An echo chamber, then, is the auditory equivalent of a funhouse mirrors at the carnival, except that the reflections iterate for so long and with such complexity that the reflections can barely be recognized as human.

Rather than producing ideological conformity and shared political analyses, forces like Fox and Facebook do not function so much as the hypothetical echo chambers of the present but like the literal echo chambers of the past. When we type words into Facebook threads, they transform from ideas to talking points to nonsense. And they grow increasingly nonsensical as they bounce off not just other people’s words but the words we have previously typed; in fact, they go beyond nonsensical; they become uncanny, familiar words distorted into something frightening and alien.

When we engage in the politics of small difference within a community bounded, if not by ideology, then, at least a set of shared political positions, one would assume that the combination of a shared critical vocabulary and shared aims would make debate possible. But the reverse is true. That is because “if-then” and comparative reasoning have been eviscerated by standpoint epistemology. An emerging consensus across, for want of a better word, ideological communities believes that truth-making and truth-seeking processes do not exist in the intersubjective space where our conversations reside. The truth is no longer the argument most participants in a debate, agree to, through the presentation of evidence and the practice of reason, because truth is no longer located in intersubjective space. The conversation is not the thing that produces truth; it is the place to which you report subjective truths already produced.

Conversation, then, tends to comprise competing claims of the validity of one’s subjective truth; this typically involves claiming membership in an identity group and then arguing that this identity group is the one vested with authority to report what is true. Among what I am increasingly tempted to call the “fake left,” this involves claims of membership in a marginalized or stigmatized identity group. An act of oppression calculus then takes place to review evidence not about the person’s argument but their claims of marginalization. Whether a person able to pass as white can make a claim to authority based on being a member of a racialized group must be adjudicated—it is here, ironically, the intersubjective truth-making does take place; the authority of the crowd is relevant but only insofar as it situates one’s identitarian credentials but not in whether one’s claim makes logical sense or is supported by evidence—and pronounced upon.

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On the right, the same ideas obtain, right down to the narration of victimization and marginalization. Except that the stories are of white male failure and white male victimhood. A man was passed over for a promotion in favour of a woman; a white person lost out to a person of colour; a business owner went bankrupt; a white Christian had to attend a Kwanza’a party for work. Once adjudged the biggest white failure in the room, the man—and inevitably it is a man—can then narrate what’s “really going on,” with Antifa and Black Lives Matter being paid millions of dollars by George Soros to destroy Christianity, or whatever.

Once one has won the argument as to the superior oppression calculus credentials, one may then report the truth. But truth, at this point, is increasingly presented not as an if-then syllogism but instead as a talking point or set thereof.

I have written about talking points before, a new speech style developed during the deregulation of 1980s neoliberalism to shield corporations from liability for increasingly frequent product recalls and industrial accidents. Following the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster that killed hundreds of thousands, the firm handling the file, Burson-Marsteller pioneered specialization in “crisis communications,” PR strategies designed to minimize the effects of corporate malfeasance.

Central to crisis communications is the use of “talking points.” Talking points are one or more mantras corporate representatives are taught to repeatedly intone during interviews with media. Their purpose is not to offer answers or inform listeners or viewers but instead to beat meaning out of conversations by repeating a slogan that appears, superficially, to relate to the matter under discussion but never to the question that has been asked. By breaking down conversational interchange, itself, corporate representatives could concurrently bore and confuse their audience, ultimately causing them to tune out because no sense was being made.

After all, the first rule of crisis communications is never to answer the question you have been asked but simply to present one’s talking points brazenly as a non-sequitur.

Talking points soon metastasized into electoral politics and were used to great effect by the apologists for neoliberalism to produce confusion and disengagement, the next best thing to actual consent of the governed. But either as part of Third Way popular front politics or simply because of the discourse environment, what passes for a left began to adopt talking points language but with no understanding of what it was for or what it could successfully do.

Of those on the putative left, organizations that identify as progressive are the most likely to believe in the use of talking points, believing that if one can reduce one’s ideas into a set of koan-like non-responses that roll off the tongue well, one is somehow meeting the right on its own field of battle, using its own weapons and can therefore win the day, not understanding that important Orwellian lesson that nonsense is not politically neutral; it serves the oppressor.

In this way, argument becomes impossible because an increasing portion of every conversation is both nonsensical and non-responsive. People are asked to “check their privilege,” as though there a privilege-check boy waiting them at some metaphorical coat-room, who could somehow relocate them closer to a subject position closer to ideal victimhood if tipped well enough. This is a talking point amongst talking points, impossible, non-responsive and designed to address solely the authority of the speaker, not the veracity of the argument.

And so the tower grows higher, Mark Zuckerberg standing atop it, its panopticon enabling the creation of a new kind of hegemony through the confounding of language itself.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite | July 10, 2020

Do Conservatives Have Opinions About Climate?

For someone who declares an end to the Age of Reason, as both an epistemological and a political project, with some frequency, it surprises me how often I underestimate the effects of this collapse on my immediate surroundings and the political reality in which I attempt to take action. So, once again, I am writing a mea culpa for failing to notice and describe, with clarity, some of the obvious consequences of the widespread abandonment of Enlightenment thinking. I have failed to notice that political movements that identify as conservative do not have ideas, thoughts or opinions about the climate crisis. They only superficially appear to.

What movements like the Trump Movement have are a set of social practices they use to respond to people who do have thoughts, ideas and opinions about climate. I used to think that the reason the forces of climate denial and the forces of climate justice could not have an actual debate was because the two movements practiced different epistemologies, that their ways of determining what is true were incompatible. So, they would not accept each other’s argumentation or each other’s evidence.

But, ironically, I think that this description actually awards the two groups too much common ground, not too little. That is because I did not think through the fact that the burden Enlightenment epistemology places on people is to assume that the purpose of saying things is to convey meaning and that meaning is made out of ideas about the world. But what if the episteme of Authenticity (or whatever is out-competing the old epistemology of the past) does not place these burdens on people? What if, culturally, it does not demand that the things that are said convey meaning and/or that meaning arises out of a description of how the world works?

The reality is that long before we great apes and other smart creatures decided to use conversation as a meaning-making, data-transfer activity, many spent thousands or millions of years taking turns making sounds, competitively, cooperatively, spontaneously or based on long-rehearsed material. Conversation is a rhythmic game used for many things and it is only in recent centuries that we have over-focused on its data transfer possibilities and logic co-processing capacities at the expense of more venerable functions. Perhaps those most eager to exit the Enlightenment are among the most eager to return to conversational basics.

So, let us consider that climate deniers and their ilk do not feel the need to have opinions or ideas about the climate, never mind expressing them in a conversational or epistolary context.

Because Authenticity, or whatever this new knowledge-power system turns out to be, sees things in intersubjective and social terms, rather than objective terms, opinions about scientifically-knowable processes are not so much wrong as uninteresting, outside the frame, unless they can somehow be recast in social terms.

So, that is what conservatives do when they are confronted by people expressing ideas about a shared, physical, inescapable reality that undergirds society without being able to be reshaped solely by social perceptions. Their goal is to draw the experience into a space that is of interest to them: the social. So, their goal is to say things calculated to produce anger, sadness, disappointment or disengagement but this does not mean that they think the things they are saying are, in any sense, descriptive of the world. They are not playing a meaning-making game; they are trying to force their interlocutor to stop playing it.

So, they might say, “the climate is not changing,” and, when confronted with evidence then say, “the climate is always changing and always has been.” They might say “carbon does not warm the planet” and then, moments later, “we need this carbon to warm the planet to stop the de-carbonization of the atmosphere over the past 500 million years.” They might say, “fossil fuels do not contribute significantly to carbon emissions,” followed by “if we don’t release all this carbon, the economy will collapse and everyone will starve,” followed by “carbon from fossil fuels doesn’t warm the atmosphere, only carbon from animals and plants does.” And on it goes.

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So, what are these words that superficially appear to be ideas but, in reality, are not?

They are talking points.

“Talking points” is an idea that is not nearly as old as our collective amnesia says it is. It is a term arising from the neoliberal era and became important during the waves of industrial deregulation, de-unionization, wage rollbacks and expansion of manufacturing into peripheral agricultural regions like Mexico and India. The 1980s were also an age of product-tampering, a related phenomenon, as the decline in regulation made this form of industrial sabotage vastly easier.

This caused the burgeoning public relations business to specialize in a key area, “crisis communications,” special PR professionals within firms and, later, whole specialized firms like Navigator and RunSwitch, whose sole job was to deal with things like product recalls. The gold standard for crisis communication was Burson-Marsteller’s handling of Union Carbide’s massive industrial disaster in Bhopal in 1984 which killed 16,000 people and injured an additional 550,000.

Crisis communications developed a fundamentally different way of talking using something we call a “key message” and “talking points,” not to communicate but for the purpose of preventing or sabotaging communication. If a CEO or PR flak was being interviewed by the press, the idea was to refuse to answer any questions honestly or completely but instead to give a highly repetitive “key message,” whose purpose was partly to reassure listener but primarily to make them disengage, by beating all actual meaning out of the conversation by making answers unrelated to questions and making answers as repetitive and predictable as possible.

And these efforts were effective. They prevented corporations’ shares from declining too much in value by suppressing both information and attention. They were so effective that incumbent governments began using them as part of their messaging and experienced the same kind of improvements in public opinion.

Much of the stupidity of the recent political history of North America—and especially Canada—has come from people confusing talking points and key messages with successful persuasion. This evidentiarily-unsupported orthodoxy that one attains office by being repetitive, off-topic and hostile to conversation became so powerful that political parties and movements of all kinds adopted it. And its adoption was so widespread, so fast, that there was little opportunity to compare the use of talking points to other more conversational, informative strategies.

Worse yet, many on the liberal left now confuse talking points with ideas, when they are, in fact, the very opposite. And this has led to widespread, self-inflicted idiocy as people have tried to squeeze actual ideas into vessels expressly designed to be unable to hold them.

One of the reasons modern conservatism is ascendant is that it understands what talking points are: they are a conversational tactic, akin to the strategy of “cutting off the ring” in boxing. Consequently, liberals and progressives trying to use talking points are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs because they mistake what talking points are and insist on attempting to tether them to sense.

Modern conservatism does not call upon its followers to believe things about asocial phenomena like climate. And it does not call upon its followers to say things that are self-consistent or representative of ideas. Members of the Trump movement or the Bolsonaro movement or the Duterte movement might say lots of things about climate but this does not mean that they represent things they think about climate. Because what they think about climate is nothing at all.

Politics of Epistemology US Politics | fusangite | May 13, 2020

Castrovalva: Reappraising Anti-oppressive Thought in 1980s Doctor Who

In the past, I have suggested that there is a sharp break between the politics of monstrosity in original Doctor Who (1963-89) and new Doctor Who (2004-present). The most famous, effective and frightening monsters in the original series stemmed from memory of the fascist threat in the Second World War and, secondarily, from fear of the Soviet Union. The Daleks, the Cybermen, Sontarans and the Autons, as well as minor villains like the Movellans all played to the fear of a militaristic totalitarianism that annihilates individual free will.

The second Doctor Who found its legs when it came to creating truly terrifying monsters when it began to play on a more universal yet less individually ubiquitous centre of fear: childhood trauma. The Weeping Angels and the Silence perfectly encapsulate the experiences of repression that we associate with serious childhood abuse and trauma.

That stated, I want to offer a qualification to that general schema in suggesting that the last nine years of the original series, which, ironically, was produced by a pedophile, presages this childhood turn in a few important ways. A hallmark of the original series’ final decade was the return of the Master, a timelord of commensurate power to the Doctor but evil. The original Master, played by Roger Delgado, had been featured in 1970s plots in which he formed alliances with hostile alien forces or sought to trick non-hostiles into hostility. The 1980s Master, played by Anthony Ainley, was a different sort of villain who replaced the first Master’s primary strategy of alliance with that of illusion, especially disguise.

In every storyline featuring the Master in his first four years, he is either disguised as someone else (Castrovalva, Timeflight, the King’s Demons) or someone else is disguised as him (Planet of Fire). Fundamental to his villainy, when he returns, is his misrepresentation of himself and his use of this illusion to wrong-foot the Doctor. Yet it often seems that the misrepresentation is not merely a means to an evil end but an evil end in itself.

This allows late original Doctor Who to tell some important and prescient stories about questions of identity and subjectivity, ultimately, in my view, putting forward a very specific kind of anti-oppressive narrative that challenges the kind of hegemonic identity politics that were only in a nascent state during the 1980s.

Nowhere is this anti-oppressive politics better illustrated than in the first Peter Davison serial, Castrovalva, named for the MC Escher painting of the same name. The original painting, early in Escher’s career, did not have the features for which he would later be known: there was no recursion or optical illusion within the piece. Instead, it depicted an actual place, a remote village in the mountains of Central Italy.

But within the Dr. Who Castrovalva, there was also a tribute to later Escher, a central courtyard structured by recursive geography; every staircase away from the town square was also a staircase to the square. Furthermore, the Master, who had created and populated the city with simulacra of human beings, could manipulate individual paths within the city, looping them back to different locations based on his needs. His ability to manipulate included not just the geography of his pocket dimension city but also how its inhabitants physically perceived him.

The Master, himself, was disguised as the village elder known as “The Portreeve.” For much of his time in the Master’s fake city and domain of control. Ultimately, the Master’s plan is thwarted because the Doctor teams up with the local librarian and convinces the inhabitants that there is something wrong and evil about the order of their city and that its history, politics and even physical topography are an illusion and a trap.

There are several details and aspects of this plot that reveal it to be more than it first appears. The first of these struck me during my brief visit to Colorado City in 2011. Colorado City is the core territory of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the violent, polygamous Mormons who split from the main body of their church in the 1940s. They are secretive and in frequent conflict with the law and centre their activities on a town on a disputed section of the Utah-Arizona border. Upon entering the town and beginning to drive past high-fenced compounds, down empty streets, our car was approached by a local teenager trying to hitch a ride out of town. Thereafter, our vehicle came under suspicion and a large truck dragged a concrete median across the road by which we had entered, trapping us in the “city.”

For the next fifteen minutes, my companion and I drove up and down the streets of the city while we were observed from behind fences and through tinted truck windows, concrete medians being dragged from one intersection to another to create and endlessly changing labyrinth. Colorado City was a closed place ruled by a hereditary theocracy that determined who could enter and leave. The place, being the least genetically diverse town in the US, was a gigantic extended abusive family and so it followed logically that part of its entrapment of its residents was a recursive geography that folded back in on itself. After the elders let us escape back onto the highway, it began to occur to me how large and important the message of Castrovalva might be.

No doubt, the children growing up in Colorado City begin their lives unfamiliar with the idea that a street grid might be stable, predictable and attached to a fixed geography rather than the shifting mind of a city’s autocrat. This was certainly true of the residents of Castrovalva. The town’s residents are creations of the Master, himself, and have known no other world. The one exception is the librarian, Shardovan. Shardovan, The drug starts working after 30 minutes of medicine intake but rest depends upon the variety of medicine as some are effective india cheap cialis in male enhancement. Use buy viagra online the Medication according to the Recommended Dosage only. Among many wonderful drugs on the market used for their anti ED qualities are viagra sample free s and Sildenafil Tablets. However, if you do it right, you’ll be able to stop this problem vardenafil online permanently. although he cannot see the topographic inconsistencies and recursion with his eyes can nevertheless “see it in [his] philosophy.”

What makes Shardovan different is that he spends so much of his time reading. Although the books are all fraudulent creations of the Master, documenting a fabricated history of Castrovalva, the ongoing interaction with a stable symbol system and dialectical reasoning causes him to begin noticing the inconsistencies of his world, to nurture the belief that he is participating in some kind of elaborate, oppressive fraud.

Here, again, Castrovalva tells us something important about oppression and anti-oppressive practice: even a creation of an oppressive system can see through their oppression by finding a touchstone of self-consistency, in this case, the written word. It does not even matter that the book was a creation of the system of oppression or that its reader, too, is a wholly endogenous part of the system: the sequencing of a story, the stable correspondence of letters to sounds or ideas, the act of comparing past to present: these things have an intrinsic liberating power. It also says something important about the nature of oppression, that it is the natural ally of double standards, special pleading and other forms of inconsistency.

But of course, it is much easier to resist when one’s own sense of inconsistency is supported by the words, actions or even just presence of someone from outside, not habituated to the false logics that underpin oppression. The Doctor is sickened and disoriented by the space-time inconsistencies of the pocket dimension, making him, at once, the weakest and most powerful person there. So often, this is what we see when a new person joins an abusive family unit or an oppressive regime expands into a new territory: those not habituated to the system of oppression and disorientation are both the most wounded by and resistant to the new order.

This is expressed best when Ruther and Mergrave, the two town elders, revisit Shardovan’s skepticism in the Doctor’s presence. They are strengthened, nourished, by a voice from outside Castrovalva echoing the doubts they have long nourished. And this precipitates the climactic confrontation of the story.

Following the confrontation, Mergrave, the town doctor, confronts the Master and says, “you are not the Portreeve.” To which the Master responds, “something’s been messing with your perception threshold.” “No. You are not the Portreeve. I believe the Visitor.”

What is remarkable about this confrontation is that the category “Portreeve” has almost no equivalent outside Castrovalva. It is a medieval English word for the bailiff of a market town containing a seaport. It is a category that has been created by the Master to describe only one person in the universe, himself. And the only people who know the word or its putative meaning are the simulacra he has created to populate his pocket dimension world. It appears to mean the most wise and knowledgeable elder of Castrovalva, as the person has no law enforcement power and there is no seaport.

It is not that the Doctor has talked through how a Portreeve should act or what one is. All that has happened is that the simulacra have recognized that who the Portreeve says he is does not match who he appears to be. As any child raised in an abusive home knows, the first step in escaping that abuse is to recognize that their caregiver’s self-description does not match their actions, even though the abuser has defined all the terms by which they are judged. An fundamental feature of abuse and oppression, in other words, is what we have come to call “gaslighting,” the way that there is an axiomatic disparity between an oppressor’s self-description and their behaviour. This serves both to wrong-foot and paralyze the victims of that abuse that traps them, and, paradoxically, to offer a way out of an otherwise totalizing, self-contained system.

After the Master turns on his accusers, Shardovan destroys the machine that manipulates the topography of Castrovalva to keep its inhabitants imprisoned and disoriented, sacrificing his life in the process. His last words are “you made us, man of evil; but we are free now.”

Whether we examine oppression at a global scale, a familial scale or anywhere in between, what Castrovalva offers us is a story of resistance to oppression as endogenous in a totalizing system. The simulacra turn on their creator, even though it may mean the end of their lives and even their universe. They do so because asserting one’s autonomous will is more deeply constitutive of true personhood than life itself.

Today, we live in a world under the sway of family annihilator patriarchs practicing a counterfeit masculinity, leveling rape threats at teenage environmental activists, grabbing their daughter’s asses on live TV to the applause of the crowd, decriminalizing spousal violence in response to grassroots campaigns, riding their coarse boasting about sexually assaulting women to electoral victory.

And I believe that Castrovalva offers us not just hope but a narration of the first steps in mobilizing an endogenous resistance from within our states, within our families. It begins with the realization that the power of the oppressor comes from their presumed right to dictate who they are to us, to define, in defiance of our own observations, the bounds of the possible and of, not just their power, but their identity in our eyes. And it tells us clearly that the first step in resistance is the moment we say to our oppressor,

“You are not who you say you are.”

Geekery Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity | fusangite | April 24, 2020

Imagining a post-capitalist future is harder than capitalism allows us to imagine

Several people have asked me to write a blog post about the kind of society I see as emerging out of the Covid-19 epidemic, one that learns lessons from the pandemic and reorients itself in a more compassionate direction. This request joins a long lineage of requests for descriptions of the future, from what an eco-socialist BC might look like, how the Pacific Northwest might look with a bioregional system of political economy, what a post-imperial global order might look like.

It is not so much that I refuse to do these things as that I cannot do these things. The feats of imagination being asked of me are far beyond any human’s imaginative capacity. Furthermore, the belief that such feats are within the capabilities of human beings in our present moment, is, itself, dangerous.

Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers have a lot more in common than is often credited, especially in this day and age when fake intellectuals like Jordan Peterson try to conflate them. But one area of considerable overlap is the understanding that the system of relationships that comprise a social order, whether we call it a “stage of history” or an “episteme,” is the understanding that what we can imagine is profoundly conditioned by that order. The human imagination is never unfettered; it is always circumscribed by culture and knowledge. Late stage capitalism opens us to certain new areas of imagination—how a sexualized ideal of ourselves might look in our mind’s eye, new possible flavours of ice cream, how to appropriate and commodify some part of another’s imagination or our own—but it also works to dim or eliminate all kinds of imagining. And yet, at the same time, we are told that imagination is pre-social, individual and unfettered by material or cultural conditions. One of the central lies of capitalism is that it does not fetter the imagination. And we often can only guess at what it is that we have lost the capacity to imagine, given that we have lost it.

That is not to say that I do not expend huge amounts of my mental energy imagining places and times other than this one, in the past, in the future, or in a universe with different physical properties. Indeed, doing this has been one of the greatest and longest-standing passions of my life. Since being prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set by a child psychiatrist in 1981, I have spent thousands of hours imagining different worlds, different societies and sharing them with my friends.

As an adult, I became a historian and completed a PhD and postdoctoral fellowship not just in the study of the past but in the study of the imaginary past of the Mormon church, one in which God is from the planet Kolob and in which people called the Jaredites traveled from Eurasia to North America in submarines four thousand years ago.

But just as the Book of Mormon is actually a commentary on Jacksonian America, its controversies, limitations and imagination, my games are simply essays on the limitations of the late capitalist imaginary; no one is so special as to transcend it.

That stated, it does seem to be true that those most capable of imagining a future different from today are those most versed in the wide array of human societies of the past and present, historians, folklorists, classicists, medievalists and anthropologists who can use the physical and documentary evidence left by other societies to try and reach outside the imaginative limitations of our own.

That is why I have always treasured Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia, a book in which Fawcett tries to reach outside his own consciousness to report on the thoughts of his dead friend while engaging in an extended meditation on Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Fawcett’s ultimate conclusion is this: the main thing that conditions our ability to imagine possible futures is our ability to remember the past.

That is why the Khmer Rouge and other despotic movements attempt to obliterate knowledge of the past or replace it, whole cloth, with an “all now” consciousness in which human nature and human society have always been essentially identical, with the only thing in flux being labour-saving technology. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the term “revolution” was redefined as “return to the past.”

Perhaps the most clear-headed thinker political thinker on the limitations of the human imagination and how these limitations impeded the revolutionary project was Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had argued, in original dialectical materialism, that the capacity and will to rise up against capitalism and smash it varied directly with how alienated capitalism had made a person, not just in the Marxian economic sense but in the larger social and cultural sense this encompassed.

People who did not control when they went to work or when they came home, who did not own their tools, who did not own their homes, who were cut off from cultural production and participation: these would be the people who would take up arms against capitalism: the working class of England, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Lenin saw it more clearly. Rising up against this alienation was contingent on the ability to imagine something different. And the ability to imagine something different was contingent on the ability to remember something different. Consequently, he came to believe that Russia’s highly distinctive way of industrializing made it the best candidate for revolution.

Most of the industrial proletariat of Western Europe had become factory workers as part of a multigenerational process of dispossession and urbanizatioin. The workers in the steel mills of England, France, Germany and the Netherlands were mostly from families whose ties to the villages where they once farmed had been slowly cut over more than a century. Even if someone had migrated from the countryside in their own lifetime, the countryside they left was one whose feudal obligations and common lands had vanished long before. First, feudal title changed into fee simple title and then lords turned into landlords; inherited peasant land became rented land; the rural poor descended from renter, to debt peon to part of a landless and increasingly mobile rural proletariat. Urban, industrial labour was not an alternative to life as a peasant on aristocratic or common lands but an alternative to life as a migrant agricultural labourer.

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Thus, for the proletariat of Western Europe, only a small minority had a clear memory of living and farming on a family plot with hereditary rights, owning one’s tools, etc. But in Russia, things were different. Serfdom still existed in Russia, as did a wide network of common lands where serfs were operationally free people but legally, the tsar’s property. Also, the landed aristocracy and the urban elite were not two overlapping communities, as in England but a single community, comprising the identical people.

Consequently, what made economic and political sense was for boyars to open factories in St. Petersburg or Moscow and then simply uproot a portion of their serfs from their rural estate and staff the factory with them. Even the factory workers who had urbanized less coercively had typically done so within a generation or two, not within five generations, meaning that nearly everyone in a Russian factory retained a memory of owning their tools, inheriting their home and making most of the things they needed in their local community.

Lenin understood that there is a difference between alienation and consciousness of alienation. Alienation is the reason to revolt. Consciousness of alienation is the motivation to revolt. Or, in Fawcett’s terms, Russian workers could imagine a future outside capitalism because they could remember a past outside it.

This did not merely instill in Lenin one of the most profound sociological insights of all time. It also forced a curious kind of humility on him. Like Jefferson, Madison and the contributors to America’s Federalist Papers, Lenin understood that the new society that would succeed capitalism was something that could only be haltingly, incrementally thought into being after the revolution, when the constraining power of capitalism on the imagination slowly receded.

From what we can adduce of his thirty or so months of holding power after the end of the Russian Civil War, it appears that rather than proceeding with a clear plan to build a particular society, he attempted to ignite the same kind of halting, confused, self-contradictory conversation that allowed America to think liberal capitalism into being, the century from the declaration of Independence to the Supreme Court ruling that all “rights” could adhere to individuals and individuals were the only thing to which rights could adhere.

So, Lenin changed economic policies a number of times and poured money into the arts, hoping expand the horizon of possibilities available in the Russian political imaginary. He made some big mistakes too in limiting necessary discourse to make the project possible. But often our imagination of what 1921-24 was like is coloured by our knowledge of what was to come next.

What followed Lenin’s death was, of course, a tragedy with the rise of Joseph Stalin. There are many things for which to indict Stalin (and Lenin, for that matter). But central to the problem of Stalin is this: he believed that the Soviet Union was not only imaginable but had already been imagined by him. The experimental art and literature of Leninism came to be supplanted by Soviet Realism. What is meant by “realism” is clear: the real is that which already exists, has already been imagined, is already known. The limits of Soviet communism became the limits of a single man’s consciousness formed under monarchical absolutism and Dickensian capitalism.

My refusal to describe an eco-socialist future for BC or Canada or the Pacific Northwest does not just come from an attempt at a Leninist humility, a willingness to take seriously how seriously capitalism has narrowed my horizon of possibility and reshaped my imagination in fetishistic, solipsistic ways. It also comes from an understanding of the totalitarianism that is incipient in believing one can imagine a future beyond capitalism with the tools capitalism has placed at our disposal.

For this reason, we need to read history. We need to read speculative fiction. We need to read the myths and stories of cultures far off in space and time. And we need to practice our social imagination in dreaming up other ways of being, knowing and working. But we should not confuse that for fashioning a plan or blueprint for the post-capitalist world. All we can do is ready ourselves for that task when it is thrust upon us.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite | April 5, 2020

Extinction Will Be Stopped by Conversion, Not By Raising Awareness

Back in June, I promised that I would write about the alternative to raising awareness, as a paradigm for understanding shifts in political allegiance, conversion. To get more fully into this piece, it is probably useful to review the one it follows.

Green Politics, Paradigm Shifts and Raising Awareness

A few years after I joined the Green Party, the second great upwelling of environmental concern in post-war North American society began. From 1988-92, there was a period of tremendous environmental concern and activism in Anglo American society, reaching its crescendo in the 1990 Earth Day celebrations and TV specials. During this time, Angus Reid conducted a poll asking Canadians if they would vote for a Green Party, if only one existed. We, in the Green Party of Canada, were confused and surprised. But 14% of Canadians appeared to tell Reid that they would be voting for us the first chance they got.

During that time, many new people joined the Greens and membership in environmental groups shot up higher and faster. But our election results did not reflect this. We got 1.4% in a 1988 byelection in BC, 2% in 1989 and our best result in any BC riding in the 1991 election was 4.4%. The federal party did even worse.

This did not dishearten the party’s base. And what I began to hear, with increasing frequency, was that there would be a massive, quantum, ten- or twenty-fold increase in our vote once the “paradigm shift” happened. While this was, to some degree, an appeal to the strong eschatological I have describe in Green politics on more than one occasion, I want, in this piece, to look seriously at the precise meaning of this term and how it presaged a catastrophically bad theory of social change that hobbles Green and green politics up to the present day.

The term “paradigm shift” was developed by historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His argument was that science takes sudden and massive leaps forward when a “paradigm shift” takes place. An example of this is the massive shift when the theory of a universe of planets encased in crystalline spheres, making circular orbits, governed by the will of God was replaced by free-floating planets, moving in elliptical orbits, governed by the invisible forces of gravitation. Kuhn argued that science makes these major leaps forward when the model that is being used to interpret and store information becomes weighed-down with too many exceptions, too many aberrations and it is easier to come up with a new system that explains these things than it is to continue modifying a system that has had to create too many special cases and exceptions to explain away observable data.

The universe of Ptolemy and Copernicus gave way to the universe of Kepler, Galileo and Newton not because its model was conclusively disproved but because the new model was so much less cumbersome in its explanations and contained fewer special cases and exceptions, that the sheer weight of all the eccentrics and epicycles brought it down in favour of a system simpler to explain, that modeled far more – but not all – of the available data.

Greens believed that as more and more information about the harms of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. became available, human consciousness would undergo a “paradigm shift” that rejected liberal capitalist politics and economics in favour of a new, green model of politics and economics. The way forward, to political success, then, was clear: raise awareness. Circulate more and more information about the health impacts, ecological impacts, social impacts of the current social order and, upon reaching a certain threshold of information, society would undergo that paradigm shift.

This, of course, fitted well with the kinds of people most Greens were: people eager to be seen as the smartest, most informed person in the room, and eager to spread the information that made them so, to educate others.

As I have stated previously, the problems with this are obvious: one is that it assumes that people share the moral and ethical views of those raising the awareness, that society is united in a belief in utilitarian liberalism. It assumes that people prioritize future generations living as well or better than us, that they think extinction of species is bad, that they think poor people dying in extreme weather events is bad, that they wish to minimize human suffering. It also assumes that people will remain within the Enlightenment episteme and not choose an alternative theory of physical causation like sodomy causing hurricanes and gay marriage causing fire tornadoes.

But most importantly, it suggests that people have not already bought into the idea of enjoying their lives at the expense of others, be they one’s children, people in the Global South or other species. The SUV-driving World Bank economist who spent half the year in Sierra Leone implementing austerity programs and starving people to death with social program and food subsidy cuts was sure that the paradigm shift was coming any second, that he was a classic utilitarian, someone happily foregoing immediate gratification in the service of a greater good.

The idea of social change by paradigm shift is absurdly premised; first, it argues that moral, ethical and political choices function, for a society, the same way science does; second, it is premised on the idea that there is only one ideology in the world, utilitarianism and that everyone in the world is a utilitarian, someone who will maximize pleasure and minimize pain, personally, socially and ecologically. Paradigm shifters suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, first, in failing to imagine that not all people think the way they claim to think and, second, in failing to realize that they themselves do not think as they claim to. But rather than confronting this, they go forth and raise awareness.

The term “raising awareness” has problems beyond those identified by Doug Stanhope. The term, itself, appears to have arisen in the 1990s to replace the term “raising consciousness.” Whereas “raising awareness” refers simply to the idea of increasing the amount of information one’s interlocutor possesses, “raising consciousness” is about much more. Popularized by the Second Wave of the feminist movement, it was not just about giving women new information about their status in society; it was about offering an alternative theory of what it meant to be a person of worth as a woman, independent of patriarchy’s or an individual man’s evaluation of you.

Unlike raising awareness, raising consciousness was about providing women two things: new information about their status in the world and a new moral order within which to situate this information. Information about the gap between men’s and women’s wages is only significant if one decides that men’s and women’s work is equally valuable. Information about rates of unprosecuted domestic assault is only significant if one decides that it is wrong for men to beat their wives.

“Raising consciousness,” in turn, came out of a Marxist vocabulary. A key purpose of a communist party, according to canonical Marxism is to challenge “false consciousness” among the working class, beliefs like the idea that bosses are people more deserving of money than their workers, even if they work fewer hours and less hard, or the idea that people deserve family money they inherit from a rich relative. The problem has never been that people don’t know there is a massive wealth gap between rich and poor and that family wealth determines more of one’s economic fate than one’s own actions and choices; the problem has been a false consciousness that sees these things as fair.

The Nature of Conversion

When we look at the adversaries of progressives, we see social movements that are growing more powerful by the day. Neo-fascist movements, the Christian Right, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, etc. do not raise awareness, nor, indeed, do movements on the left that are not progressive i.e., movements that have abandoned coalitions with liberals and scorned accommodations with neoliberalism. Momentum and the movement behind Jeremy Corbyn, Our Revolution and the other movement groups behind Bernie Sanders, the student strikers for climate who stand behind Greta Thunberg, these groups are not raising awareness. These groups are seeking converts.

A conversion superficially resembles a paradigm shift in that it is a sudden realignment of one’s affiliations and consciousness but is, in more ways, opposite. When a person experiences conversion, the information they have does not change; what changes is the moral order in which they place that information. People do not join the Sanders movement because they have just received a new piece of information about the lack of healthcare for low-income Americans; they join because a fire has been kindled within them that suddenly makes poor people dying because they don’t have health insurance an evil they can no longer abide. People do not join Extinction Rebellion because they have just become aware that climate science is true after previously deeming it false; no, they join because they can no longer abide the scale of death, suffering and extinction our civilization is causing.

When we look at the Christian Bible and examine conversion stories, none of them are based on information. They are based on an encounter with another person or persons who have realigned their lives based on a new morality they have adopted.

We must remember that conversion is something far more natural to human beings than a paradigm shift. Many kids bully other kids in school. They do so because they enjoy the suffering of the kids they are bullying, until they don’t. Then, suddenly, they feel remorse, shame and realign their lives to behave in less hurtful ways. This is conversion. The information doesn’t change; morality changes.

Our adversaries understand this perfectly. They understand that people feel powerless, insignificant, dirty, That’s why; the patients are suggested to take this cialis sale find for more info now drug in the amount advised by the doctor. This has grown into increasing concern by in Athletic Physical Therapy researchers and endurance sports participants. levitra 20 mg It is highly suggested to avoid having intoxicants and over consumption of food while using this medicine. buy vardenafil levitra http://www.wouroud.com/blog.php Erectile dysfunction develops when there is less or no blood provision to the male viagra without prescription canada organ under the influence of this health problem from their male partner. morally compromised. They understand that the world is full of people who want to be good guys, heroes, people who want to turn their lives around with a new sense of purpose. And so, instead hurling information at them, information they usually already have, they sell moral realignment. They offer people a sense of renewal, purification and purpose.

Amazing Grace

At the beginning of the Enlightenment, we still understood the power of conversion. One of the most important and uplifting hymns of that era is Amazing Grace. The semi-apocryphal story of the hymn is that it was the story of a slaver, John Newton, delivering African slaves to the Americas, a slaver who had grown wealthy and powerful running his slave ships, delivering their human cargo. Then, one day, in the midst of a storm, on board his slave ship, God spoke to him and he realized the evil of what he had been doing:

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found

T’was blind but now I see

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear

And Grace, my fears relieved

How precious did that grace appear

The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares

We have already come.

T’was grace that brought us safe thus far

And grace will lead us home

Newton knew the same things about slavery after that moment as he did before. He had been “blind,” not to the conditions under which he captured his slaves or the conditions under which he kept them. He had been blind to the evil of these acts. The scales fell from his eyes and he had a new purpose, a new story of what his life meant.

Stories of conversion are tremendously compelling to people from all walks of life, a chance to press the reset button, annihilate one’s past mistakes and re-describe oneself as an agent for good.

So, why, then do progressives recoil from the idea of conversion as their mission, their political strategy? Some, as I said above, comes from a failure of imagination, an inability to understand that different people have different theories of good and bad or good and evil, other than utilitarianism. Such blindness is inculcated through concepts like “social justice,” the idea taught in the caring professions, like nursing and social work, that those who disagree with us simply do not believe in social justice i.e. utilitarianism, rather than recognizing that those who disagree with us have a different theory of what justice is and that everyone believes in a social justice.

But the other problem is this: shame. Progressives believe that shame is unnatural and unhealthy. It is not enough to be a good person now; one must always have been a good person. The idea that one’s life’s work is one of moral elevation of the self is an alien one. To have been a bad person in the past admits a kind of fallibility and saddles one with a guilt that progressives imagine to be unendurable. That is because, by and large, while being very well-intentioned, they exist in a culture that engenders a lack of character. I fall back on the brilliant words of the film the Big Kahuna to explain what I mean:

PHIL: The question is do you have any character at all? And if you want my honest opinion, Bob, you do not, for the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet.

BOB: You’re saying I won’t have any character unless I do something I regret?

PHIL: No, Bob. I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done and you wish that you had it to do over, but you know you can’t ’cause it’s too late. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you to remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You really don’t matter in the end. Then you will attain character. Because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face.

Unacknowledged Shame Is Paralyzing Shame

I noticed this after the 2009 electoral reform referendum in BC. I was on a board of directors who made bad hiring decisions and bad strategy decisions that ensured the victory of the status quo. Had we made better decisions, individually and collectively, we would have offered British Columbians a campaign that made sense and deserved their vote. So, I issued a public apology for letting the movement down. No one else did. Everyone else blamed our adversaries for beating us, like that wasn’t their job. I recall after the 2015 election Ken Georgetti, former head of the BC Federation of Labour, write an Op/Ed piece stating that the NDP’s drop from first place to third was not the party’s fault or labour’s fault; their strategy was sound; it was the voters who were to blame for not finding it appealing.

In fact, progressives are awash in shame for their failure to avert the extinction event we are now facing. The shame they think they are avoiding has actually paralyzed them. And it is only by acknowledging that shame, by acknowledging one’s culpability, one’s past failures that one can begin anew and fight with the moral clarity necessary to challenge the global death cult that welcomes the extinction event. And that can only be accomplished through conversion, by acknowledging our shame, our loss, our failure and reorienting our morality through an act of contrition and humility and then calling upon others to do the same.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | December 9, 2019

Politics of Epistemology
American politics and culture is divided but describing that divide is tricky. Is it a cultural divide, an ideological divide. Here, I argue it’s an epistemological divide. People are fighting about how to decide what is and is not true.