Paper on Heidegger and Social Philosophy

Even though it's quite academic and metaphysical, I thought this paper on Heidegger on historicality and social phenomenology might provoke some thought. It deals with a small piece of the question of what distinguishes real existential or social philosophy from Dr. Phil psychology on societal scale. In other words, how can you be sure your philosophical social or cultural analysis really strikes the core of the lifeforms you describe.

For the real philosophy fans I found the 1947 letter exchange between Marcuse and Heiddegger on the internet. These letters shed a great light on the pain thinkers like Marcuse, Arendt, and Sartre must have felt to see their philosophical mentor embrace Nazism.

Every Cook Can Govern

C. L. R. James 1956
Every Cook Can Govern
A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece
Its Meaning for Today

I've come across a gem of an article by C.L.R. James, whom I suspect to be one of the 20th century's most inspiring historians. Apparently, he wrote a large number of important scholarly works in the 50s and 60s that explored entirely new terrain; and he had a knack for reading history for what it can tell us today.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.

Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

(...)

For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.

Books by C.L.R. James

People Power Politics

Compared to the last American government of course, the Obama administration is quite responsive to public opinion. But, to be frank, it should be clear by now that Obama’s policies are miles away from taking measures to dismantle the empire, take care of the poor in your country, set up single payer health care, or implement a crucial emergency rescue plan for energy and climate, for instance. The crucial question therefore, I think, is not what the current administration is proposing and doing, but rather what American activists will be able to achieve in the present historic window of opportunity. As Christopher Hayes expressed a similar optimism: "history is pointing in our direction". So in this article I would like to address the strategy of the American left, the vital actors who put pressure on the only state that can on its own seriously change the course of world politics.

I am of course not alone in calling for the active citizens of the US to think about the most effective way to act in the longer term. For example, former UN weapons inspector and anti-war drill sergeant Scott Ritter stated that the anti-war movement needs to reinvent itself:

“It is high time for the anti-war movement to take a collective look in the mirror, and be honest about what they see. A poorly organized, chaotic, and indeed often anarchic conglomeration of egos, pet projects and idealism that barely constitutes a "movement," let alone a winning cause.” ('The Art of War for the Anti-War Movement')

Ritter is often a little harsh and rigid to my taste, and understandably suffered from some culture shock after siding with anti-authoritarian activists, he does have an important point. I think it can help all of us to be shouted at by people like him from time to time. Not because activist groups need to organize in a military manner per se, but to become better at strategic forward thinking; setting objectives, and consequently figuring out concrete ways to achieve them. There is, however, one crucial issue he does not address: the need to formulate an independent radical vision of and for society. Strategic action is always a means to an end, it by definition only makes sense if it is instrumental to a larger goal. The task for the left is to formulate this alternative vision for society.

So the left does not only need to reinvent itself organizationally, but also ideologically. Theory is a necessary first step to opening up political possibility. These times of proliferation of crises should be used first and foremost to return to the fundamental questions and critiques of capitalist social relations, the state and its relation to capital, democracy in the economic sphere, the relation between the economy and the natural environment, alienation and consumer society and so on. The ongoing search for forms of collective action that transcend the now all too apparent shortcomings of liberal democratic capitalism is what needs to give the left a lasting sense of direction.

But in the mean time, reforms are urgently necessary to open space for radical ideas. Electoral reform and environmental reform are two illustrations of this necessity. Electoral reform is needed to break open the two party system, to show that the Democrats or the Republicans are not the only political options. And whatever society one would like to see take form, it will have to live with natural constraints like climate change, depletion of natural resources; in short the limits to growth. Our current transgression of the limits to growth is one fundamental difference between the situation in the 1930s and today. As a consequence of these new concerns, I would argue, the American left will have to seriously press for reform while engaging in a fundamental debate of self-reinvention. The issue is therefore not whether you should take a step back and think or act immediately out of a sense of urgency, but rather how to combine the two activities.

To determine a way to start realizing those long-term visions, it is helpful to think in terms of social processes. Quite understandably, the last eight years of the Bush administration evoked a serious amount of popular disenfranchisement; resulting in passive apathy but also active resistance. The depression and the bailouts have also motivated people to protest in the streets of New York, London and Strasbourg. People power has been on the rise lately. If the process of disenfranchisement continues during the Obama administration, it could very well become the foundation for a commonplace independent activist citizenry on the longer term, in which citizens organize, self-educate and determine their own course rather than limiting themselves to passively endorsing the Democrats, the Republicans, or being apathetic. The two essential missing ingredients are active organization and critical theory.

For some time, the campaign and election of Barack Obama took away a lot of energy from the movements. Especially in the weeks following the election the Obamania was absolutely intolerable. But lately, popular discussion and pressure increased by mainstream media is forcing him into a dilemma. If I understand the significance of the torture memoranda debate correctly, there are two possible outcomes. In the most likely case, Obama will keep to his line of only 'looking forward' and stop short of prosecuting those responsible for the torture under Bush (and during his own presidency! Democracy Now reported that since the closing of Guantanamo was announced, the treatment of prisoners there worsened significantly), which means he will bend and twist to keep the torture conspirators above the law. Such preferential treatment would be another sign that real change can only be the result of pressure from below, as was shown by the conservative staff appointments, the intensification of the war in Afghanistan, the silence during the Gaza siege, the Geithner plan, etcetera. Pressure would have to increase for the Obama government to make the changes that are necessary, pressure that will only come from your actions and patience.

The other possibility is that Obama shows himself willing to give in to pressure from below on issues that can draw on widespread coverage and popular support, and really allow prosecution. Just imagine Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld as defendants in court! That would be an amazing victory, again not for the Obama government, but for the American people; earned especially by those who have made the case for justice and fought for years to get to the truth of the matter.

If anything, this debate shows there is a chance to realize successes. The Obama administration is predictably wriggling around and torturing logic in avoidance of making powerful enemies, so do not be fooled into passivity if he will not go through with prosecution of those who allowed and committed torture. But there will be new chances. Anyone who has read books by Chomsky will know that there is no short supply of issues on which the policy elite, Republican or Democrat, opposes the views of a wide majority of the American population. Herein lies possibility of reform not only for the sake of reform itself, but also to show that another world is possible.

So what I would like to convey to you is this: for your own countries’ sake and for people around the world, self-educate and become effective. While engaging in the necessary ideological debates on the bigger picture, join an activist group if you haven’t already. Get into touch with other groups on a national level, coordinate and pick a topic to campaign on, have patience and try to use the mainstream media as your own platform. I am not saying that this will be easy, but when the chance is there, you have to be able to take it and use it well. Because, as we see in the recent debate on torture, it actually is possible to get even Fox News hosts to unequivocally denounce torture and call for prosecution of those responsible. You may not agree with how Shephard Smith puts his argument -“If we are to be Reagan’s shining city on the hill..”- but he was able to suddenly disrupt the indoctrination of millions of your countrymen. His broadcast outrage was as politically valuable a service as countless hours’ worth of organizing, licking envelopes, sending emails, having meetings and staging rallies. The trouble so often is, you need to latter to have the former; the very fact that Obama released the memoranda or that Shephard Smith felt the need to denounce torture to such a degree, are the sweet fruits of effective activism. Never forget that you, the active citizens of the US, are the real superpower.

Freek Blauwhof is a philosophy student and member of the Dutch Green Party, as well as the International Socialists.

Report from Strasbourg

RTL 4 News Report on the Dutch International Socialist Demonstration

Below this report is a transcript in English.

Last weekend I joined the Dutch International Socialists to try and peacefully protest NATO and the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine in the French border city of Strasbourg. While no demonstrations were allowed inside the city, we agreed to try to get into the city as early as 4 am on Saturday, where we were met with extraordinary police repression. The gendarmerie immediately fired tear gas grenades at our manifestation the moment we were first spotted in the Strasburg suburbs. This encounter would set the tone for the entire day. Nonetheless we tried to reach the city centre, but had to back off when the riot police threatened to hopelessly split open our already decimated group of, at that moment, around 300 protesters. This is where Sanne, interviewed in the news clip, got hit directly in the face by an exploding tear gas grenade. She, some other comrades and I locked arms and got away as quickly as possible while we were trying to reach the retreating group, resisting the gas and grenade impacts. Many fellow protesters, me included, got hit by explosive grenades directly aimed at our bodies. In several cases this resulted in injuries. Inside the protected 'orange zone', we got trapped by lines of armed and armoured riot police, who refused to let us out to join the major demonstration. We were locked in at an intersection for several hours, Over time other split off groups of demonstrators joined our blockade, and so we slowly regained morale.

It took determination and a lot of pressure before the riot police let us cross the bridge to join the planned major demonstrations. The battle for the bridge started when a bigger group of several hundred people joined our group cheering. The police felt threatened and moved in to ram us away from the bridge. We stayed our ground, lifting our hands in the air, chanting: "We are peaceful, what are you?". The pressure mounted and we were forced to retreat, but the police apparently feared retaliation and returned to the bridge. It was at this time that the 'Black Block' started rioting. The Black Block are a radical group of anarchists who want to beat the system with violence. They got increasingly worked up, reacting with stones, clubs and eventually a few Molotov-cocktails to the police blockade and their continuous volleys of direct tear gas and CS grenade fire from launchers aimed with laser guidance. They also lobbed deafening and dangerous sonic grenades. An especially grim detail we witnessed was that a medic in uniform got hit frontally in the crotch by another directly aimed exploding gas grenade. As he was dragged to the side of the road by his colleagues, they got hit as well while treating their colleague's wounds. The police definitely seemed to single out the medics.

It started to look like we might be surrounded for real, when, at precisely the right moment, a thousand strong group of fresh Englishmen, Greeks, Italians, Turks, Frenchmen and others gloriously tipped the scales in our favour. When we finally broke through the bridge blockade the riot police moved to the side of the road and let us through to the main stage; the starting point for the official demonstration outside the city centre. But a few hundred Black Blockers turned right one street later than we did, where hundreds of riot police let them set fire to a hotel and a bank office before they felt the need to quell the riot. We suspect the fires were allowed to happen because, from our stage site, we saw smoke coming from the other side of a wall at least half an hour before we heard any serious grenade and rifle fire. When it hit, though, nobody knew what would happen to the planned demonstration - tension was definitely in the air.

The manifestation was quiet, while the widely spread frustration with the Black Block got confirmed one more time. Another bridge was occupied by at least two hundred fully equipped riot police now blocking a route to the city centre, but this time we could just have passed them by. In stead of ignoring the gendarmerie and following the normal route for the demonstration, the black mob chose to pick a fight anyway. This incident resulted in intense fire with rubber bullets, water cannons, and a suffocating amount of CS and tear gas. Disappointed with these irrational rioters, we decided it was time to go home to the Anti-NATO village and called it a day.

As Strasbourg was my first demonstration at an international summit, I never expected this amount of violence. But neither did the more experienced members of the Dutch IS. We agreed to have a peaceful blockade before the main demonstration, something that is to my mind an act of perfectly legitimate civil disobedience to a refusal of right to free speech. However, it seemed that the police would not let a peaceful blockade happen. The police response combined with a Black Block that is immune to arguments of non-violence leaves little room for an honest and widely supported demonstration against NATO and the occupations in the Middle East. Still, we managed to win the sympathy of the local population in the city centre at least. We crossed a good part of the 'orange zone', and even got our message of peace and solidarity across two Dutch national television broadcasters. Reporting teams from the public news programme Netwerk (transmission Monday the 6th, 20:25) and RTL Nieuws (Saturday the 4th, 19:30) followed us in our attempt to cross the city.

I think our movement has two major problems that prevent it from spreading in the hundreds of thousands. The Black Block were in my view just as much a threat to our message as the riot police was to our right to convey it. Despite serious difficulties for peaceful protesters at this summit, we have reached more than a million of our countrymen who might see through the general picture of violent rioters as a result. I want to thank all the comrades who made our efforts a success in spite of everything with their courage, caring, solidarity, and clarity! THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!

Transcript:

(0m;0s) Suzanne Rosman: Compliments back and forth, Bastiaan, eh, outside people are apparently less happy."

Bastiaan Hetebrij: "You can say that again. There have been demonstrations in both Germany and France today, as was the case yesterday and the day before. Some fifty protesters got wounded in the process today, and colleague Jeroen Akkermans got up very early this morning to report from the demonstrations."

Jeroen Akkermans: "Columns of smoke over the NATO summit. Strasbourg is the scene of riots and fires despite the enormous security operation. A group of around 100 Dutch socialists is on it's way early in the morning, but time and time again they find the police in their way."

Maina: "Emm, look, this is also not what we are looking for, but we want to make our voices heard against the war and escalation here today. It's hard, but we do it nonetheless."

Jeroen Akkermans: "De police fears spontaneous action and ar present on every corner of the street."

Pepijn: "If it were up to us, then all those security measures, that whole 110 million would not be necessary, because we are not out to kill those world leaders at all, our intention is to forcefully make our voices heard."

Bart and the IS: "A! Anti! Anticapitalista! A! Anti! Anticapitalista!"

Jeroen Akkermans: "Next to Bart, disguised protesters are singing along."

Jeroen Akkermans: "That protesters disguise themselves. Is that okay?"

Bart: "Yeah, I think it's okay, but erm, I don't understand the reason for it. Because protesting I think is something you do in complete openness, to plead for ewaul rights, human rights, democracy, I don't do that in disguise, and I would like to ask everyone to do it without disguise."

Jeroen Akkermans: "Because?"

Bart: "Because we don't have anything to hide, literally."

Jeroen Akkermans: "But this is not the place nor the time where protest is allowed. Also the police without uniform sees more and more protesters join in."

Maina: "So, firstly, this is a good feeling that we are with so many, by the way I have to take some measures now, but this is an excellent... development..."

Jeroen Akkermans: "Because?"

Maina: "Because, eh, there's a line of, er, riot police coming towards us, and we are a little surrounded."

Jeroen Akkermans: "The police fires with tear gas regularly. The protesters are not impressed. They retreat, only to advance later. Afterwards rocks are being thrown. The police beat with t heir batons, and people get injured."

Sanne: "All of a sudden there was this kind of BAM, and then this thing had exploded in my face."

Jeroen Akkermans: "But do you think this is worth it?"

Sanne: "I don't understand, why in a city like, you know, Strasbourg, we don't have the right to peacefully protest, in that sense I think it's really true: 'This is what democracy looks like.'"

Jeroen Akkermans: "Finally the demonstration is allowed to start, far away from the NATO leaders.(2m:46s)

More Reports: G20 Demonstrators Get Interviewed by OneWorldTV in London

Watch OneWorldTV - Interviews from the G20 protests in London in News  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

On Science, Philosophy, and Public Debate

Philosophers are fond of saying that the way you conceive of a problem, theoretically or practically, already determines a range of solutions you might end up proposing. This is often considered the domain and 'practical use' of philosophy; not to answer questions but figuring out which questions to ask. Empirical science, then, deals in actual knowledge of the world around us, and is therefore able to answer questions that one formulates for some practical sake. Economists can tell us what happens when the Fed prints money to help banks, ecologists can tell us when a particular patch of sea is fished beyond its carrying capacity, and physicists can tell us how to produce energy in new ways.
So lets apply this distinction to what we are doing here; to figure out from which perspective(s) we can meaningfully analyse the moral problems posed by the economical, ecological, and political crises we read about all the time. It should be quite clear that figuring out which questions to ask is not just the job of the philosopher. In most cases you don't just need the analytical training of the philosopher to formulate the right questions and points-of-view, you also need to know something of the object-field you're talking about to find out whether the concepts you use apply well enough to the problems at hand. For example; depending on which economist you take seriously, the current worldwide recession could be a problem of failed regulation of the financial markets, it can also be a problem of greed, maybe the crisis stems from the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself, or according to others it's the free markets' self-cleansing process. Depending on your beliefs on technology and energy resources, whether these beliefs are considered and well-argued or complete faith, you will have a different idea of the possible futures for the real economy.
These scientific problems, or at least problems of applied philosophy of science, show that you need to have some sort of understanding of the matters of fact you are talking about to make a judgment about the ethical side of the topic at hand. And as it is my goal on this blog to find the right moral questions to ask, this kind of philosophy needs science just as science needs philosophy. Without a critical understanding of disputes within the sciences we cannot possibly decide which narrative to cast our moral discussions in. To put it in a simpler way; differences of opinion on the scientific level (do CO2 emissions lead to increased worldwide temperatures?) so often lead to disagreement on the moral level (Should we make a serious effort to reduce our CO2 emissions?).
This realisation is especially relevant for people who are, like me, convinced that main stream science cannot give us a satisfactory analysis of some deep crises that confront today's societies. If you are dealing with peak oil, the limits to growth more generally, trying to revive discussions about economic democracy, or understand the current economic collapse in terms like Richard Wolff's analysis (in systemic terms of unsustainability of lending workers' money in stead of increasing wages), you first need to convince people that your theoretical approach to the topic is legitimate. Only after that can you start an ethical discussion based on acceptance of a new analysis. So if we are going to understand, let alone raise awareness of the moral imperatives in this relatively new world of scarcity, climate change, and collapse of the debt bubble that allowed so much concentration of wealth, we have to fight on both these fronts.
But something is happening; the old free market narrative that was held up to disguise a system of state support for big corporations has now become so unbelievable that a lot of critical people are trying to reorient themselves. In these times there is an opportunity for ideas that are developed in the margins to enter the main stream. If we get this right, we might just be able to build the foundations to have public discussions about some real issues at last.

On Connecting Dots

When I picked up Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' a few weeks ago in an local bookshop, I knew it would prove a very valuable source of information. And the book indeed surpassed my expectations as it documented a systematical and conscious fine-tuning of a kind of 'laissez faire on speed'. The book follows a wealth of historical examples that reveal again and again that behind the facade of supposedly 'objective economic truths', the free market model is actually an antidemocratic seizure of the public sphere for capital to commodify and marketise.

In normal English, Klein compares today's neoliberalism with the classic days of Adam Smith: "Under Chicago School economics, the state acts as the colonial frontier, which corporate conquistadors pillage with the same ruthlessness and energy as their predecessors showed when they hauled home the gold and silver of the Andes. Where Smith saw fertile green lands turned into profitable farmlands on the pampas and the prairies, Wall Street saw "green field opportunities" in Chile's phone system, Argentina's airline, Russia's oilfields, Bolivia's water system, the United States' public airwaves, Poland's factories - all built with public wealth, then sold for a trifle." Crucial to Kleins' argument is that this is all made politically possible by powerful people exploiting crises and shocks -whether it be military coups, mass torture, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or hyperinflation. And to take the argument even further, the useful crises have often been artificially designed or manipulated with the express purpose of creating these new frontiers for lucrative investment. In short, 'The Shock Doctrine' reaffirms the classic picture of expansionist (crony) capitalism by documenting it in historical and political context.

This alone is already quite heavy stuff to digest, but the narrative is still acceptable for a broader audience. It's still common, at least in left wing or academic circles, to follow Klein in her connection between crises, repression and corporate expansion. This is considered respectable; connecting two themes that, in the main stream media seem "totally unrelated", may require arguments and justification to many, but is perfectly within the scope of debatable discourse. However, what happens if you start assembling a larger picture from combining Klein's account of the shock doctrine with other plausible but deviant investigations?

I can simply no longer keep this conclusion to myself. I need to share it with people at least once. The point to the shock doctrine, using moments of crisis to reduce the public into a regressive, childlike state, to create a window of political opportunity for 'free market reform' and resource grabs, seems to me exactly identical to the motivation for the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. At first hesitantly, I reviewed some of the literature on the attacks of September 11th; especially David Ray Griffin's 'The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions', 'War and Globalization' by Michel Chossudovsky, and Michael Ruppert's 'Crossing the Rubicon' helped me clear up my mind on the matter. It seems only reasonable and, frankly, unavoidable to conclude at the very least that the US intelligence and top officials knew of the attacks before hand. The evidence is just too overwhelming. For those readers who need this claim backed up, just pick your favourite story. The insider trading cannot possibly be statistically accounted for without assuming foreknowledge. Whistleblowers like Mike Vreeland who warned of attacks months before they happened were being ignored, in Mike's case he was kept tucked away in Canadian prisons. The head of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) Mahmood Ahmed wired 100,000 dollars to Mohammed Atta shortly before the attacks and then spent a full week before, during, and after the attacks in the United States, meeting with CIA director George Tenet. Various people like New York fire department chief Nick Visconti, George Bush, and Rudi Guiliani displayed knowledge of the second twin tower and building 7 collapsing before it happened. Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder to building 7, admitted in a jawdropping interview that he gave permission to blow up building 7 with explosives. All this is documented in the three books I mentioned, and the list of evidence goes on much further. Are we just to ignore this or can we conclude something from these verifiable basic facts?

At least so much has to be concluded that the Bush administration top officials like Dick Cheney welcomed the attack, had intensive ties with one of its main financiers Mahmood Ahmed, and did their best to make the attacks pass through the most standard of air defense procedures. We can also be sure the Twin Towers and building 7 could never have collapsed from just the plane crashes; never before 9/11 have steel beams collapsed from fire and never after. Knowing all this, who could doubt that 9/11 was one of the most ambitious attempts yet by a closely knit ideological clique, to whom the shock doctrine is the bread and butter of advancing their politics, to advance a plan they debated and planned years ahead in publicly available documents. Both foreign policy 'realist' Zbigniew Brzezinski in 'The Grand Chessboard' and the neoconservatives of the Project for A New American Century in 'Rebuilding America's Defences' were speaking of the necessity for a new enemy to galvanise the American people into supporting an endless 'War on Terror'. Reading the Shock Doctrine confirmed my suspicion that this was nothing new, it was just high time for a daring new phase in the expansion of capital. In 'The Last Oil Shock', David Strahan writes that Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, had been arguing in 1998 that the Western oil industry will very quickly lose its productive capacity if the industry doesn't gain access to Middle Eastern oil. In dire need to open up the critical markets for pushing the envelope of collapse, a few shock doctors were willing to go a step further. (Again, all my factual claims are publicly reviewable. If in doubt, ask me for sources.)

Naomi Klein, however, would not agree (publicly at least) with this analysis; in interviews she repeatedly stated that the attacks were exploited immediately afterwards, but she won't say anything on guilty parties or intention behind the attacks. No need to look further into these obscure matters nobody can know anything about, the consequences of the attacks are all we need to build our case on, she says. Like many people on the left and in activist movements, this is where the scope of Klein's critique stops short of coming full circle. One has to ask, what event has been more of a watershed in the return to imperialism and realpolitik than 9/11? Surely one of these rare moments, on par with the Reichstag fire or the Gulf of Tonkin incident is worthy of the same investigative rigour as Klein applied to other shocking events?

Asking the same questions, many frustrated 9/11 skeptics developed notions like 'left gatekeeper'. Influential writers like like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Naomi Klein are seen by these 'truthers' as serving the 'powers that be' by stopping the dominant critical discourse short of investigating 9/11. They keep the issues that would be too undermining to those in power marginalised, and are therefore must be somehow complicit. In return, Chomsky, Klein, and other public intellectuals claim the 9/11 issue takes away energy from more real and actual concerns. And so the stage is set for tensions between those who think a proper understanding of 9/11 is central to understanding the war on terror and those who think the subject is irrelevant. Sometimes the debate can be a quite juvenile case of left infighting over who is more subservient to power. A debate not worth getting dragged into, one that needs to be transcended. I prefer to take from people on both sides of the debate what knowledge I can.

The inability to officially come to terms with 9/11 can be best be explained in terms of ideology, as Zizek uses the word; for him ideology is made up of 'unknown knowns', the assumptions we do not explicitly make but that implicitly guide our actions. You can sort of feel it in your gut what is speakable and unspeakable, there is no need to communicate the rules explicitly. Connect too many dots that the mainstream media and so the general public do not relate, and you are seen as simply outside legitimate debate. The herd mindset kicks in and arguments don't matter. Connecting junta coups and laissez faire economic policies as inherently related is acceptable. Adding 9/11 as the new high score to beat for shock doctors makes you a strange conspiracy theorist. And adding peak oil to explain why 9/11 was so essential for business, that the motivation was not just simply profit but the need to stay in the game for American industry and the American empire as a force in the world, and probably to be the 'last man standing' in the coming resource scarcities, that is just another bridge too far.

At this risk of sounding crazy, I want to assimilate as much knowledge of what is really going on. Every thinker quoted or linked to on this blog I believe holds an important piece of a puzzle that is too large to ever complete. The point is to try and see how much of the puzzle we can assemble in an attempt to understand the world we live in. I realise that is difficult; the more relations you see and issues you integrate into one single narrative, the more assumptions seriously need to be justified and double checked. But I believe there is no topic that a priori precludes objective investigation. The real problem is not that careful research into all these issues is impossible, but only the fear of falling down the rabbit hole we should try to overcome.

Why bother?

In many ways, what this page is all about is a combination of a positive perspective of advancing the plight of common people with a negative acknowledgment of the limits to growth. This combination is a contradiction in terms to many people, and so, most of the time, political debates keep to one topic or the other. That's why, on the one side, 'Malthusianism' is a derogatory term for misanthropes who really want a 'cleansing' of our overpopulated planet. (Texas radio host and New World Order conspiracy theorist Alex Jones actually puts Henry Kissinger and the Club of Rome in one and the same category.) On the other side it explains why 'peakniks' often find Chavez' use of oil revenues to create a welfare state naive in the extreme.

Issues like peak oil, the current world wide economic collapse and climate change tell us about how life has become harder and will become much harder still in the future. Looking through all the literature and information it seems like the era following the second world war was a friendly time of rising prosperity and the consolidation of the middle class, accomplished by pushing problems into the future, with the future beginning just about now. From this perspective, many people discard the aspiration for a good life for all people on this planet as a tragic wild goose chase, reminiscent of Tantalus' eternal torment in Hades.

It is very understandable that the limits to growth have turned precisely those committed people with a social conscience into utter fatalists. How can humanity possibly improve its fate when at a peak of prosperity inequality has spiraled out of control, leaving half of the world population in dire poverty and lacking the most basic of necessities? In a desperate attempt for some kind of hope and meaning, these environmental (and/or Marxist) determinists retreat into a more soothing geological timescale. They hope that even if we are not able to stop the ongoing collapses of the economy and ecology and the societies that depend on them, wiser future generations will scavenge a sustainable economy out of the corpse of industry and the natural resources it left unscathed.

I have been, and in darker moods still am one of those fatalists who retreat in their impotent determinism. The scarce forces that point in the good direction are so often so lacking in coherence and determination. But even if our darkest fears will play out as predicted, it would be good to know that someone tried to do something. You probably heard that one before, so let me put the argument another way; I also know that there are more than one or two possible futures, even if there are increasing natural boundaries to what is possible. As anyone who traced back the contingencies of his birth knows, the present world is the result of an infinite number of causes, both natural and human. Like ripples in a pond, actions that seem insignificant might change the world incrementally in unexpected ways, and you never know what is possible unless you take the initiative to find out.

What I have become increasingly convinced of is that as scarcity, climate chaos and economic collapse become ever more frightfully real, we should least of all abandon our social ideals. To many of us in the West solidarity has a quite abstract meaning; it means softening the sharp edges of the market, or giving a coins to charity. We have quite forgotten to practice the moral convictions that now seem like intellectual allegiances. As life gets tougher, we might actually have to make some more concrete life choices; we might have to share our food even if that means that we have no desert ourselves. We might have to start really opposing the international trade regime that has so systematically kept the third world underdeveloped to stimulate overconsumption in the West, in stead of just bandaging the results of this scandal with our charity money. To take seriously the imperatives of ethics, to do something for the other will only gain in its already critical importance, in small scale daily life or in grand scale international politics.

Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurter theorist and co-writer of the profound 'Dialektik der Aufklärung' is famous for saying that ethics should not be about individuals solving dilemmas in concrete life situations, but about avoiding that individuals find themselves in those situations. In other words, it should be a philosophy of social systems, not of the actions of the morally autonomous individual. I believe we need both. If we just do systems ethics, the now disappears as a moment of action and ethics becomes an interesting but ultimately pointless battle of ideology, while actual politics is left to the usual players. On the other hand, if we just do dilemma ethics, we get things like the hypocritical and shallow practical ethics that Peter Singer has been trying to escape from.

In stead, we need an ethics that is visionary enough to imagine all kinds of ways to advance the plight of common people that are now still unthinkable or politically impossible. We need that kind of broad understanding and orientation now, and in the dire years to come, to shape better societies than the ones existing now. But a better society has always been a long way away. For the shorter term and more limited scope we also need to think seriously about the moral choices that we face while we are still living in the self-destructive and often cruel systems that are in place at the moment. And, to use a rhetorical trick again, even if everything goes wrong, I would still prefer to live in a broken society in which people share their scarcities than in one where people fight each other over them. The point is that only by taking seriously both of these dimensions of ethics, both Singer and Adorno, can we profoundly make sense of what we should do to curb and to mitigate the tide of the collapse of economies, ecosystems, and societies that we are very concretely facing.

So to retreat into a deterministic analysis of capitalism, population growth, and environmental destruction I think is a mistake. Not because the analyses are wrong, but because it denies the present of its importance, being the only sliver of history over which we have any kind of influence. Capitalism may be inherently expansionist and self-reinforcing, poverty and population growth may be locked in the most cruel of positive feedback loops, and we may be too late to stop both serious climate change and the peak oil worst case scenario, but never will I give up on the only thing that can prove the predictions wrong; action by conscientious and strategically savvy people in the here and now. And I hope that anyone kind enough to read this article to the end won't, either.

The Ethics of Climate Change and Peak Oil

Download paper on climate change and peak oil

Download paper on climate change and peak oil

What can ethics say about the different limits to growth that we are beginning to experience? In beginning to explore this question, I presented this 6000 word paper at a conference on the ethics and politics of climate change this January. I am still busy expanding and reviewing it. All commentary welcome as usual.

Paper on Philosophical Anarchism

Download Paper on Philosophical Anarchism

What if states cannot be legitimate? That is, what if we don't have a moral obligation to obey our states? Would that justify a 'war of all against all', as Hobbes would have it, or would states still be justified in their everyday coercion? This 3500 word paper of mine deals with the consequences of philosophical anarchism, and is followed up by a 2500 word discussion between me and my teacher dr. Mokrosinska.