BODY

“Physical life in general is nothing else than this perpetual interchange of the objective and subjective relation … We enjoy, and are enjoyed.”  Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence Of Christianity. 

Breathing the oxygen that becomes a trillion cellular furnaces  accelerating you through space, determined, graceful, strong, eyes alive to any impediment, fresh sweat on your face in chilly sunshine paradox, resonating hammer beats of heart against ribs, inflation and contraction of lungs.

Beginning the gentle touch that becomes a lithe caress that becomes liquid entwining, orgasmic electricity, peaceful melting together, then blissful exhaustion. 

Being that oceanic feeling of dissolution in the space your body occupies, sheer being present in immediate thereness, floating as a weight that is not heavy.  

Swimming in the dizzying  euphoria  of too loud laughter binding one to the others in irreverant camraderie of the night. 

Curling against the killing wind outside in the saving warmth of cotton and down and love, drifting into the all-enveloping darkness and silence of temporary not-being.

Arising into a moment when existing is uncomplicated, senses joyously alive to the presence of objects,  nothing more asked.

////

MIND

“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.”  Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 

Failing forever to hold back that gnawing termite thought that unravles the fabric of the argument you have worked so hard to create.

Racing dread of incapacity to accomplish all that remains undone, deflation of the satisfaction you felt with what has already been achieved.

Piercing memory that comes from nowhere to remind you of what you should not have said/done/thought but did.

Drumming self-doubt reverberating daily, warning that pride cometh before a fall, thus better to not value anything you accomplish too highly, lest it prove unrepeatable.

Agonising in the truth that time drains inexorably away, constricting the circle of possibility more and more tightly around you.

Believing, rightly, on the basis of still-accumulating experience, that nothign you can do will ever be enough or fully adequate in any respect.

Are the alarm clocks of mainstream journalists set to the tune of broken glass?  After ignoring a strike of 186 000 students in Quebec for almost 8 weeks, some minor vandalism and a scuffle or two with the cops has set off a flurry of coverage.  Objective reporting soon grew dull, so it was replaced by patronising critique.   Once again, people coming together to exercise democratic power in opposition to the further erosion of public goods are denounced as selfish, blinded by the comfort of their historic “entitlements.”  Like disobedient children, they need to be taken behind the barn and whipped with the harsh lash of reality.

One does not need to study metaphysics to know with what reality these students need to be lashed.  It is the reality of unemployment or drudgery.  The wages of the sin of expecting that a society that prides itself on freedom of choice really means that you have a choice– about what to study, about how to organize politically, about whether to accept what politicians try to impose upon you–  is condemnation to a life of servitude. 

You are free only to make the right choices.  What are the right choices?  The  stern, uncompriomising, right wing  intelligence of Margaret Wente can tell us.  From her pulpit on Front Street, 500 kilometers from the action, she has discovered that, “the protesters do not include accounting, science and engineering students, who have better things to do than hurl projectiles at police. They’re the sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts, and victim-studies students, whose degrees are increasingly worthless in a world that increasingly demands hard skills. The world will not be kind to them. They’re the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it, because the adults in their lives have sheltered them and encouraged their mass flight from reality.”

She did not mention whether the journalism students were with the protesters or still at work acquiring the “hard skills”  needed to pontificate in press.  But no matter.  Let us seek further insight into reality.

“A university degree,”  she continues   ”is no longer an automatic ticket to a decent job and a pleasant living. According to a devastating story by The Associated Press last week, more than 50 per cent of recent university graduates in the United States are either unemployed or working in jobs that don’t require bachelor’s degrees. They’re more likely to work as “waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined” Margaret Wente, “Quebec’s University Students are in for a Shock,”  Globe and Mail, Tuesday May 1st, 2012  (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/quebecs-university-students-are-in-for-a-shock/article2418431

Now, forgive me if I err, because I only have three worthless philosophy degress, but has she not just undermined her own argument?  First, she chides the social science and humanities students for wasting time with degrees that will not land them a job, and then she cites a “devastating”  report from the Associated Press which suggests that even students with the “hard skills” demanded by today’s hard reality are facing difficulties finding work.  If engineers and physicists and other useful people are having to work as waiters and waitresses, might there not be something wrong with the economic system, indeed, with the entire set of priorities of this society, and not with the choices young people make as to what to study?  Is youth unemployment in Spain 50% because too many young people are studying philosophy and not enough physics?  

In any case,  the economics of youth unemployment are not my main concern here.  My main concern is the value of education both for the individual who becomes educated and for the society that invests resources to educate them.   Let us set aside the invidious contrast that Wente wants to assert between the pure and applied science and professional degrees on the one hand, and humanistic and social scientific work on the other.  Regardless of what one studies, what is the reason to study it?  Wente seems to believe that the entire value of education lies in the job it leads to.  Let us accept this answer, but ask:  what do we mean by ‘job.’  Do we simply mean paid employment?   As Wente points out, you do not need a university degree to find a paying job.  But what if we mean more than paid employment, what if we mean “opportunities to contribute to the value of the lives of others in the society of which one is a part.” 

I think that this desire to contribute is an excellent reason to study.  But how many ways are there to contribute to the value of the lives of others with whom one shares a social life?  Far, far more than there are subjects in university.  But let us just stick to those subjects for the moment.  Do only engineers and business students have something to contribute?  Is life about nothing more than making money and buildings things?    Life in capitalist society is increasingly about nothing more than making money and building things, but it does not follow that there is no value in practices and activities that lead to insight and understanding but not money.  There is a reason that the disciplines devoted to interpretation and understanding are called ’the humanities.’    

John Rawls, commenting on the idea of great German humanist Wilhelm von Humboldt that the good society is a “social union of social unions” argued that “we may say, following von Humboldt, that it is through social union founded on the needs and potentialities of its members that each person can participate in the total sum of the realized natural assetts of the others.” (523, 1971)  For Rawls, a just society was not merely procedurally fair, but substantively valuable for its members.  In order to be substantively valuable, it has to make a place for everyone with something to contribute, whether that contribution be scientific, practical, artistic, or scholarly.  A substantively valuable society is a harmonious unity of different talents, pursuits, goals, and interests all contributing to the end of enabling each to enjoy their lives, rather than just survive.  Attaining this society is not an engineering problem, but requires political, philosophical, moral, and economic imagination, as well as ‘hard’ skills.’   By ensuring place for all talents and interests that enrich and humanise life, a good social organization enables the progressive ramification and deepening of the whole wealth of human intelligence and creativity.  The good society is not a world in which everyone is forced to sacrifice their interests and talents for the sake of maintaining mere biological existence.  It welcomes difference of purusit and goal as the very essence of human community. 

The real issue at stake in the Quebec student strike, as in protests against austerity in Greece and youth unemployment in Spain, is not tuition rates or wage levels, it is the legitimacy of a society that brings new life into the world but prepares no social space for human living.  What is at stake is the legitimacy of a society that reduces every commitment to an “investment”  in personal monetary payoffs in the future.  What is at stake is thus the legitimacy of a society in which no one is ever present, engaged with the object of their interest, because they are forced to instrumentalise their present for the sake of a secure future that never arrives.  Commentators genuinely concerned with the well-being of students should be fulminating against the moral absurdity of a world that does not take care to ensure that there is space for everyone to contribute in their own ways to collective well-being, rather than against the students exercising their democratic power to protest against this absurdity.     

Is a society in which politicians deploy the interests of children as weapons in a struggle against reasonable opponents of their austerity agenda democratic in any coherent sense of the term?   There were undoubtedly elements of bargaining table theatrics in Ontario Education Minister Laurel Broten’s threat to eliminate 10000 elementary school teaching positons if the teachers’ union did not accept 0 % wage increases.  (Rob Ferguson, Tanya Talaga, and Kristin Rushowy, “Teachers, MDs Warned Over Pay,” The Toronto Star, Friday, April 13th, 2012, p. A1).  Nevertheless, the Minister of Education,who is responsible for the health of the institutions in which the cognitive and imaginative capacities of the next generation of Ontarians are cultivated, openly threatend to ignore her responsiblilities to those students in favour of responsibilities to the institutional bond holders who own Ontario’s debt- the only group that will benefit from the ‘fiscal restraint’ announced in the provincial budget.  

Let us think about the deeper grounds and implications of this threat.   Teachers, defending their right, not to a wage increase, but to free collective bargaining, are attacked by the Education Minister as the potential cause of a decline in educational quality, even though the only way those jobs could be lost is by her decision to eliminate them.   There are three fundamental moral contradictions implicit in the Minister’s attempt to make teachers’ bargaining demands rather than the government’s own policies responsible for compromising the public education system.  Teasing them out tells us much about the value disorder under which Ontario, and the world, is currently suffering.  

1.  Preaching responsibility to everyone else, never accepting it oneself.  It is a great virtue to have the courage to assume responsibility for one’s actions.   Neo-liberal ideologues never tire of lecturing the unemployed, the drug addicted, women, and the poor about assuming responsibility for their lives.  Yet they never assume responsibility for the destructive consequences of the policy options they impose upon these targets.  Why not?  If the policy prescriptions are sound, should they not trumpet their authorship of them?  If austerity raises the level of unemployment, and the government that imposed the policy sincerely believes it was the right move, then why not take responsibility for the effects and say:  “Yes, our policy did cause higher unemployment, and that outcome is good, because unemployment generates downward pressure on wages, which increases profits, and profitable investment is the lifeblood of the capitalist system.  Yes, unemployment causes deep psychic trauma as people are forced to contemplate themselves in a world that has no use for them.  Yes, these traumas generate further pathologies like addiction and violence, and these are good too, because they give us a reason to intensify the disciplinary-surveillance-repressive powers of the state, which makes political organizing more difficult, which means that it is more likely that we will be able to continue on with the austerity agenda, even though it is so demonstrably harmful to people’s shared life-interests.”  Yet, we never hear the architects of these problems make these admissions, but must endure their sermonizing to the victims to pull themselves up by their own hair.

2.  Self-sacrifice is virtuous, but only those over whom power is exercised are called upon to practice it.  Broten’s  arguments play upon the nobility of individuals’ being willing to attenuate their short term monetary interests so as to help in the collective effort to improve overall economic health.  It is true that a willingness to devote oneself to a valuable collective project, even at some costs to oneself, is a virtue.  But this abstract moral truth is put to perverse use time and again by politicians whose policy choices attack and undermine those who are actually making a contribution to the public good.  The real contributors to the common wealth of material  and symbolic life-value– those who build, educate, create, clean, heal, etc.–  are only asked to sacrifice after they have in fact already been sacrificed.  Then, when people resist being treated as tools of an agenda which they have had no part at all in framing, they are denounced as ‘greedy special interests.’   The faceless, fractional minority who actually reap the returns on these assaults but which invests nothing of their gains back into the society from which the money has been extracted happily continues to gorge itself free of criticism and condemnation.   

3.  Exalting freedom, and then blaming every political (free) decision on an abstract necessity that is impossible to resist.  This contradiction expresses the massively destructive moral-political logic of no alternative.  Where and whenever politics requires blood on the floor, there some overweeing necessity– God, the Fates, the Market (notice the identity of logical function)–  will be invoked.  Contradictions 1 and 2 presuppose 3 as their condition of possibility.  Responsibility for the sacrifice of others’ life-interests requires a subject onto which this responsibility can be off-loaded.  The more impersonal this object, the better.  If there is no one to blame but quasi-natural forces which no effort, individual or collective, can resist, then there is no political problem (i.e., no problem which changes in the structure of collective governance could solve).   Thus, even if organized resistance would not be met with force, there would be no point to it, since there is no alternative.  Hence, you should bleed silently, but know that it is for the best, because freedom requires the sacrifice you are rightly forced to make because you have lived too high off too many hogs for too long.   

Acting on the basis of the truth of 3 is tantamount to commiting social suicide.  By ‘social suicide’ I do not refer to the extinction of the species, but to the willful destruction of society as a free association of self-conscious agents who decide together how they will live.  If we really must sacrifice every life-valuable institution:  public education and public health care, publicly funded cultural and artistic spaces, open civic and natural space; if we cannot invest collectively created wealth in opening the intellectual and creative horizons of every person, if instead we must be forced to eliminate all of these life-goods for the sake of a credit rating, then we have lost the humanity it has taken millennia to create.     

But is there no hope?  Perhaps it is concealed in the existence of the very contradictions which led me to my dreary conclusion.  Can one not detect, beneath the prevarications and displacements, a silent acknowledgement of deep wrongs being committed?  Could it be that the contradictions are signs that the executors of this destructive value-program recognise that they are  undermining the institutions, relationships, and practices that define the very civilization they claim to uphold?   Why else would they work so hard to deflect attention away from themsleves?   Could it not be, as John McMurtry has argued, that “state and corporate agents will go to any lengths to provide cover-ups and rationalizations” for their assaults on the shared life-interest because they know that human consciousness cannot long bear life-destruction.  Learning who the causes of life-destruction are activates “a civil commons identification” of human life with other human life, an identification that can “cross classes, cultures, races, and genders.” (The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, p. 214). 

This civil commons identification carried the spark ignited in Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Greece, New York, and across North America in the Occupy Movement.    These movements are seeking to reconnect human sccial organization to the life-value ground with which it has lost touch.  This reconnection is not about higher salaries or special interests, it is about collective self-governance and free self-development–  the due of everyone now alive for millenia of struggle against exploitation and oppression of all sorts.

One might think baseball beneath the dignity of philosophy.  I have always found, on the contrary, that drinking beer all afternoon in the sunshine is most conducive to everyone who partakes becoming  a philosopher.  What is beneath the dignity of philosophy is bullying on the one hand and servility on the other.   Philosophy neither issues nor accepts commands, but only arguments and reasons.  To either command or be commanded is beneath the dignity of humanity because both are antithetical to thought.  Thinking is what allows us to make oursleves, and the capacity to make ourselves is what distinguishes human being.  

This past week the manager of the Miami Marlins, Ozzie Guillen, had the misfortune of thinking in the presence of money.  At a press conference he admitted that he admired Fidel Castro.  In response, the owner of the team, Jeffrey Loria, suspended Guillen for five games.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/10/ozzie-guillen-suspended–fidel-castro-marlins_n_1414666.html

Ordinary sports fans, mostly working class people, tend to react with disgust when professional athletes go on strike  The press now has a ready-made formula to channel this hostility.  It is billionaires vs millionaires, the headlines scream.  The hoi polloi are exhorted to cast  a pox on both their houses, until it is time to start buying tickets again.  As the suspension of Guillen proves, however, it is not the figure on the pay cheque that confers real power.  Real power derives from controlling the resources that enable one to amass the wealth that allows one to sign those cheques.   As we can see, those with real power control body and mind– not only whether you work, but what you are allowed to believe  and to say. 

In this case the spectacle is made more disgusting because of the racial dimension that cannot be kept from view.  The Venezuelan Guillen is publically humiliated and forced to confess his sin by the white owner speaking as the mouthpiece of the colonial past of Cuba, trying to protect his investment from the wrath of anti-revolutionary Cuban-Americans pinning for the good old days of Hemingway and whorehouses. 

There is great beauty in human athletic achievement, as there is great beauty in nature, in people, and in the arts of all sorts.  Why should our aesthetic judgements be extended to the dancer and denied to the hockey player?  It is not just the individual talent in sport that is beautiful, but even moreso the poetics of space, the constant adjustment of players to each other that creates each game as a unique, spontaneous, living whole.  The problem is not athletes and sport; the problem is that athletes and sport are increasingly seen not as the outcome of their own work, discipline, and talent, but a mere function of the monied owners who pay them.

So absolute has the hold of money over all things become that fans now cheer for the team through the mediation of cheering for the owners.  In Buffalo, Terry Pegula, the new owner of the Buffalo Sabres, is openly referred to as ”saviour-” and this in a country of religious fanatics.  In the more restrained Canada, fans in Winnipeg have confined themselves to turning the national anthem into a hymn to True North Enterntainment,  the company that brought the Jets back to Winnipeg.   While some might take offence at the equation of divine grace and national identity with egomaniacal sports owners, the fans are only expressing the truth of our world-  money is god and the greatness of nations.   

What are we to say to this omniverous colonization of human talent?  I think that there are enough academic critiques and political slogans.  I think we need someone to speak as real people speak.   And I think we could find no better spokesperson than Ozzie Guillen, who up until this point has never been afraid to speak his mind.  So, I think we need Ozzie Guillen to become Ozzie Guillen again and let his anger rise up.  And when his anger at being treated as the subordinate of the monstrous ego of the owner has become fever-pitched he needs to find a microphone.  And he needs to stand in front of that microphone and say:

“Jeffrey Loria, go fuck yourself.  I’ll be managing next year in Cuba.”

Hasta la victoria siempre!

John Brown: Watching, Photo: Josie Watson

As one looks at Watching a reverential image of a buddha on a podium dissolves into the static violence of the observing soldier .  The enlightened one becomes an eyeless, networked seer, reporting and receiving instructions, guarding, warding off.  The form is human but without a face:  sentient but non-living; one with the machine that protects and defines it.   The lifelessness of the watcher is emphasised by the extraordinary darkness– literally and metaphorically–of the image.  There is an almost total absence of individuating detail in the figure,  the background threatens to absorb it completely.  And yet, here at the moment of almost total loss of the human there is still illuminating light that gives shape and structure to  the figure.  Even the watcher requires light, and where there is light, truth can be seen.  The light allows the watcher to be watched and the truth to be seen.

John Brown: Stupid # 1

 

Stupid # 1 is thematically and compositionally related to Watching, but is even more horrifying in the separation between human form and humanity expressed in the figure, a towering cyborg whose simple lines remind one of the robots of 1950′s and 1960′s science fiction movies but whose contemporaneousness with 21st century military technology cannot be doubted.  ”Stupid” means to lose one’s faculties of sense, discrimination, and thought– to be scared stupid is to be frozen, incapable of intelligent action.  The cyborg is stupid– insensate and unthinking in any human sense; even more pityless and remorselessly threatening than the helmeted watcher.  All traces of any possible human-hearted connection with whomever it might encounter have been abstracted out of the painting.  Again, there is no face.  All that remains is the solid shadow form looming.   Here too the figure is individuated not by any features peculiar to itself but by the light that radiates from behind and from the side.  But the figure seems to be stepping in front of its source and positioning itself to wall off the last rays.  When the light is gone for good, there will be nothing more for us to see, nothing more for us to bear.   

 

 John Brown:  Prince Albert                                                                                                                         

John Brown: Prince Albert

 

The violence of machine functioning is interrupted by the playful, comical rear wheel, obviously too flimsy to support the heft of the machine.  But the real power of the painting is the intricately painted, colourful and ambigious form in the centre.  There is a suggestion of organic structure here.  But is it a body that has been churned to bits by the machine?  Or is it a body slowly materializing by a centripetal force drawing towards the centre the uncountable chromatic particles-  the streaks of colour left over from scrapping away heavier layers of paint– that populate the open but bounded field of possibility that forms the background?  

 

John Brown:  Victoria

John Brown: Victoria

 

A more threatening– but in a way, even more comical (look at the wobbling front wheels and the cartoon-dragster wheel in the back) –companion piece to Prince Albert.  It is hung, appropriately, on the same wall, and in some ways best viewed from afar, so that both can be seen together.  On first glance the painting seems to be derived unambiguosly from an armoured car.  Yet, towards the rear the dark solidity of the metallic structure begins to dissolve into colour and space.  Is the space reclaiming the hardness of the iron, or is the iron devouring the empty space?  Possibilities opening up and closing off at the same time.   

 

John Brown:  Waiting

John Brown: Waiting

An extraordinary expression of  the indistinct architecture of memory.  A disused industrial structure – the old mine-  floating in space just as the mental image that memory summons floats free of all context in the mind’s eye.  The almost complete absence of detail intensifies the power of the image, just as the abstractness of the mental image intensifies the desire for its object.  There is a longing in this painting– for the human beings who have long since left the scene?  for a return to an earlier time?  The structure is paradoxically solid and diaphanous.  It cannot contain anyone or anything.  Despite its stony materiality it cannot keep anything out or in.  We do not see into it, but through it and beyond it. 

John Brown:  Listening 

 

John Brown: Listening

 

Like “Waiting”  “Listening” has a nostalgic air about it.  A rectangular structure perches upon a rusty-coloured arched surface not unlike the soot-blackened reddish granite of Sudbury’s ancient mountains.  But what is one to make of the structure that dominates the centre of the piece?  As with ”Watching,” the figure undergoes a transformation the more one looks at it, but this time from non-living to living.  On first glance, it seems inert: a box, a cage, a chest?  Look longer, and what seems initially imprisoning and lifeless becomes comforting and sheltering of a living form.  A chair with its back to the viewer in which is resting  a person, an old woman perhaps, her head slumped to the side, resting, in the warming and healing embrace of its arms?  Peaceful, silent, finally able to rest.     

 

John Brown:  Eating

 

John Brown: Eating

 If there is a common element to the paintings in this show it is the pardoxical nature of the central images.  ”Eating” is perhaps the most paradoxical.  On one level, it is the most obviously representational–  can the machine be anything other than a warplane, an F-35, streaking through space soon to exit the viewers frame of reference?  But the longer one looks the less obvious it becomes.  As in “Victoria”  and “Prince Albert”  there is again a transition between living and dead elements–  the engineered, rectilinear geomtery of the black machine and the freer form greeness escaping the confines of the airframe.   On longer view, the whole image seems suspended:  suspended in time and space, hovering above a target, suspended between  programmed purpose and the free articulation of living  substance.                                                                                        

John Brown:  Speaking                                                                                       

John Brown: Speaking

 

“Speaking” is the only painting whose central image seems purely organic.  At the same time, it is completely indefinite– its curves and its colour suggest life, but it is not a representation of any whole being.  It is more reminiscent of  Gericault’s body-part studies, or even Rembrandt’s or Soutine’s sides of beef, than a portrait or even an allusion to or an evocation of a coherent living whole.   Yet the paint radiates an inner light outward, as people at their most beautiful are said to ‘glow.’   The inner light that helps us bear the enclosing gloom. 

Hope?

New York

The city is the concentrated energy of the contradictions of the last three centuries.  Colonialism, capitalism, globalisation, financialisation generating poverty, homelessness, segregation, racial, ethnic, and class violence but at the same time forming the womb for the Chrysler Building,  St. Mark’s Place,  jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, Walt Whitman, Stonewall, Martha Graham, Louise Bourgeois, Abstract Expressionism, Philip Guston, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Paul Auster, Don Delillo, the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, Chuck D.,  Sonic Youth, Sharon Jones…_n

 Coursing through it all, the unchoreographed dance of ceaseless human motion.

Between the grey elegance of the Brooklyn Bridge and an already-cliched-before-it-was-finished Frank Gehry condominium stands Pace University.   In the middle of this architectural contradiction takes place the Left Forum 2012.  The urban-loving left-wing intellectual is a contradiction in the midst of a contradiction in the city of contradictions:  powerless to resist the exhileration of having a role in the dance; confusion as to how a system he has come here to criticise could have given rise to a creation so irresistable.

Left Forum 

In its 30 year history the Left Forum has never been so large.   Animated by the Arab Spring and Occupy,  4000 participants gather to listen, argue, and exchange ideas on every imaginable subject: public education and public health care, economic crisis and nationalising the banks, the politics of twitter and life without money, ecofeminism and how to avoid climate catastrophe, the possibility of new socialist party formations and the role of religion in the struggle for social justice.  Militant ideas, articulated from a diversity of  perspectives, academics and activists swapping stories in the halls, local and global orientations co-mingling.  Best of all, objective evidence that America is not lunatic Santorums and ‘reality’ tv, but down-in-the-trenches fighters for a democratic society.  For a moment,  political dreams are freed from  historical doubts. 

At the same time, a sense of missed opportunities.  There was the Occupy think tank on the first night, but at the plenaries, just luminaries talking at, not discussing with.  Why was there no attempt to bring 4000 people together to talk politics, tactics, strategy, goals, organization, means of institutionalization and transformation?   Everyone too much in their own rooms –just like university–  pursuing their seperate interests, all the while asserting the need for unity, direction, organization, etc.  But the organziers organized no space or time to allow this unity to be created. 

There was talk of a crisis of leadership in the unions and on the left.  Indeed.  But this raises a frightening prospect:  what if leadership and genuine social progress are antitheses?  What if leaders are motivated only by the power of command, not the value of the idea?  Then those with leadership qualities will pursue power, either through the vehicle of established parties, or by transforming whatever opposition movement they lead into an establishment party.   In that case, solving the problem of leadership would be a pyrrich victory at best.  Historical doubts return to silence political dreams.

So no leaders then– horizontalism, social media, reclaimed space, the right to the city, liberated zones, spontaneous order, self-organzation.  So good in the saying and in the hearing, but no match for the very vertical blows of organized state violence. 

Exuberant, said Frances Fox Piven at the closing plenary, exuberant she said she felt.  Cannot feel the same way.  Where is the left today that it was not at when the Forum began? 

Youth Riot

On Saturday evening, Zucotti Park, a missed opportunity to get involved.  Michael Moore was speaking but felt disinclined to listen to celebrity lecturing.  Afterwards, however, Moore asked people to march to Zuccotti Park, to mark the sixth month anniversary of Occupy.  Peaceful initially, but then, for the crime of sitting down,  the cops attacked, arresting dozens, injuring a few.   Youth organizing themselves to fight non-violently for solutions.  Together, constructive, peaceful, thoughtful, engaged, having fun, creative, happy.  If only one could say the same for the police.

On Saturday evening, London, another group of youth, a corporate-programmed herd, doing what they have been told to do, drunk with leprechaun hats and green shorts.  A new defence against taking responsibility:  inference from internalized media-created stereotype-  we are ‘x,’ therefore we are supposed to do ’y.’  No thought, no resistence.  Result? Not constructive, not peaceful, studpid, ignorant of the meaning of existing in social space, drone-like, destructive, thinking they are happy but really miserable in the face of a hard world that is not going to do them any favours.  But rather than try to change it together, they flee from the task into their ghettoes and hope someone else will deal with the problems.  Also attacked, beaten, but who feels inclined to help them now?  

Enjoy life, by all means, but learn to govern yourselves, because if you do not govern yourselves, someone else will, and that is rarely the better option.    

Norman Finkelstein at

Palestinian Human Rights Week

University of Windsor

Wednesday, March 7th

Norman Finkelstein spoke to a standing room only crowd at the Ambassador Auditorium last night.   He was a deceptively powerful speaker whose quiet intelligence shone more and more intensely as his argument developed.  My aim here is not to give a complete report on its content, but rather to expand upon certain of its core principles in ways that I feel might be relevant for the Canadian left.  These reflections might usefully be read in light of the questions I posed in my  December 8th, 2011 post, “Open Questions.” 

Finkelstein has recently turned his attention to the Indian struggle for independence, and in particular the political thought of Mahatma Ghandi, for ideas that can help bring about a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.   Finkelstein claims to have learned from Ghandi that the fundamental assumption of orthodox Leninism-  that political passivity or conservatism springs from ignorance that only the vanguard party can overcome–  is materially false.  People are not ignorant of the structural problems that beset their worlds.  No, people are not stupid, according to Ghandi, they are lazy.  The problem of politics is thus not education and enlightenment, but overcoming inertia.  The way to overcome inertia, argued Finkelstein, is to present the political public with a coherent  agenda for immediately realizable solutions to a fundamental problem. 

He proceeded to support this claim with what I regarded as an effective thought experiment.  He asked the crowd to consider two movements that shared a critique of capitalism, articulated this critique in identical manifestos, but presented the public with different practical demands with regard to the specific problem of the suffering of homeless people in cold climates.  The first manifesto concludes by asking people to donate spare coats to the homeless; the second manifesto asks the same people to donate a spare room.  The second manifesto, Finkelstein argued, is the more moral, but the first the more political.  

If people were willing to deeply reflect upon their duties to their fellow human beings, and they had a surplus room, they would feel obligated to offer that room to the homeless.  The problem is, people do not fully reflect upon their duties to their fellow human beings, and even if they did, most are psychologically incapable of fulfilling this duty if it means giving up something that, while surplus, is also of essential importance:  their privacy, their space.  If we try to base politics on moral demands that most people are incapable of living, then we will be moral, but we will also not solve the problems that stimulate our moral consciousness. 

The first manifesto makes demands that are less than a fully human morality would require, but it would also most likely generate a wide response.  The problem of homelessness would not be solved, but the problem of the homeless freezing would be.  The program of the first manifesto will not solve every injustice caused by capitalism, but it does mobilise people to effectively meet others’ real unmet needs for warm clothing.  The point is not that a politics of charity is preferable to structural changes.  The point, rather, is that serious political commitment must be commitment to action, action, to be succesful requires broad social movements, and broad social movements can be activated only around goals that people believe are achievable in a given social, political, economic, and cultural context.   Adherents of the second manifesto could rightly object that the movement does less than is required to solve every structural injustice.  The problem, however, is that this critique is academic, made from a position of political isolation, and thus incapable of bringing about the change it demands.  It fails to provide people with either rooms or coats.  It will leave  the pressing material need unmet and the structural causes of need-deprivation unchanged, because it asks of people more than they are capable of giving.  It will fail to build a political public, and it will remain an impassioned, but pratically useless , critique.

The first manifesto builds a political movement, argued Finkelstein, the second creates a cult.  While his use of ‘cult’ might sound like an invidious slur against the far left, that is not how I interpreted it.  I did not sense that he was being dismissive of radicality in politics, or implying that people who insist on a morally pure politics are dupes or brainwashed.  Rather, I think that he meant by ‘cult’ a self-selecting group of people capable of great discipline and sacrifice, but who are incapable of reaching and motivating a broad social movement, because most people are not willing to impose that degree of discipline upon themselves.   So the question he posed was:  do you want to belong to a political movement that can make an immediate difference, or do you want to belong to a cult that has abstract plans for perfect solutions, but lacks– and will always lack– the power to bring them to effect? 

I have belonged to a cult, in the non-pejorative sense explained above.  I learned a great deal from truly thoughtful, caring, engaged people.  I participated in a number of struggles, but never in a fully committed way, because these particular struggles were always for us instruments of building our own movement.  But we never managed to grow, and, as I now think back on that time with Finkelstein’s argument in mind, I can see clearly why we did not.  Most people wanted to belong to a political movement that could make a difference, not master the abstract intricacies of Marxist theory. I did master those intricacies, and today I am a full professor of philosophy who struggles constantly to motivate myself to act, because I am capable of providing elaborate theoretical critiques of any partial movement, so well did I learn my lessons.

Overcoming this inertia, not in my own case exclusively, but across the broad spectrum of Canadian citizens who are concerned about the environment, an economy that can provide meaningful jobs, a society that makes a place for its young to contribute, that has transcended the utter spiritual vacuity of capitalist consumerism, demands that a new left arise that is capable of figuirng out what the political public is willing to do right now to advance these demands.  There are different movements addressing different aspects of each of these problems, and many left-wing intellectual like myself have tried to supply moral, political, and theoretical unity to them.  But where is the practical program that links the abstract and the concrete in winning mass struggles? 

I wish it were otherwise but I think it is clear that Finkelstein is correct.  Most people with something to sacrifice are not willing– unless circumstances have become comprehensively catastrophic–  to sacrifice it all for the sake of political activity.  There are a few people who are capable of giving everything– all their intellectual and emotional energy, their time, their resources,– to the fight for the morally best world.  But most are not, at least not right now.  Yet, people are cold, and the problem is how to get them warm right now.  A new left needs to begin with modest goals.  Modest goals do not require the new left to be a creature of existing parties, which have no goals beyond power, or to take on board any illusions about the possibility of a just and democratic capitalism.  Modesty means asking not “what is to be done?’ absolutely,  but ‘what can be done?’ right now.

In a brilliant essay, one of the best on Marx that I have read, Andrew Collier argued that Marx is more kin to the traditions of British conservatism (think Edmund Burke, not Margaret Thatcher) than to British liberalism.  He means that for Marx political values are not fauna of disembodied reason calculating private advantage, but flora of the soil of long traditions.  Transformational politics can only succeed if it anchors itself in these traditions:   “What he shares with conservatisim is his belief that starting from where we are rather than an idea of where we want to go, and asking what can be done, not for the good of people in general, but for the good of these people, with these tradions, these needs, these skills, these resources.”  (Andrew Collier, “Marx and Conservatism,” Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, 2009, pp. 99-100)  The real structure of Marx’s politics was thus not utopian, as both liberals and conservatives often accuse those politics of being, but, as I have argued elsewhere, ‘organic’– an on-going living development rooted in existing plateaus of achievement and oriented by realizable goals that demonstrably build up and out from solidly that which exists right now.  If a new left is to be built, it has to start from an honest accounting, not only of where we are, but where we can realistically go as a first step.

“Rien faire, comme un bete, lying on water, looking peacefully at the sky, being, nothing else.” (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 157.

If one desires the peace of being, nothing else, why not look to rocks rather than animals?  For it is the mineral, not the animal kingdom, that  truly has nothing to do.  It persists, it supports, but it does not act.  Yet it has structure, it has beauty, it erodes and becomes soil and enables life without intending it.  It holds up the entire human world, but philosophy has nothing to say about it.

Not so the worldviews of the people of the First Nations.  Many of their sacred spots are anthropomorphic rock formations.   Typically, one assumes that the place has become sacred because the rock reminds the community of the human form-  the spirit has shaped the rock to take on the appearance of a person.  Could there not be a deeper wisdom in the opposite interpretation?  What is the opposite interpretation?  That it is not an immaterial spirit –animating power, moral centre, directing intelligence– that has shaped the rock to look like a person, but the spirit is rocky substance– solid structure enduring across aeons, the ground linking generation to generation, the underlying basis supporting collective effort across time, resistent to impetuous change but tolerant enough to permit alteration over the long-term, a universal foundation that joins everyone whose feet touch the earth? 

Philosophy needs the geologist’s sense of time in order to understand the development of the conceptual tectonic plates that organize our lives.  If we do not understand these, we literally do not understand the cultural ground upon which we stand.  If a rock that lasted billions of years were conscious, imagine the depths of reflection and understanding it could accomplish.

Speed is crucial if you are prey to something else.  But if nothing is hunting you, why not stay still for a moment?  Concentrate.  Pay loving attention.  Explore the nuances of the environment that surrounds you.  Caress it.  Smell it.  Hear it.  You might never return to that spot.  Learn its depths before departing. 

I was staying in a hotel on the straits of Mackinack over the summer.  The landscape was familiar to me, as it was just like the landscape of my boyhood home in Northern Ontario.  But this was Northern Michigan, not Northern Ontario.  I let myself feel how I was feeling.  I felt at home and not at home.  Strange, but wonderful.  But that is not the whole story.  Standing on the balcony of  our room one evening I noticed a family from Japan.  Stretching before them were the straits, the muscular rocks and evergreen forest of the Canadian Shield, the gently arched back of Mackinac Island.  They saw none of it.  They took stupid tourist photgraphs of each other with their I-phones. 

Years ago I wandered the streets of Old Jersusalem looking for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, magnificently lost in the labyrinth of alleys and cramped streets, one minute exposed under the baking desert sun, the next covered by ancient vaulted arches, now in a spacious square, now in a crowded casbah inhaling the scent of uncommon spices, now coughing up five scheckles to see the spot where my entrepreneurial friend assured me Jesus first picked up the cross, now coughing up five scheckel for a Maccabee beer in a youth hostel in the heart of the Old City, my mind totally given over to reflection on the multiple architectures, histories, and hatreds that vibrate across this space.  But aside from the people who lived there, I seemed to be the only one alone, and the only one paying attention.  Everyone else was part of a tourist group, all behind a camera or video camera lens, all of them totally alienated from the life around them. 

Why be anywhere if you are not going to concentrate on where you are? 

People have utterly lost the ability to feel comfortable being by themselves.  Josie and I were having lunch in Toronto awhile ago and a young man sat down next to us.  On the other side of him was another couple having lunch.  Instead of reading the paper, or daydreaming, or staring at the walls, he immediately dug out his laptop and  started sending emails.  I could feel him worrying that others would think he was totally bereft of friends, and so instead of just enjoying his lunch, he made a great show of letting us all know that he did too know other people, people who wanted to hear from him.  Come to think of it, I don’t even know if he bothered to eat.  I think he might have just had a glass of water before making up some excuse to the waitress and leaving.

Being able to be alone is hard, but it is a condition of being interesting to other people who are capable of being interested in interesting people (which is not everyone).  Where does emotional and intellectual depth come from if not from reflection upon what our experiences have meant to us?  But that reflection requires time, silence, and solitude.  People do not like silence, because when there is no other sound you have to listen to yourself, and it is generally painful to hear what you have to say.  Our doubts and failure speak louder to us than our triumphs.  

The Morally Inverted World of the Conservative Party of Canada

Like their cousins to the south, members of Canada’s Conservative Party never tire of reminding everyone that they are a party of ‘values.’   There is no end to their pieties about the sanctity of life.  Yet everywhere in practice they support economic policies that despoil life’s conditions, political practices that trample its physical and moral integrity, and intellectual strategies that substitute demonization for reasoned, evidenced refutation of opposition.  In just the last week Public Safety Minister Vic Toews exemplified this catastrophe of rationality and morality.  One day, he quietly instructed the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to accept information obtained under torture.   The next day,  he warned Canadians that we are under potential threat from environmental and anti-capitalist terrorists.  And then three days after that, he denounced opponents of intensified  police-state spying on electronic communications as supporters of child pornography.    

Do you oppose torture as the worst possible assault on the moral and physical integrity of human beings?  Then you are an  appeaser of terrorism.

Do you believe that people of the First Nations should democratically decide whether pipelines carrying tar sands oil should cross their lands?  Do you believe that an economic system that systematically devours the natural life-support system is materially irrational?  Do you believe that an economic system that fails to alleviate absolute poverty, provide opportunities for meaningful and socially valuable work, and treats working people as dispensible and disposible spare parts is structurally unjust?  Then you are a potential terrorist.

Do you believe that you should be free to  read and watch and talk about your interests free from government and police surveillance?  Then you must be a child pornographer.

This is the morally inverted world of the Conservative mind: 

torture = life-preservation,

 environmental and economic destruction=  the good life,

massive expansion of police powers=  personal freedom.

Totalitarian Closures

Considered politically, totalitarianism is an attempt to institutionalize the supremacy of a single ruling party whose interests are asserted to be identical to the real interests of those over whom it rules.  Since this identity of interest is demonstrably false, the totalitarian seeks to create by exclusion and erasure  that which he or she cannot create by persuasion or superiority of values.  Competing ideas and values must be effaced from the social, political, and cultural landscape.  Only once there is no alternative to identify with can the society-wide hyperconformity the totalitarian mind requires be secured.   

The drive towards totalitarianism of rule is therefore always correlated with a totalitarian closure of mind to anything which is not identical to its exclusionary value-system.  Hence totalitarianism always proceeds apace with caracitured demonization of opponents on the one hand and rallying symbols to bind the faithful together against the outliers on the other.   The overt aim is to do away with the need to publically argue against and refute opposed views.   

Harper has made no secret of his desire to permanently entrench ‘conservative values’ in Canadian social institutions.  This struggle manifests both symptoms of the totalitarian disease noted above.   The possibility of rational disagreement is excluded from the outset:  if you disagree, you must be some sort of criminal.  And if you are not a criminal, not only must you agree, but you must manifest this agreement by rallying around the symbols of moral-political purity–  the flag, the armed forces, the Queen.      

Hatred of Life’s Spontaneity

As I noted above, the Conservatives make no secret of their desire to protect life.  At the same time as the Public Safety Minister is celebrating life by sanctioning the torture of living beings, Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth is employing “pro-life”  rhetoric to attempt to re-impose anti-woman limits on abortion.    

But what is life, and what is it to be pro or anti-life?

Life is fragile and depends upon material conditions outside of itself for its support.  To be pro-life is to defend the integrity and life-support capacity of the natural world.   But as we have seen, for the Conservatives, environmental defence is potential terrorism.

Sentient life is conscious of its surroundings and its life-requirements, both for its survival and its development.  Human sentient life seeks to build and enhance the social conditions that enable it not merely to survive, but to unfold and enjoys its vital capacities.  Collective life is therefore creative of the conditions that allow individuals to create themselves as a unique bearer of value.  To be pro-life is to support movements seeking to improve the conditions supporting individual self-creation.  Creation of the conditions for self-creation demands enquiry into the arrangements that best enable full and free self-development.  Where existing arrangements are found wanting, life’s creative nature pushes on beyond the prevailing limits  towards new ideas, institutions, relationships, and practices.  This process is constructive, not destructive.  To the Conservative, it is potential terrorism.

But spontaneity, development, and self-differentiating movement is not terrorism, it is life-value in action.  It is opposed only to the systems of external control and on-high rule that the totalitarian mind needs to feel safe.  The totalitarian mind fears that which it cannot control, for that is not subject to external control can develop, become self-catalysing freedom of thought demanding freedom of action and the enhancement of the conditions that support both. 

With finite resources human minds and hands create infinite worlds of meaning.  This creative power opposes itself to all attempts to engineer it for specific purposes, to impose external controls upon it, to make it serve the particular interests of groups whose enjoyment of temporary power causes them to flatter themselves as possesors of ultimate truth.  Because they flatter themselves as the last men, totalitarians cannot abide change, growth, development, unfolding, or novelty.  Totalitarianism is motivated above all by the small-minded desire to control every process from on high and the outside, to steer everything to a pre-determined conclusion.  That is why they sing old pop songs grown inoffensive with age  but send real artists fleeing from their presence as if  from them as from the Reaper.  They are death for creative thinking and practice. 

Anyone who disagrees is immoral and should be silent or disappear. 

Let’s be immoral and visible and demand that the world be set morally right side up. 

There has been much proselytising amongst the globe-trotting atheist set lately.  The last several years are full with books by big names (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchins), hipster press stories about the atheist bus (at Christmas time no less!, quelle scandale), Hitchins’ death sparking a new round of books sales, and now Alain de Botton’s plan for atheist “temples”  to secular virtues.   

De Botton’s plan has provoked the expected reaction from the doyen of non-believers, Dawkins.  He has protested– boringly– that atheists do not need temples. (We have the starry heavens above at which to marvel).  Instead of temples, he says the money should be spent on secular, scientific schooling.  He does not mention anything about aesthetic, emotional, or political education.   Maybe those sensibilities just develop “naturally.”    

This spat is so uninteresting that one can only imagine it hatched in the backrooms of  publishing houses to generate discussion on the cocktail party circuit frequented by the well-heeled who once thought about becoming intellectuals, until they realized that a lot more money can be made doing other things but who still want to sound like they are philosophically attuned.  

This merry band of atheists stroking each others egos and fattening each others’ royalty cheques is every bit as unbearable– because just as self-righteous– as the fundamentalist lunatics from whom they claim to be rescuing the world.  As is obvious from the term, atheism, a-theism, i.e., not-theism-  is not a set of positive beliefs.  Atheism is not any set of definite beliefs.  It is not a virtue, and does not necessarily lead to virtue.  It is not a form of knowledge.  It commits one to no positive set of values.  It is the rejection of a belief in any sort of universal steering principle (God) guiding the universe in a definite direction.  That rejection is certainly a liberation from illusion, but in itself it does not make you good or bad, clever or stupid, cultured or philistine.  It is really not any more interesting a subject of conversation than why one is a Presbyterian. 

But the new atheists tend to sell atheism as if it were salvation and redemption from irrational religion and its homicdal acolytes.  All evils are traced back to the door of belief in things that are not empirically evident and not provable by scientific means.  Train the kids in alegbra and population genetics and there will be no more war.  The ahistorical foolishness of such arguments predictably invites a rejoinder from the believers:  the real mass murderers are the atheists.  

No debate  between atheists and believers is complete without the body bag debate.  The Crusades!  Stalin!  The Inquisition!  Mao!  Global Jihad! Pol Pot!  9/11! …    

What gets lost in fixing one’s moral compass by the poles of identity “atheist” or “believer”  are the multiple forms of value the things and creations of this world express at different scales of order, complexity, and function.   Mathematical deductions can be examined for logical rigour, but the logical rigour can also be examined for elegance and simplicity.  The entire field of mathematics can be admired for its modelling power, but also as an extraordinary creation of the union of imagination and intellect even if it had no application to anything beyond itself. 

The song is the formal arrangement of notes on the page, the artistry of the musicians, the sound waves causing the eardrum to vibrate, and also the mind seized by the melody, the emotions seized by the key and chord changes, the body seized by the rhythm, the memories it summons as it unfolds.  

The rock is a complex lattice work of molecules, but its shimmering colour captures the child’s imagination.  It is also a dollar figure, a potential weapon, a paper weight, a curiosity for one’s guests to discuss, the potential subject of poetry or painting. 

The ultimate origination of things (Leibniz) is a problem, but is it really more important than the scales of value our mutliple relationships with the things of the world establish?  Zero sum debates between atheists and believers tend to predicate things being valuable on their ultimate origin, God, or nature.  But then, isn’t that the solution:  God, or nature.  For Spinoza, the terms were synonymous, but he phrased the synonymy in a delightfully ambiguous way.  The atheist can naturalise God, the believer can deify nature, and both can get on with the more important business of valuing existence and things that exist, attending to human problems, and expanding the scope of life-affirmative relationships between people and between people and things:

“The free man only desires to join other men to him in friendship, not repaying their benefits with others reckoned as of like value, but guiding himself and others by the free decision of reason, and doing only such things as he knows to be of primary importance.” (Spinoza, Ethics, Proof to proposition 70, Part 4).

Now, friendship, like reason, is a creature of this world, and the things of primary importance must also be things of this world.  Things of primary importance are things that sustain life, and no reasonable person can disagree (for if they did, they would soon cease to live, and therefore to be reasonable as well).  Since the abstract answer to the question of how the things of this world originally came to be, by evolution or by God’s will, does not sustain life, it is not a thing of primary importance.  Nothing but abstract truth is riding on the outcome.  But as Marx said, “The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question.” (“Theses on Feuerbach”).  There is a time and a place for scholastic questions, and there are people with whom reasonable people cannot be friends.  But reasonability is a matter of listening, attentiveness, and willingness to enlarge the scope of one’s thinking and valuing; it is a virtue, but neither secular nor religious.  Everyone needs to strive to practice it well, not to support its entombment in a temple.