After reading the report of the panel that they assembled to look into the financial sustainability of Ontario’s postsecondary institutions, the Ford government probably wished that they had heeded the advice implied in an aphorism from the 1001 Nights: He who asks what he ought not ask will hear an answer he does not want to hear. Asking the panel to look into the financial health of Ontario’s universities and hoping to hear that it could be improved by slimming down faculty fat cats, the government instead heard that their own funding policies are the primary threat to a secure future for Ontario’s post-secondary system. Surprisingly and encouragingly, the panel urged the Ford government to increase funding. Unsurprisingly and discouragingly, the government ignored that recommendation and insisted that institutions find more “efficiencies” in the way they use resources.

The panel defines financial sustainability as: “the financial capacity of the public sector to meet its current obligations, to withstand shocks, and to maintain service, debt, and commitment at reasonable levels relative to both national expectations and likely future income, while maintaining public confidence”(15). They boldly concluded that any threats to the financial sustainability of the sector were functions of government policy. Ontario colleges and universities receive the lowest per capita provincial funding in the country. That low level of funding has fallen further in real terms because of inflation. The negative impact of both factors is exacerbated by the on-going tuition freeze in the province. Adding these factors together, the panel found reasons to worry about the financial sustainability of this model. None of the provinces universities are in danger of becoming the next Laurentian, yet, but an over-reliance on international students, especially in smaller and comprehensive schools, jeopardizes their future should international enrollments dip.

Since I work in the university sector and have no direct knowledge of the college system I will limit my comments to the panel’s analysis of universities. I find myself in broad agreement with the panel’s recommendations on the need for increased funding, but worry that whatever good increased funding might do will be compromised by the committee’s assumption that changing labour market needs should guide university program development.

Before I fuss about the potential bad, I will discuss the good. The report begins with a frank acknowledgement that provincial policy and not wasteful spending is the root cause of the ‘challenges’ that universities and colleges are facing: “The province’s colleges and universities have faced significant challenges to their financial sustainability in recent years. In 2017, as part of the Strategic Mandate Agreement process, direct provincial funding to support domestic enrollment at colleges and universities was effectively frozen. The number of funded domestic students a college or university could enroll was fixed, as was the finding per student.. Two years later, the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities were further challenged by the province’s decision to reduce by 10% the tuition rates paid by students.” will continue through 2023-24.” (6) While most everyone involved in the sector would agree that the tuition reduction was a good thing, it nevertheless increased the financial strain on universities because it was not matched by higher government grants. As the report notes, the opposite happened: tuition was frozen and grants reduced (once inflation is factored in, the per capita domestic student grant fell from from $8514 in 2008 to $8350 in 2021)(18).

At the same time as grants and tuition fell, the Province’s enrollment corridor system effectively capped the number of domestic students that universities could enroll (17). One might wonder why the government would impose an upper limit on the number of domestic students an institution can enroll. Aren’t higher enrollments the key to sustainability? Yes, and no. The government has not imposed enrollment limits, but only enrollment limits on domestic students, because government grants to institutions must increase as enrollment increases. By limiting the number of domestic students it will fund, the government thus limits its costs. (The corridor model also indirectly serves the interests of smaller schools outside the Greater Toronto Area, by preventing the three big Toronto schools from throwing open their doors and enrolling everyone they can. The limits mean that it is at least possible for schools outside the GTA in regions with stagnant population growth to attract students who cannot get into U of T, York, and Toronto Metropolitan).

The government attains cost certainty but the institutions have no way to earn additional revenue, unless they can recruit international students. The provincial government does not fund international students. Institutions are free to recruit as many international students as they can, and charge them whatever tuition the market will bear, and they have. The intense recruitment of international students is not an act of multicultural solidarity but pure financial necessity. The report notes, in sombre tones with dire implications that “many colleges and universities are past the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students. They are financially sustainable only because of international students.”(38)

The dramatic increase in the number of international students and the creation of programs tailor made to attract them (and the much higher tuition that they pay) prompts the question of whose interests are being served? The panel addresses the question and answers that, in principle, increasing numbers of international students are good for institutions, the country, and the students. The panel notes that international students are a “source of needed talent and desired population growth. They also bring a number of benefits to the on-campus experience for all students.”(37) The federal government seems more concerned that a tipping point has been reached. A new policy will double the financial requirements applicants must meet in order to obtain a student visa in an effort to put a stop to unscrupulous recruiters exploiting prospective students, put “degree mills” out of business, and reduce pressure on local housing markets unable to cope with the influx of international students.

But there are also critics in the home countries of these students. The report notes that international students bring a needed supply of talent to Canada, but that means that those talents will be realised here and not in their home country. He was speaking to a domestic audience, but the point that Indian Marxist political economist Prabhat Patnaik was making should inform Canadian thinking on the matter of international students as well. “If using tax payers money to subsidise students who go on to have lucrative careers is ethically questionable, using tax payers’ money to subsidise students with lucrative careers providing services in the advanced countries is even more so. It constitutes both private appropriation of public resources and a ‘drain of wealth’ overseas … The existing system of allowing ‘brains’ to ‘drain’ away needs to change.”(203, Re-Envisaging Socialism) To be fair, the report was not commissioned to work out just political economic international relations, but everyone involved in higher education in Canada needs to think about the consequences of attracting the best students from the Global South for the nations from which they are recruited.

The focus on international students is also having a profound (and mostly negative) impact on the intellectual structure of Ontario universities. The report notes that in 2021-22 63 new University programs were approved, 75% in health and STEM, because those are areas “of high labour market demand. All these programs identified career pathways and strong ties to business and industry.” (13) Many of these programs are designed explicitly to attract international students. Getting institutional and government approval is a massive undertaking. Any new program must prove that there will be demand for its graduates and it must be at least cost neutral (bring in as much money as running the program will cost). The implications of these trends are dire for the humanities: undertaking the sorts of innovative pedagogical transformations that I think we need to undertake would require approval of new programming, but proving to the institution and government that labour market demand exists for graduates will prove a difficult task.

The problem is not that humanities graduates do not find work, (at the University of Windsor, 83% of Humanities graduates were employed after 1 year, 97% after 2– a higher rate than Sciences, Social Sciences, and Engineering). The problem is that the government wants to see very specific demands for very specific credentials. I have never seen a job add (outside universities) for a philosopher in the way one sees ads for physiotherapists and medical diagnostic experts. Humanities departments, already threatened by low enrollments, could well enter into a death spiral: low enrollments rule out investment, lack of investment impedes the ability to re-think and re-organize how we deliver humanistic education, our faculty ages and retirements are not replaced, course offerings need to be consolidated, consolidations impedes our ability to recruit, until finally the last retiree turns out the lights and the corridors go dark, forever.

The report was not concerned with how Universities spend their revenues, but one cannot disconnect provincial and institutional priorities. In public, administrators and politicians always say the right things about the importance of the student experience and the enduring significance of the humanities, but when push comes to shove, as in the case of Laurentian, the philosophers and literary critics lose their jobs. Institutions cannot simply buck provincial demands: they remain dependent on government grants for a large portion of their revenue and the government has the final say on the creation of new programs. I prefer catastrophising to naive optimism (I am never disappointed when worse comes to worst). Perhaps we humanists will find away out of our precarious state, but simply increasing operating grants will not help us. Other things being equal, those additional resources will be allocated to the “growth centres” in the university, and, with very few exceptions, those disciplines will be in STEM and professional programs.

I do not begrudge my colleagues in those fields the resources that they need, but I do think the universities need to reject the activity-based budgeting models they have adopted in favour of a more whole-institutional approach. Such a model would start from the assumption that the university is a single institution articulated into faculties and departments. Instead of forcing departments into contrived competition for scarce funds, the administration would treat them all as organic elements of the institutional whole. The first principle of resource allocation would be sufficient funds to ensure consistent delivery of existing programming, with increased funding allocated to growing disciplines and departments. Secure in the knowledge that retirements will be replaced, smaller enrollment disciplines like philosophy will be better positioned to re-imagine themselves and hopefully attract larger numbers of students.

Nevertheless, re-imagination and re-invention of the humanities is a complex problem for another day. I doubt very much whether the Ford government will respond favourably to the recommendations of the the panel to approve a 1 time increase of 10% to the grant and then index future grants to the Consumer Price Index in subsequent years following.(20) Change will probably not come unless the federal government’s policy changes cause a crisis, and the last time an institution was forced to change because of a crisis– Laurentian– the result was disastrous for academics, staff, and students.

My winters were spent in unbordered bush n snow drifts

n on The Hill

behind the school

where everyone would

slide.

A city of children, classless, kinda

cause no one had fancier coats

or thought they were better than anyone else

cause they weren’t:

everyone’s dad worked in the mines

n their moms at shops in town

or cut hair in their living rooms

to earn a few extra bucks.

Day n night the Hill would draw us

together on toboggans

or solo on a Krazy Karpet

n if you didn’t have either

you could use some cardboard

or even old

boots whose treads had worn out

(but not a sled: sleds were snow machines

in case ya didn’t know).

Maybe some bigger kids would push us smaller ones back down the hill

before we had scrambled back to the top

but ya just had to take it

you couldn’t be a suck in those days.

Later, when we had become jaded teenagers

we would still go sliding

drinking rye from the bottle

on the lip of the scary steep slopes of the gravel pit.

It was like falling over a cliff

drunk as hell.

Everyone crashed before the bottom

but that’s what made it fun

n the bottle waiting for us

back at the top

promised the illusion of warmth, even when it was wicked cold.

I never thought about it then

but I did the other day, that

probably there are classless cities of children

in the desert

n maybe they go sliding down sand dunes,

(but not in boots, obviously, but Krazy Karpets would work).

It’s probably hard to find a 40 pounder of CC

in the desert

but maybe they have other stuff to drink

but whether they do or not

I bet

if they are alone in their city of children

doing whatever kids do in the desert

they smile

cause they feel safe

n together

n even if the bigger kids push the little ones around

its all in fun

n you can’t be a suck

in the desert either, but ya learn to

laugh n take it

just like on our Hill.

I haven’t gone sliding in decades

but I can still feel

the dirty February snow spraying my cheeks

and freezing to my toque.

When I think now about what I have been doing

I guess I’ve mostly read:

philosophers n poets n novelists n historians n economists n political scientists,

I have thought up n down

over, under, n sideways,

in straight lines n spirals n circles,

even dialectically.

I have thought long, and I have thought hard

n me n all the serious people I have read

think we know what’s what

but whatever we think we know

it’s not been enough

to stop the same shit from happening

over n over n over.

Today I can’t say

that I know anything much fer sure,

so I could be wrong

but this much seems clear:

that babies who need to be in incubators

should not have to be wrapped in tin foil

because they had the misfortune

to be born into somebody’s war.

I really don’t know much for certain anymore,

so I could be wrong

but it seems clear to me

that if the price of whatever

is that tiny creatures

who don’t want anything except to be warm

have to be wrapped in tin foil

to survive the night

then that price is too high

and whatever it is

that caused people to destroy

the cocoon that those babies needed

is not worth it.

One more thing seems clear to me,

but I could be wrong,

still, I think that anybody

who– every cell vibrating with terror-

doesn’t run away

cause babies can’t wrap themselves in tin foil,

those people who stay behind and maybe tell those babies stories

about how they used to go sliding– on icy hills or sandy dunes

or whatever–

who stay close and promise them that they will get through the night

and grow up and go sliding

or whatever the citizens of the city of children will do in the future,

I think maybe those people should be leaders,

cause they don’t read and write about what should be done

in the future

but do what must be done.

right now.

There have been numerous attempts over the past twenty years to understand the mutations that contemporary capitalism has undergone. John McMurtry argued in 1998 that the world has entered “the cancer stage of capitalism.” Whereas capitalism was originally a productive system driven by the sale of physical commodities for profit (described by Marx’s formula M-C-M1) contemporary capitalism, according to McMurtry, devoured the public services and infrastructures past generations of struggle had created. Privatization schemes stripped societies of their public wealth while banks made money speculating on currencies and exotic financial instruments with no material reality save the damage the fluctuating value of currencies caused people still dependent upon the real economy. Instead of M-C-M1 the cancer stage, according to McMurtry, was best described by the formula M-M1-M2 …n.

McMurtry’s arguments were influential amongst critics of the speculative economy but did not make any impact with Marxist political economists. Thomas Piketty did capture the attention of Marxists, at least in so far as they have been motivated to criticise his attempt to construct a socialist but non-Marxist understanding of the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Piketty too focuses attention on the outsized role that the financial sector plays in the twenty-first century. Piketty argues that capitalism has been replaced by ‘hyper-capitalism’ in which rent-seeking financiers profit from de-regulated money markets and tax cuts. Income and wealth inequality has exploded and reached levels not seen since the “gilded age’ that preceded the First World War.

Alongside of these systematic efforts there have been a host of books that have described contemporary capitalism through one or another qualifying adjective. Naomi Klein worried about “disaster capitalism” while Zuboff argued that we had entered the age of “surveillance” capitalism and Giblin tried to understand the dynamics of “chokepoint” capitalism. Newly entering the fray is former Syriza finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. In Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism he argues, in a popular tone but systematic fashion, that capitalism has been replaced by what he calls (following Cederic Durand) “technofeudalism.”

Like McMurtry and Piketty, Varoufakis believes that the continued growth of the financial sector signals a change within capitalism, but he goes beyond either in arguing that the change has now become qualitative. “The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness … by incubating a new form of capital, which has ultimately empowered its owners to break free of capitalism and become a whole new ruling class. … Yes, capital still exists, but capitalism does not.” (55) Varoufakis makes two interrelated arguments to support his conclusion that the global political economic system is now better understood as technofeudal. First, rent has replaced profit as the primary driver of the behaviour of firms, and second, wage labour has been supplanted (within what he calls the “cloud capitalist” sector), with the unpaid labour of “cloud serfs.” Cloud serfs are the ordinary people who willingly fill the internet with the content which media and distribution platforms like Facebook and Amazon subsequently monetise.

Varoufakis explains the differences between feudalism, capitalism, and technofeudalism in a technical (but not mathematical) appendix. “Under feudalism,” he writes, “the power of the ruling class grew out of owning land that the majority could not own, but were bonded to. Under capitalism, power stemmed from owning capital that the majority did not own, but had to work with to make a living.” Finally, “under technofeudalism, a new ruling class draws power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone.”(215) If Varoufakis is correct, the “cloud capitalists” like Jeff Bezos are a new ruling class because all other capitalists are dependent upon access to their networks in order to do any sort of business. The Amazons of the world do not earn revue from the profits of exploiting their own workers but by extracting rents from productive businesses who must contract with them to distribute their product or reach their customers.

Even if Varoufakis is correct that social media and distribution platforms make money by extracting rents from other capitalists rather than profit from exploiting their own workers, that fact alone would not entail the death of capitalism and the birth of technofeudalism. Rent and capital have always co-existed. Capitalists love rent because it is a form of income that yields returns above normal prices. As Varoufakis explains, ” rent is “any price paid by a buyer above the price which most closely reflects the exchange value of the commodity.”(220) Rent is a function of natural or artificial scarcity. A piece of land can only be used for one function at a time, works of art are unique. Their owners can therefore name their price when offering it for lease or for sale. While it is true that their surplus is a function of exploiting the scarcity of the resource or object that they own and not exploiting labour in the classic Marxist sense (unpaid surplus labour beyond the time necessary to pay for the reproduction of the labourer), that does not mean that they have ceased to be capitalists.

Piketty and David Harvey have also looked carefully at the role rent seeking plays in contemporary capitalism and neither have concluded that we have gone back to the future of technofeudalism. Ownership and control over land was essential to the feudal economy, but its fundamental difference from capitalism was the way in which labour was deployed. Peasants and serfs were tied, literally and figuratively, to the land that they worked, and they were paid in kind, not in wages. The immobility of labour meant that the productivity gains made possible by new techniques or bringing new land under cultivation were limited, because labour could not follow technical improvements or new developments. Capitalism replaced feudalism when those structural and ideological impediments were overcome and labour could follow investment (which followed profits). However, the development of capitalism did not eliminate ground rent, it simply introduced a new strata (which did become a new ruling class): the capitalist farmer who rented from the aristocratic landowner the farm that he worked with wage labour. The “triumph of rent over profit” is evidence of a structural crisis in the capitalist economy, but it does not prove that capitalism has been replaced by technofeudalism (118).

Although Piketty does not accept the (controversial) Marxist explanation of crisis as the result of a falling rate of profit, he agrees with Marxists like Michael Roberts that falling profits in the real economy have driven capital into the speculative economy in search of higher rates of return. My point is that we do not need to posit the existence of a new social formation and a new ruling class to explain the phenomena that Varoufakis is studying. A simpler explanation might conclude that capital seeks the highest rate of return. Downward pressure on profits will push capital out of the real economy into financial speculation. That outflow of capital signals a crisis of profitability and the wider social problems economic crises tend to cause, but is not proof that capitalism has been replaced by technofeudalism.

What about the other side of Varoufakis’ argument, the role of the labour of “cloud serfs” in the new economy? Varoufakis notes that “Big Tech’s workers … collect less than 1% of the firm’s revenues. The reason is that paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech relies on. Most of the work is performed by billions of people for free.”(84) It is a fact that platform users provide unpaid labour for social media firms, and I agree with Varoufakis that the entwining of leisure and labour on-line constitutes a novel form of domination. His argument is a necessary corrective to the overly optimistic celebration of “immaterial labour” and “prosumption” in the work of thinkers like Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. However, the fact that social media users provide content for free does not mean that wage labour has ceased to be essential to the capitalist economy.

While it is true that new communication technologies have changed the nature of work and created new forms of dependency linking consumers to producers through on-line platforms (now even other corporations are dependent on access to “cloud capital” while ever more people become psychologically and socially dependent on their on-line relationships) one must not forget that the hardware that these platforms use and the energy the networks require are still created using old fashioned wage labour to pay miners and manufacturers and network engineers. Other analysts of the changing nature of work in contemporary capitalism have acknowledged the increased complexity and further fragmentation of the working class without concluding that workers have become ‘cloud serfs.” Ursula Huws, Phil Jones, Nick-Dyer-Witherford, James Steinhoff, and Atle Mikkonen Kjosen have examined the composition of the contemporary working class in detail and concluded that it is increasingly super-exploited and dominated, but still a working class in the standard Marxist sense. No one makes their living shopping on Amazon. The fact that Amazon monetises their preferences and sells the information does not mean that those people are cloud serfs of Amazon. They have other jobs which pay the wages that they spend online.

Thus, it is only partly true that “cloud capital … has revolutionized its own reproduction. The true revolution that cloud capital has inflicted on humanity is the conversion of billions of us into willing cloud serfs volunteering to labour for nothing to reproduce cloud capital for the benefit of the owners.”(85) The truth is that users willingly contribute to the reproduction of the web-based interface through which they access the platform, but the existence of the platform itself presupposes the material labour of the workers who extract the minerals and manufacture the machines on which the platform runs. Capitalism has constantly reconfigured the working class in light of changing technologies without ceasing to be capitalism. Varoufakis might be correct that workers have been replaced by cloud serfs if social media users made their living using these platforms. As I noted above, they do not, but spend a portion of their earnings on-line as they formerly would have in traditional concrete and glass stores. Just as the landlord would have charged the owner of the business rent for use of the physical space, so too cloud capitalists charge rent for access to a portion of cyberspace. That change is significant, but, I would argue, still understandable as a change within capitalism rather than a change to technofeudalism.

While I was not convinced by his general conclusions, novel analysis of the changing dynamics of global capitalism is always welcome. The book contains an excellent explanation of the new forms of rent which the digital economy has made possible, a concise history of financial markets and monetary policy from the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, through the global response to the 2008 crisis up to today, and a clear, de-mystifying explanation of derivatives and the way they radically destablised the global economy. Varoufakis sets these explanations in the context of the rise to prominence of the American dollar and how its use as the global reserve currency has served the interests of American, European, and Chinese capital. “Shortly after the dollar was decoupled from gold, Europe’s currencies were decoupled from the dollar. Once they lost their fixed exchange rate, the dollar value of European and Japanese currency began fluctuating wildly … The dollar became the only safe harbour.” (45) As America’s manufacturing industry declined, its economy was kept afloat by the repatriation of the dollars in which European, Japanese, and Chinese profits were denominated. America “gobbled up everything produced in Japan and, later, China. In return, the foreign (and often American) owners of these distant factories sent their profits, their cash, back to Wall Street to be invested– an additional form of tribute, which enriched America’s ruling class, despite its deficit.” (44)

The global power of the American dollar also contributed to the hypertrophied growth of the financial sector. Dollar denominated profits flowed into wall Street to be invested by banks which grew larger and larger. As these banks grew, they started to invent the exotic new investment instruments whose sale generated monstrous profits but ultimately de-stabilised the global economy and led to the 2008 crisis. Cloud capital consolidated its hold on the global economy in the wake of the 2008 crisis. According to Varoufakis, the vast sums that governments poured into the economy to stablise the banking sector were not put to productive use but instead used to fuel another speculative cycle. The low-interest rate policy of central banks- given an extended lease on life by the pandemic– addicted firms to free money.

We are now exiting that era. Interest rates continue to rise at the same time as economic growth is slowing in most of the world. The Ukraine War has shaken much of the world’s confidence in the American dollar, but no one can say what might replace it or what the overall consequences for the global economy might be. The polarization between the Global South and the Global North, already tense in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has reached a crisis level in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. These spectacular political clashes are playing out against a backdrop of intensifying economic competition between China and the United States (153, 159, 161). While I was unconvinced by his characetrisation of the global economy as technofeudal, I agree that 2008 marked the beginning of a long term structural crisis that has not yet been solved.

Unfortunately, the socialist and social democratic left has not been able to translate the crisis of capitalism into a politically and economically unified movement. Varoufakis was one of the victims of the failure of the socialist left when Syriza was undermined by the intransigence of the European Central Bank. He concludes his book with a rough sketch of an alternative economic system, one of many that can be found in the books of socialist intellectuals. Like Michael Albert’s Parecon and Pat Devine’s negotiated coordination economy, Varoufakis argues that an alternative must begin with collective ownership of universally needed resources (including information resources) and democratic planning of economic priorities and processes. The real problem that the left faces (aside from the identity politics that he also appropriately criticises, 183,184) is that these models float in the air without a coherent political movement to carry them forward. One can construct any model of an alternative economy one wants, but in order to start building it, governments have to establish control over their own economic resources. Unfortunately, the financial system– as Syriza found out– cannot be controlled by any one government. Since the financial system controls people’s savings and pensions, its threats have to be taken seriously by even the best left wing governments. Syriza was armed with a referendum victory in which the Greek people rejected further austerity. However, when the bankers merely scoffed and threatened to destroy the Greek banking sector, Syriza had to give in or risk watching its citizens savings and pensions evaporate.

Hence the biggest problem the left faces- whatever we calls the society we are trying to change– is not how to sketch plans for a systematic alternative, but re-establishing credibility with workers. No transitional program will get off the ground if it cannot protect workers’ short term interests in secure work for a living wage. Syriza’s unfortunate defeat and the political ascension of the far right in numerous European capitals stresses just how difficult this problem will be to solve.

Only one day after the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations warned that the Ontario government’s threat to start monitoring campus groups who criticise Israel would have a chilling effect on academic freedom, Western University in London Ontario announced that a campus imam had been fired for “divisive” speech. How someone is to take a coherent position on a war (i.e. a fundamental political division) without being ‘divisive’ is a question I would like the Western administration to answer. I would also ask how they convinced themselves that firing an imam is not divisive. I assume that the Islamic students and faculty might find this move all too familiarly divisive.

This attack on the imam’s right to articulate his own position on the war is the latest act in a drama playing out on campuses across North America. Major donors have threatened to pull funding from universities in the US judged insufficiently critical of Hamas and not uncritically supportive enough of Israel. In Florida, the state government has effectively dissolved campus Palestinian solidarity groups, while back in Ontario both Toronto Metropolitan University and York are investigating and threatening to sanction student governments and campus groups because of statements in support of the Hamas attacks.

I have made my position on Hamas’ tactics clear in my earlier posts on the war. Anyone who understands the Palestinian struggle as a moment in the broader struggle for human freedom has to condemn attacks on Israeli civilians, for both moral and political reasons. Being a member of a nationality or a citizen of a state is not a capital offence. While contradicting the life-value justification for the struggle for national liberation, the Hamas attacks, as they are now finding out, were also monumentally politically stupid. They seem to have been based on a number of miscalculations: that the Israeli government would be willing to exchange Palestinian prisoners for the hostages, that they would eschew the medieval tactic of imposing a complete siege, and that Iran and Hezbollah would be able to deter the complete destruction of Gaza. Instead of negotiations, Israel has been on an arrest rampage that has doubled the number of Palestinian prisoners. The people of Gaza are literally the targets of genocidal violence, while Iran and Hezbollah talk tough but lack the power to decisively alter the conflict. The recent meeting between Hamas and Hezbollah to discuss their “final victory” over Israel was otherworldly in its failure to understand the political reality in which they find themselves.

The intensity of the violence in a region that is no stranger to war has provoked heated rhetoric on both sides of the conflict. University campuses have been flashpoints for solidarity rallies. As it always does, the Israeli state tries to short-circuit criticism of its policies by attacking anyone with the temerity to question its goals as an anti-Semite. They have been joined this time by the billionaires pulling funding and governments and university administrators threatening student groups. Their combined assault on academic freedom reveals a three-fold problem with the contemporary university.

First of all, it reveals the danger of relying upon private funding. Billionaires giveth and billionaires taketh away. When they give, they give on their terms, so that if the university becomes addicted to those donations they will find themselves, like all junkies, having to sing whatever tune the dealer wants them to sing. Major US institutions are now facing the loss of tens of millions of dollars in donations because some of their donors have decided that the universities’ statements about the Hamas attacks and resulting war have not been sufficiently critical of Palestinians. University policy thus finds itself hostage to outside forces who lack any academic standing and should have no input into the intellectual life of the institutions.

The second problem is that universities as corporate bodies feel the need to intervene one way or the other in the first place. Since the murder of George Floyd it has been de rigeur for university PR departments to selectively issue saccharine bromides in response to world events. These interventions are as unwelcome as they are ineffective. Universities are complex networks of students and researchers engaged in the difficult, open ended work of trying to understand our world in all of its multiple dimensions (physical, political, etc). University administrators do not speak for the whole, because there is no whole in whose name determinate political positions can be expressed. The active members of the university, faculty and students, necessarily have different perspectives on complex problems, and they all must be free to argue pro or contra on any issue. The role of administrators should be confined to ensuring that the work of research and teaching carries on; they do not speak for the “university community.”

The third problem is the most serious. This problem stems from a misunderstanding of the political value of universities. Activist academics and student groups typically mistake academic freedom as their academic freedom to be critical of established structures of power. They are jealous in their defence of their right to speak but, over the last decade or so, quite willing to sacrifice opposed groups’ academic freedom. As I have argued in a number of earlier posts, academic freedom is not a personal right to say what one wants to say, it is an institutional right necessary for the functioning of the university as an intellectual institution. The university cannot function as a space for free inquiry and argument if billionaires, governments, administrators, or one-sided campus political movements determine what can be said and not said, questioned and not questioned. By its nature inquiry questions, opens up a field of problems for critical scrutiny and debate.

The only legitimate means of “shutting an argument down” is to articulate an opposing argument so powerful that the opponent feels compelled to revise their position. Everyone who works or studies at a university must be committed to this principle on pain of performative contradiction. A performative contradiction (Habermas) is a form of speech that undermines the institutional conditions of its being made. If members of the university owe their ability to speak to the principle of academic freedom, then any attempts to deprive opposed groups of this right contradicts the institutional conditions of their making that argument. Academic freedom presupposes and justifies the university as a site of intellectual exchange of positions and argumentative conflict. Those who cannot bear the argumentative burden of proving their conclusions against opponents are not fit to remain members of an institution of ‘higher’ education.

Sadly, even though it typically has the most to lose when academic freedom is threatened, elements of the campus left have led the charge against academic freedom. Childish demands to ban speakers, cancel events, and boycott publications because they run afoul of some dogma have become too common. These movements are both intellectually cowardly and politically suicidal. When real conflicts like the Gaza war break out, state and administrative powers exploit the weakened commitment to academic freedom to threaten to ban and fire anyone who does not toe the party line.

Universities are not revolutionary parties. No one is obligated by party discipline to take one position as opposed to another, but to reason their way to their own conclusion and– crucially– to defend it against opponents and revise it if found wanting on grounds of insufficient evidence or self-contradictory reasoning. The job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution, as Che said, but the job of the academic is to prove their argument. No one needs be an academic: if argument seems too thin a practical contribution to the resolution of complex problems, one is free to leave the academy and organize a more kinetic struggle against whatever structure is supposed to be the problem. But if one remains an academic or a student one’s duty is first of all to the truth, which is rarely obvious. The truth will out and set us free (one hopes) but only through a process of exchange of arguments.

Bad arguments are exposed by better arguments. Which is better and which is worse cannot be determined if one side is simply banned by state or administrative power or silenced by political movements afraid to defend their position against critics.

Dehumanization is the classic means of de-legitimating the struggles of oppressed groups. First, the ruling power makes the movement personal, portraying political struggle as an attack on the individual members of the dominant group. Once the opposition movement’s political goals have been portrayed as a smokescreen hiding their real goal: to kill the individual members of the dominant group, the opposition can be denounced as subhuman killers. All the while, the violence that the dominant group rains daily down upon the oppressed people is ignored.

This pattern is repeated over and over again. The established powers declaim that the oppressed cannot be granted the freedom they demand because they are not really human beings who just want to live as other humans do, in peace, security, and for the sake of enjoying meaningful lives, but wild murderers who would use their freedom to rampage and destroy.

The oppressing power can always point to specific events to bolster their case. If oppression goes on long enough, some groups will be driven to violence. Their acts, and not the history of oppression, will be seized upon as evidence with which to convict the oppressed of crimes against humanity: the humanity of the oppressor.

But “humanity’ is not reserved for some specific groups of human beings. Human beings are social self-conscious centres of experience, activity, and enjoyment. Our capacities for receptive enjoyment of the world, thought, planning, creative activity of all sorts, and mutualistic, peaceful relationships with others and the world at large constitute the basis of everyone’s legitimate claim to life-security and the means of life-enjoyment. The other names by which we call ourselves: Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Muslim, are valuable not as such, but only as concrete instantiations of the underlying humanity that links us all beneath constructed historical differences. Those differences are real and valuable, but they are not ultimately valuable, because they presuppose life. People change religions or become atheists, they move to different countries and they change political ideologies: they do not thereby cease to be human beings.

Human beings also fight. No group of human beings is constitutionally warlike or peaceful: violence is a function of socio-historical structures and forces, not the peculiar traits of one or another culture. De-humanization strategies draw attention away from the structure and point it at a one-sided, caricatured portrait of the purported essence of the culture to which the demonized individuals belong, the secret that explains “what they are really like.” But this strategy too is generic and not a tactic unique to any particular ruling group. Wherever a group in power needs to justify itself, it does so by de-humanizing the culture of the group to which it is opposed.

In a brilliant short essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?” Hegel exposed the way in which demonizing constructions depend upon adopting an ahistorical, or as he says, abstract point of view. His example will be familiar to us: the criminal. When a terrible crime has been committed the newspaper will trumpet the community’s outrage and portray the criminal as some beast without a life-story. They never ask: how did the human being come to be a criminal? Instead, they fixate on the deed without inquiring into the historical process by which a human being became the sort of person that could commit the ghastly crime.

When we encounter political crimes the same sort of ahistorical thinking tends to prevail. The media focuses on the atrocity and not the historical process– the reasons, as Hegel would say– that led up to it. Hard as it is for people to accept, the militants who commit atrocities are human beings. Only human beings can behave inhumanely. The terrorist who blows up a bus or shoots up a rave, and the pilot who bombs civilians and goes home at night to his family are not space aliens. They are human beings as much as the pacifist. When they were born there was no gene that programmed them for a life of violence. If they were lucky their mother held them tenderly in her arms and whispered all the hopes she harbored for them.

But not everyone is lucky. 50 000 pregnant Palestinian women are currently under bombardment by Israel. What will they whisper to their newborns if they survive the onslaught? But even under those circumstances none of those children are fated to become one thing rather than another. Human beings can change, if they recognize the causes of their conflicts, actually address them, exchange one-sided justifications in favour of mutual understanding, and understand differences as the concrete form that humanity takes.

A tall order which often seems impossible. But wars end and former enemies can reconcile.

The task of solving problems and forging different futures is delayed when opponents lock into cycles of ultra violence such as we are currently seeing in Gaza and Israel. The reality of political struggle once it takes a predominantly militarized form is that the lives of non-combatants become instrumentalized. Perverse as it is, in war death can be more important than life. The perverse logic of the moral economy of war is the reason why war should be avoided at all costs by liberation movements. Their goals are peace and life-security, and they should choose means consistent with those ends. Non-state terrorism and state-led terroristic bombing campaigns are political choices that movements and governments make. No strategy or tactic is a function of pure mechanical necessity. Other means than military force are always possible.

One would have to be a complete naif to believe that Hamas did not know exactly how brutal an Israeli response to as audacious an attack as that of October 7th would be. Indeed, they openly crowed about luring Israeli forces into a ground invasion. Therefore, they must hope for even more civilian casualties, because they believe that they can turn those images into propaganda vehicles while at the same time dealing Israel such high casualty levels as to tip the strategic balance in their favour.

Israel is obliging. The bombardment of Gaza is shocking to the sensibilities and sentiments of any human being paying attention, but is entirely predictable when judged within the strategic calculus of means by which conflict is pursued. Enjoying complete air superiority, there is no military reason for Israel to stop bombing. Civilian lives are just part of the cost that must be paid.

One can never say for certain what the outcome of war will be. However, from a strategic perspective Hamas may have seriously miscalculated. Trapped without means of re-supply, their fate lies in the hands of the morale of the Israeli army. If it remains as high as it is now in the face of mounting casualties, then Hamas is almost certainly facing its Tamil Tiger moment. In 2009 the Sri Lankan government decided that the time had come to end the threat from the Tigers once for all. They were destroyed as an effective fighting force, along with tens of thousands of civilians.

Gaza is not the first city to be absolutely flattened in an all out war. The world watched in 1999-2000 when Putin completely levelled Grozny during the 2nd Chechen War. Just last winter the world was treated to another Putin extravaganza, when his forces completely destroyed Bakhmut. Hamas has nowhere to go and cannot win by hiding in tunnels. If Israel remains committed to the task there is no doubt that they will obliterate all of Gaza.

And they will tell the world that they were justified and that the complete liquidation of Hamas was necessary. But they will not ask themselves who the human beings who made up Hamas were or what their mothers hoped for their lives to be when they were born. A relative handful of people will protest in solidarity, but they are thousands of miles from the conflict zone and powerless to stop the forces that have been unleashed. The protests will end and Palestinians will be left to their fate, even more impoverished and desperate than they had been before the war.

Hamas believes itself to be engaged in a heroic struggle to the death with an inhuman enemy. Israel is exacting genocidal revenge for the citizens it has lost. Locked in a death dance, neither can comprehend the other’s perspective and instead they are trying for the final victory.

There will not be one. If Hamas is destroyed, a new version will emerge. Militarily, Israel cannot be defeated, but, politically, morally, Israel does enormous damage to itself when its leaders openly declare genocidal aims and- what is worse– execute them. It is beyond the capacity of people outside Gaza to imagine what it would be like to know that water, food, medicine, fuel and power have been cut off, and that the power that could force Israel to turn them back on- the United States- is not only not doing so, but parking aircraft carriers off the coast to ensure that Hezbollah does not open a second front.

As sickening a human tragedy as has been ever been written unfolds before our eyes.

Tragedies are difficult to witness, but they also teach lessons. It is time for the politics of heroic self-assertion and sacrifice to end. Justice is not on any one group’s side. Justice– getting what one deserves– is a human right. No one deserves to be killed as a matter of right. Meditate on the absurdity of a human right to be killed.

National liberation is a human right and as such a life-value. But when the struggle is pursued using life-destruction as a means it contradicts itself and encourages the cycle of killing and revenge that must now work itself out to its undoubtedly bitter end.

Ideas always come to me from the world when I need them most. Like every other political philosopher in the world I have been reflecting upon the implications of Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. What can one say that has not been said before about this seemingly endless dance of destruction between Hamas and Israel? Palestinians, like all people, have the right to resist the unbearable oppression under which they have been forced to live since 1948. They have the right to elect whatever party they think best serves their interests. Western governments’ are hypocrites when they decry the loss of Israeli life while for decades ignoring the murder of Palestinians. All of these well-worn truths circulate every time the Gaza cauldron boils over and they do nothing to change the reality on the ground.

The reality on the ground is going to rapidly get worse even than one’s worst imagination about what Israel’s response would be. Today is Thanksgiving day in Canada, a day usually marked by drinks that begin mid-afternoon and Turkey dinners. In Gaza, it was the day that Israel announced a an absolute, total blockade of the strip: no electricity, no water, no food, no medicine. The strategy is clear: the population will be starved into breaking with Hamas or dying of lack of food or water or bombardment. One could predict that reprisals for a humiliation as deep as Hamas inflicted on Israel would be severe, but the policy announced today is literally medieval. “We are fighting human animals,” the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant announced, “and we are acting accordingly.”

The language comes as no surprise. The Netanyahu government is composed of open racists who have long dreamed of a pretext to crush all Palestinian national liberation struggle if not expel the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories outright. Shockingly, Hamas has given them this pretext. All oppressed people have the right to resist oppression and to choose the means by which that resistance is pursued. But it is the most lunatic, abject, political stupidity to launch an invasion of a state with vastly superior military means under the assumption that a spectacular assault by a few hundred guerrillas will be a crushing blow.

As Gilbert Achcar wrote:

“And whereas it is not difficult to understand the “enough-is-enough” logic behind Hamas’s counter-offensive, it is much more doubtful that it will help advance the Palestinian cause beyond the blow to Israel’s self-confidence mentioned above. This would have been achieved at a hugely disproportionate cost for the Palestinians.

The very idea that such an operation, however spectacular it was, could achieve “victory” can only stem from the religious type of magical thinking that is characteristic of a fundamentalist movement like Hamas. The distribution by its information service of a video showing the movement’s leadership praying to thank God on the morning of 7 October is a good illustration of this thinking. Unfortunately, no magic can alter the fact of Israel’s massive military superiority: the result of Israel’s new ongoing war against Gaza is certainly going to be devastating.”

Slogans and spectacular symbolic operations are one thing. Military and geo-political reality are another. Israel has the means not only to seal off the Gaza strip but to bomb it for a century if it chose to do so. Hamas has no allies anywhere capable of restraining Israel. The EU has cut off all aid to Palestine. China and India are not going to support Islamist movements in any meaningful sense. Russia will certainly try to exploit the tensions for its own purposes in Ukraine, but given what it did to Islamic Chechnya in the second Chechen war, any support it offers the Palestinians would be cynical at best. Hamas’s hopes that Hezbollah will intervene from the North are likely to be dashed. And to put an exclamation point on why such intervention would be a bad idea, the US has just repositioned an aircraft carrier battle group off the coast of Lebanon. Given that there are Americans held in Gaza, American intervention from the air cannot be ruled out. Likewise, Iran is unlikely to get further involved. Iran’s leaders are thugs but not stupid. When they take a break from ordering their laughably named “morality police’ from beating teenage girls to death for showing their hair, they will realise that any attempt to overtly intervene on the ground would risk a massive Israeli response. Does anyone doubt that that Israel would use nuclear weapons against Iran if it felt seriously threatened?

Achcar is once again astute in his analysis:

“On the other hand, if Hamas’s leadership had been betting on Lebanon’s Hezbollah—and Iran behind it—to join the war at a level that would really put Israel in jeopardy, this bet would be very risky indeed. For not only it is far from certain that Hezbollah would take the high risk of massively entering a new war with Israel, but such a situation, if it were to happen, would inevitably bring Israel to resort unrestrainedly to its massive destructive power (which includes nuclear weapons), thus bringing about a catastrophe of historic magnitude.”

Serious critics must also add that attacking military targets is one thing, gunning down unarmed teenagers attending an all night rave is indeed barbaric. Anyone who believes that such tactics can advance a liberatory cause is both politically deluded and morally bankrupt: ends do not justify any means whatsoever. Liberation and vengeance are distinct. Vengeance is born from hatred, justified or not. Liberation is born from the need to live freely: free to create democratic institutions that give voice to the collective goals of people, but also free from ancient hatreds that imprison the emotions and imaginations of people and poison their relationships with each other.

Dancing in the desert is not a capital offense. Singular individuals are not responsible for historical crimes such that they can be legitimately gunned down in cold blood. No North American or European commentator sitting in the safety of their study with their teenage kids or young adults safely at university or exploring their world should be excusing such self-undermining political insanity. No one but lunatic fundamentalists could convince themselves that a rampage against a rave would not unleash the full murderous fury of the Israeli Defence Force. No one but a crazed fundamentalist could contort the idea of an all-powerful, all-perfect deity into a petty human imbecile who wants one group of humans that It created to kill another group that It also created. As ye sew, so shall ye reap, in Israel and Gaza, round and round it goes, occupation breeds resistance, resistance breeds reprisals, reprisals breed resistance, and on and on it goes.

That is not to say that resistance is not fully justified and that the root cause of the violence is Israeli occupation. As horrific as the civilian costs were, one must not shy away from the truth that the conflict is caused by the refusal of Israel to seriously negotiate the creation of a geographically, economically, and politically viable Palestinian state. The question is: what are the most efficacious means for struggling for that state.

Achcar is again insightful:

“Against an oppressor that is far superior in military means, the only truly efficient way of struggle for the Palestinian people is by choosing the terrain on which they can circumvent that superiority. The peak in Palestinian’s struggle effectiveness was reached in the year 1988 during the First Intifada, in which the Palestinians deliberately avoided the use of violent means. This led to a deep moral crisis in Israel’s society and polity, including its armed forces, and was a key factor in leading the Israeli Rabin-Peres leadership to negotiate the 1993 Oslo Accords with Yasir Arafat—however flawed these accords were, due to the Palestinian leader’s indulging in wishful thinking.”

As always, the primary victims of Hamas’s “heroic” thinking are the mothers and children of Gaza. When I see their tears all I can think about is that they would rather have their dead child alive, happy, in school , playing with other children, than in heaven with the boble martyrs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. If they want to martyr themselves so be it. But they should do so by means that do not cause the vast majority of Gazans trying to get on with their lives in impossible circumstances to die with them, vaporized by a bomb dropped from an invulnerable plane.

So what was the idea that found me just when I needed it? I was reading a collection of poems by Adrienne Rich last night, and in her notes on the poems she quoted the eccentric Catholic philosopher Simone Weil. “The love of a fellow creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him: “What are you going through?” I would only add: and take their response to heart.

If the Israeli, before they vote for far right racists in the misguided belief that only the most hard-hearted killers can protect them, would ask the mother in Gaza “What are you going through,” and really listened, perhaps they would could understand, on a human level, why that mother might support people who want to kill Israeli children.

Ultimately, this dance of death will not cease with a political solution, because a political solution requires trust, and trust requires that people ask each other (and mean it) “What are you going through?” Somehow some people on both sides of this conflict are going to have to find the impossible courage to tell their leaders to stop shooting and ask each other: “What are you going through?” And if the Israeli side listens then they will have to prove that they have listened by ending the occupation and creating the conditions for the construction of a viable, prosperous, free Palestinian state.

It seems impossible that two peoples locked in a seeming battle to the death could ever become neighbors and friends to each other. But between 1939 and 1945 Britain and Germany were locked into another battle to the death, raining incendiary bombs on each other’s cities just as Israel is doing today. Human beings can overcome almost any past, eventually, but only once they risk listening to each other.

Mainstream political commentators and empirically minded political scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing social polarization within the liberal-democratic world and between the Global North and the Global South. Radical critics of liberal-democratic capitalism should perhaps be pleased: sharpening social contradictions portend an era of fundamental change. It does feel as if we have entered into a period of severe social crisis, but the dominant political signs point to the right and not the left (as narrowly or broadly as one wants to extend the concept of “left”) capitalizing on the tensions. Far right parties have been elected in Sweden, Italy, and Slovakia, the atavistic populism of Modi rules the world’s largest country, Israel’s Netanyahu has just declared war on Hamas (and by extension, the Palestinian people generally). Impossible as it is to believe, there is a 50 50 chance that Donald Trump wins the US Presidency a second time. First time tragedy, second time farce indeed.

The left does not suffer from a lack of ideas but from a lack of credibility. The far left is too concentrated in academia to have a noticeable effect on global political trends or national policy. The social democratic left, it seems, has burned too many bridges to the working class in Europe to function as an effective counter to the right-wing outrage machine. The right has effectively mobilised anxieties about immigration and economic stagnation while the left too often responds with slogans about open borders and unlimited hospitality towards migrants that sound the right notes and are rooted in the correct life-values, but fail to resonate politically and do not address the real pressures on working class living standards that keep people awake at night.

From a philosophical perspective what worries me is that, in the abstract, the left has the better objective arguments. Migrants suffer from structures and dynamics not of their own choosing; erecting barriers that cause them to drawn in the Mediterranean is inhuman. Yet, time and again, abstract invocations of humanitarian concern fail to carry the day, their force dying out as soon as they run into the brick wall of political expediency. The abiding belief of philosophy is that the truth will out and the better argument will eventually carry the day. But where is this power when it comes to the resolution of long standing political problems. Hamas launched the October attacks on Israel because Israeli policy over seventy years have rendered talk useless. But it does not take a strategic genius to see that Hamas’ strikes will unify what was becoming a deeply divided Israeli society, give carte blanche to settlers to launch even more extreme racist violence against Palestinians, and allow the Israeli defence forces to flatten Gaza and whatever they decide to bomb. Philosophically, in other words, Hamas’s decision was understandable,

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history will not be surprised that the immediate pressures of political decision-making have once again trumped philosophical argument. When push comes to shove, critical voices without armed backing are easily liquidated. Socrates was executed, Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, and Spinoza sent off to Leiden to grind lenses. Christianity is a philosophy of love and Marx proclaimed that the workers of the world had no country. But Christians have loved their enemies by destroying them and the workers of the world are rather too easily mobilised to kill each other for the sake of a flag.

That the same general problems seems to repeat itself for thousands of years must be dismaying to anyone who is committed to the principle that fundamental social problems can be solved by rational argument and without violence. I believe that all philosophies, even those which try to explain the historical necessity of violence, are peace-loving at root. Philosophers talk and write and even if what they talk and write about is the reason why war and violence can never be eliminated from history, still they assert that through the tip of a pen and not the barrel of a gun. Such thinkers thus draw a distinction, at least in practice, between their own commitments to peaceful argument and the historical forces that cause wars. But if it is possible to sit quietly and write about historical causes, to understand them in other words, it should be possible to convince the people who make the decisions to understand those causes too, and then avoid them when the pressure that turn conflict towards mass violence increase.

Should philosophers fold their tent and stop arguing that a better means of social change than organized life-destruction is possible? Perhaps, but that would be to admit that philosophy as such has no role. I am not talking about “philosophy” the academic subject, but philosophy as it has always been: open ended inquiry into the human condition. Since we must live together on this planet, open ended inquiry into the human condition cannot but arrive at problems of how we can at least stay out of each other’s way and at best how we can organize global life such that our different societies and cultures form harmonious communities that dynamically interact in ways that preserve what is valuable in the existing cultures while constantly engendering novel forms of symbolic life.

Let us assume that philosophers (that is, anyone who engages in these sorts of reflections and makes these sorts of inquiries) achieves some level of understanding of the problems involved. Understanding is not an abstract intellectual achievement; by its very nature it has practical and transformative effects. If one understands what poison is, one does not ingest it. If one claims to understand but continues to act in a way contrary to the truth purportedly understood, one has not yet achieved real understanding. So politicians who claim to understand what is good for their own people, or, indeed, the whole of humanity, manifestly do not understand what is good if they mobilise armies to kill for it. All human goods, those that can be realised in time, are experiences or activities. Experiences and activities are functions of living, self-conscious organisms. if human goods are functions of human experience and activity then they are, in general, universal. Different people value different experiences and activities, and, to them, the content matters. However, from a philosophical perspective that tries to understand the good for human beings as such, what matters is the form: all human goods are expressions of our capacity to sense, experience, and interpret the world and to act in it in various ways.

What would be the practical result of understanding this conclusion (assuming that it is true)? No one would be willing to kill– to undermine the conditions of experience and activity, i.e., the basis of all human goods– for the sake of imposing any particular content on other people who have different concrete values. In short, a life-valuable approach to the problem of the good, properly understood, would undercut all justifications for the use of life-destructive violence in the service of particular ends.

Neither national security, nor spiritual truth, nor economic growth is good in and of itself. National security that can only be achieved by making the peoples of the world friends to each other. Pursuing national security by turning others into enemies to be liquidated undermines its aim. As Hamas has just shown, enemies will find ways to strike blows against even the most powerful opponent. Prosyletizing about the one true way to freedom or salvation likewise is self-undermining. People must find their own path to spiritual truth. The fact that there are many spiritual traditions and that atheists find meaning and purpose in their lives is proof enough that there no religion is compulsory for our spiritual health. If, therefore, that which religious believers value in their beliefs is spiritual health, they must agree that if others feel the same way about different traditions, or no religious tradition at all, then all are valid ways of realizing spiritual health. Killing others in the belief that you are saving their souls is therefore a contradiction. Believers who understand this conclusion will let everyone live in peace and allow God to sort out our souls after a full and free life.

Likewise, economic growth has no value in itself but is good only in relation to its contributions to overall human well-being. Economic growth must both be measured and governed by life-valuable standards. Growth is good to the extent that it is used to satisfy fundamental natural and socio-cultural needs and that it does not undermine the life-support capacity of nature and depend upon the exploitation of labour. Economic growth of a life-valuable sort would require democratic cooperation and sharing and not, as at present, zero sum conflicts to commodify the world’s life-sustaining resources.

The struggle to promote this sort of philosophical understanding is therefore far from useless. However, I do not ask the question of whether it was useful or not, but whether it was powerless or not. And on this question the answer is perhaps more troubling. It seems as though philosophers will never be kings because, in so far as they are philosophers they argue, but kings must be willing to use the sword.

But must they? For obvious reasons social critics point to the violent conflicts roiling one part of the globe or another, but perhaps it is worth pointing out that many, many more conflicts and tensions are resolved without warfare. There have been precious few years over the past 5 millennia free of war somewhere, but with only two exceptions, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the whole world has not been at war simultaneously. (And even then, not all nations were direct parties to the fighting, although some, in North Africa and the South Pacific, were victimized by the great powers fighting there). Why should we not see this fact as a hopeful sign, as proof that argument can resolve differences?

The hope is reinforced when we remind ourselves of another historical fact: no movement, no matter how ruthless, has ever been able to kill all of its opponents. Therefore, ultimately, struggles must terminate in the agreement of the parties. Either one side (or some of that side) are won over to their former opponent’s position, or they at east agree to some sort of modus vivendi. Again, if we actually understand what history teaches (I am not pleading a moral case first of all, but claiming that history teaches the lesson that non-violent conflict resolution is ultimately necessary) different choices can be made as the pressure builds towards war to relieve rather than increase it until armed violence becomes inevitable. The war in Ukraine is a case study in what not to do as tensions increase. .

One must distinguish, I think, mass violence from mass struggle. Philosophical arguments are not spells or incantations that change reality just as soon as they are spoken. If war is politics by other means (von Clausewitz) perhaps we can say that demonstrations, strikes, pickets, boycotts, and the organization of new political movements are argument by other means. Like arguments they attempt to change reality without physically liquidating the opponents. However heroic struggles to the death have been portrayed as in history, the attempt to achieve fundamental social change through violent means never succeeds in fully destroying the enemy and always damages and destroys the democratic values of the movement that chooses the violent path. The historical evidence suggests that people do not normally spontaneously kill other humans, they have to be motivated to do so. The hardening of head and heart which killing requires impairs the subsequent ability to live in democratic peace afterwards.

Understanding is the precondition of our transcending mechanical necessity in history. It is true that conflicts can reach a point where the use of violence becomes necessary. If you know that your opponent is going to strike you must strike first or risk destruction. But if we study the history of past conflicts we can see that there are typically opportunities to defuse tensions that are missed. The US could have sat down with Russia to discuss its security concerns; the Minsk accords could have been enforced. Israel could have allowed for the creation of a territorially integral, fully sovereign Palestinian state. These failures are a tragedy for everyone involved, but they also teach a lesson for the future: one must take the other side’s concerns seriously.

When parties to a conflict start from that principle (not a naive moralistic assumption but fruit of historical inquiry) they can become partners in dialogue. They do not have to love or even care for each other, they just have to respect the fact that the other side has a perspective. Sharing perspectives and finding a compromise is life-preserving: neither side gets everything that they want, but everyone lives to enjoy another day, and as enjoyable days pile up, ancient hatreds fade and new forms of cooperative interaction, new forms of world-creation and life-value become possible.

Amongst the laundry-list of platitudes and promissory notes that was the final communique from the recently completed G-20 Summit in Delhi was this truth:

“The global order has undergone dramatic changes since the Second World War due to economic growth and prosperity, decolonization, demographic dividends, technological achievements, emergence of new economic powers and deeper international cooperation. The United Nations must be responsive to the entire membership, faithful to its founding purposes and principles of its Charter and adapted to carrying out its mandate. In this context, we recall the Declaration on the Commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UNGA 75/1) which reaffirmed that our challenges are inter-connected and can only be addressed through reinvigorated multilateralism, reforms and international cooperation. The need for revitalized multilateralism to adequately address contemporary global challenges of the 21st Century, and to make global governance more representative, effective, transparent and accountable, has been voiced at multiple fora. In this context, a more inclusive and reinvigorated multilateralism and reform aimed at implementing the 2030 agenda is essential.”

The text is littered with banalities about “inclusion” and “inclusivity,” including hopes for an “inclusive” global financial system and “inclusive” information technology policies. It also dedicates sections at the end to promises of policies that are inclusive of the interests of women. The one concrete measure that the group took that gives some substance to the “inclusion” agenda was to admit the African Union as a permanent member.

“We welcome the African Union as a permanent member of the G20 and strongly believe that inclusion of the African Union into the G20 will significantly contribute to addressing the global challenges of our time. We commend the efforts of all G20 members which paved the way for accession of the African Union as a permanent member during India’s Presidency of the G20. Africa plays an important role in the global economy. We commit to strengthen our ties with and support the African Union realise the aspirations under Agenda 2063. We also reiterate strong support to Africa, including through the G20 Compact with Africa and G20 Initiative on supporting industrialization in Africa and LDCs. We are supportive of further discussing the deepening of cooperation between the G20 and other regional partners.”

Appropriate as it is to acknowledge the global importance of the countries and regions of the global south on an equal footing with America and Europe, lurking not far beneath the surface were the rather less “moral” motives of international realpolitik. The United States and its allies lobbied hard to have the group issue a united condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But as a sign of the reality of the power of the major powers of the Global South who have tried to stay neutral in the conflict between the Us-EU-NATO-Ukraine and Russia, this demand was resisted in favour of a (predictably) abstract and self-contradictory statement:

“We call on all states to uphold the principles of international law including territorial integrity and sovereignty, international humanitarian law, and the multilateral system that safeguards peace and stability. The peaceful resolution of conflicts, and efforts to address crises as well as diplomacy and dialogue are critical. We will unite in our endeavour to address the adverse impact of the war on the global economy and welcome all relevant and constructive initiatives that support a comprehensive, just, and durable peace in Ukraine that will uphold all the Purposes and Principles of the UN Charter for the promotion of peaceful, friendly, and good neighbourly relations among nations in the spirit of ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’.”

The problem still, as it has long been, is that opposing sides have opposed views of what international law demands. All major powers have good reason to insist on international law when they claim that their opponents are violating it, but even more powerful reasons for not insisting too strongly that it be enforced, lest they are hoist on their own petard when they decide that reasons of state outweigh abstract considerations of legality when it comes to dealing with their own problems. As international relations realists have long argued, sovereignty outweighs international law when whatever a major power has deemed a vital interest is at stake. America wants to remain free to roam the world imposing its version of “rules based order” on everyone. China and India both have internal insurgencies and separatist movements that they want a free hand to deal with in any way they see fit, and Russia claims that it is protecting the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern and Southern Ukraine from far-right Ukrainian nationalists.

One might think that multilateralism posited as a goal and value of international relations implies global harmony of interests. However, as one can see, the reality is quite otherwise. Multilateralism actually means the right of each state to pursue its interests free from interference from other states, because none are powerful enough to impose their interests as the global norm. Harmony is impossible, because the goals of the major actors are at odds with each other and the interests of smaller states or movements that find themselves trapped in between. Multilateralism is thus not a solution to major international problems but disguises the real structures of conflict that generate the wars and poverty that the document laments. The opposition between Russia and the US and its allies is obvious, but there were other tensions playing out behind the scenes. China and India are clearly in competition to assume the role of leading spokes-state for the interests of the Global South. While Russia was certainly pushed to war by American policy and the Russian-speaking population of eastern and southern Ukraine have legitimate interests and concerns, Putin’s attempt to paint the conflict as an anti-imperialist struggle is laughable. One only need bring to mind Russia’s racist treatment of minorities from the Central Asian republics, its absolute destruction of Chechnya in the Second Chechnya War, its arrest of anti-war critics and Marxists, and its attempt to re-conquer the lands first annexed to Russia by Catherine the Great to see that there is nothing more (or less) than classic reasons of state behind the decision to invade. The Putin regime has ruthlessly pursued a centrally-managed capitalist economy that has no place for independent unions but now finds it convenient to invoke the Soviet Union’s (quite checkered) history of support for anti-imperialist struggling defence of its definition of Russia’s national interest.

My point is: anti-imperialism does not mean just anti-American imperialism and is not a positive political value in its own right. Anti-American imperialism is fully compatible with imperialist ambitions within other countries’ self-defined spheres of interest. To the indigenous inhabitants of Tibet the fact that it is the Chinese and not the American state that governs their homelands does not make the situation less oppressive. The women of Iran will likely not be mollified by Iranian President Raisi’s railing against the United States in his address to the UN General Assembly. They were not motivated to take to the streets last year because of American interference but because his regime murders women who dare to decide how to wear their hair. Neither Multilateralism nor anti-imperialism have value save as a contribution to global peace, more comprehensive satisfaction of the natural and social needs of each and all, and the creation of the social, political, and economic conditions for the free and full exploration and development of the creative and experiential capacities of each and all, in forms whose appropriateness is decided by the individuals and not a narrow strata of conservative rulers. The self-determination of nations is valuable only to the extent that it is a political condition for the self-determination of all the members of those nations. Fanon warned long ago that however justified and necessary anti-imperialist national liberation struggles were, they always ran the risk of putting in power a national ruling class that collapses the interest of the people as a whole into its own interests. The Hindu nationalism of a Modi and the conservative Islam of a Raisi are contemporary analogues of the problem that concerned Fanon.

The rising powers of the world are right to remind everyone of the historical injustice they have faced at the hands of American and European colonisers and imperialists. But the logic of the value of self-determination that they invoke in their legitimate critique of American hegemony is universalizing and does not stop at the boundaries of individual states. If India as a whole has the right to determine its own domestic and international policy, then it must recognize that the same right legitimates the struggles of nationalist movements in Kashmir and Sikh struggles for a homeland. If Iran rejects the legitimacy of interference in its internal affairs, it assumes the duty to govern those affairs in keeping with the demands of its own people, who reveal, by their not infrequent taking to the streets en masse, that they are tired of paying the price for a conservative theocracy. America will always try to exploit such movements, it does not follow that America creates them. Where there are mass political movements there are problems. To be sure, the groups involved must solve their own problems their own way, but the efforts must be genuine and “anti-imperialist” justifications for internal repression of national and social movements must be rejected on grounds that they contradict the universal human value that the particular demand for self-determination contains. That value is the unrepeatable singularity of the life of each and every social self-conscious human agent. No one is born to be the mere instrument of the World Spirit, American manifest destiny, capitalist market forces, or any other abstract, reified force. People are not born to be sacrificed in wars or murdered because they demand for their nation what other nations already enjoy: independence.

How incompatible demands can be resolved without destruction of one or the other side is the most vexing, challenging, and perhaps impossible question in global politics. The twentieth century has taught us that America and Europe have no solutions; that their professed support for national liberation moments or social movements amongst the oppressed is always hypocritical, cynical, and self-interested. It does not follow that a move from a unipolar to a multipolar world on its own will make any difference to the poor and oppressed of the world. Likewise, anti-imperialism is valuable because it opposes the political and economic domination of smaller nations by larger and more powerful states. The member of the smaller states are reduced to mere tools of the interests of the great power. But imperial, neo-imperial, and quasi-imperial power are functions of size and relative strength, not nationality. Think what one will about Lenin, he at least made it clear that Tsarist Russia was an imperial oppressor of Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Poland. No one was a more vehement critic of European imperialism than he was, but he also fought the enemy of imperialism at home. The Bolsheviks withdrew from World War One and the first Soviet Constitution granted independence to the nations engulfed by the Russian empire. Like all the other liberatory values of the revolution national independence for the lands conquered by the Tsars was never realized, of course, but the early leaders of the revolution at least understood that imperialism, not the imperialism of other nations only, was the problem.

of course, the assertion of general philosophical principles is much easier than working out concrete political solutions. However, the articulation of general principles is not useless if they can function as agreed upon guidelines for the conduct of political life. In all cases, the life-values that alone justify more particular practices and relationships must be drawn out. Multilateralism and anti-imperialism are not valuable in and of themselves but only to the extent that they serve the deeper general purpose of helping to create the political and social conditions for all-round need-satisfaction and thus enabling each person to explore and develop their life-capacities in their own way. Perhaps it is too much too hope that all political powers and movements recognize and act according to these universal life-values. Nevertheless, if those who understand them stop insisting upon their reality because it seems impossible, then reasons of state will certainly continue to dominate actual politics to the detriment of the vast majority of the world’s people whose real shared interests will be ignored.

Deacon’s outstanding but challenging book concerns two of the most intractable scientific questions: how did life arise from non-living molecules, and how did conscious intelligence and agency arise from mechanistic natural forces? Answers to both questions place seemingly impossible demands on established science. Science must assume that there is a uniform causal structure to nature that operates in an unbroken chain linking the smallest subatomic particles to the largest socio-political constructions built by human beings. Since these constructions require human thought (which Deacon examined in his previous book, The Symbolic Species) and thought is symbolic and intentional, the human world appears to operate on quite different causal principles (teleological rather than mechanical). Natural scientists have most often tried to preserve the causal uniformity of nature at the expense of preserving and explaining the unique texture of the symbolic dimensions of human reality. Since the 17th century, reductionism has ruled natural science. While reductionism has led to spectacular technological achievements, no one has yet successfully provided a reductionist account of consciousness and agency that convincingly explains rather than explains away the properties that distinguish them as consciousness and agency. Deacon titled his book Incomplete Nature as a challenge to scientists to acknowledge that living systems and conscious agents are characterised by powers that non-living systems do not have and to meet that challenge by working out a non-question begging explanation of the mediations through which life emerged from non-life and consciousness emerged from unconscious elements.

The books’ brilliance is rooted in Deacon’s honesty and originality. He accepts the principle of causal uniformity, even thought its operation would seem to to rule out that which he devotes his considerable scientific and philosophical powers to explain: the reality of the teleological powers of self-conscious life. Eliminative materialist reductionism is unsatisfactory because it simply denies the reality of that which a complete natural science must explain: the ability of living beings, and especially self-conscious agents, to initiate action and bring about states of affairs that would not exist without their goal-seeking activities. On the other hand, the best scientific alternative to reductionism, emergentism, tends to bog down in the other direction. If reductionist attempts to save causal uniformity cannot explain the emergence of the unique powers of life and conscious intelligence, the existing emergentist theories cannot square their accounts with the causal uniformity of nature. Existing emergentist theories have not yet adequately explained by the mediations that enable the phase transitions between atomic and molecular structure and functional biological systems, and functional biological systems and intelligent agency. Instead of detailed explanation of these transitions, emergentists tend to invoke exotic and under-explained ideas of “top down causality” and slogans like “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Deacon does not claim to have developed a fully worked out and empirically adequate explanation of these critical transitions, but he does think that he has created a novel approach that solves some methodological problems and opens to door to the empirical work necessary to one day arrive at complete and coherent solutions.

Deacon’s approach is materialist– one might even say dialectical, without meaning anything more than “dynamic” by that loaded term. The unique powers of living beings cannot be understood if they are treated as reified wholes greater than the sum of their parts. Instead one must pay attention neither to the whole nor the parts but the interactive dynamics that distinguish living beings from non-living material systems. The distinguishing powers that life-forms display are high level analogues of lower order self-organizing processes that are explicable by reference to the most basic physical forces. Deacon’s account preserves causal uniformity but avoids the pitfalls of reductionism. There is no one to one correlation between a thought and a material brain state that would allow the scientist to conclude that the thought is nothing but the brain state. The brain state depends upon thermodynamic work and the thought depends on the brain state, but it instantiates a new form work that Deacon calls “teleodynamic.” Teleodynamic systems are defined, paradoxically, by the absent state that they represent to themselves. Thoughts represent absent objects and posit goals about future states that the organism then tries to bring about. These “absential properties” are the key to one day constructing a complete and consistent explanation of how mind emerged from matter.

Deacon’s argument is too complex to reconstruct completely and too difficult for me, a non-scientist, to understand in every detail. His account draws on mathematics, physics, information theory, chemistry, bio-chemistry, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience and was built up over a decade working with a team of specialists from these different areas. Even readers with a science background will be challenged to understand every step of the argument; humanist philosophers like me, drawn to the book because of its non-magical explanation of human origins, will often find themselves at sea. However, since Deacon writes as clearly as one might hope about these issues, if they pay attention and are patient, non-scientists can understand the argument well enough to grasp the limits of competing explanations and the merits of Deacon’s alternative. Whether it proves correct is for future scientists to decide, but anyone interested in these problems will come away from the book better versed in what a true explanation of these existential as much as scientific problems will have to contain.

Deacon begins by reviewing the well-known limits of reductionist explanations of life and mind. As far back as Aristotle’s critique of atomism philosophers have stressed the difference between living and mechanical systems: living entities can initiate action whereas mechanical systems require an impetus from outside. “There is a “discontinuity of causality implicit in human action” that parallels a related discontinuity between living and non-living processes. Ultimately both involve what amounts to a reversal of causal logic: order developing from disorder, the lack of a state of affairs bringing itself into existence, a potential tending to realize itself. But compared to the way things work in the non-living, non-thinking world, it is as though a fundamental phase change has taken place in the dynamical fabric of the world.” (21) This difference is the touchstone of all idealisms (and non-reductive materialisms). Criticising reductionism has proven far easier than providing satisfying non-reductionist explanations. Idealist explanations, from ancient Greece to Descartes, simply beg the question: they assume the existence of a non-physical substance with the power to freely initiate actions but do not explain how its existence is possible in a world of matter and energy. Appealing to the eternity of forms (Aristotle) or divine creation (Descartes) is not scientifically satisfying since it does nothing more than assert whatever conclusion the abstract coherence of the theory requires. But theories must be empirically verifiable as well as internally coherent.

In order to advance beyond the impasses of idealism, reductionism, and standard emergentist theories Deacon makes a bold and counter-intuitive move. The problem with idealism is that it is question-begging, and reductionism and emergentism face the same problem from opposed sides: trying to explain consciousness as some thing, either “nothing more” than brain states or, from the other side, some unique expression of those states whose properties can be described but whose connection to physical reality remains unexplained. Deacon tries a different tack: consciousness is not a thing at all, but must be understood as an “absential” property. Absential properties are states which can produce effects in the physical world because they seek to correct from an absence of some sort. When you are hungry, you initiate a sequence of actions to find food; the conscious desire for food is a desire for that which is not present. The absence of the food is the cause of one’s working out a sequence of actions to attain it. “My counterintuitive hypothesis is that whenever we recognize that a system exhibits ententional properties, it is not because of something added to the physical processes involved, but rather quite literally because it depends on the physical fact of something specifically missing from that object or process.”(43) Ententional properties are “all phenomena that are intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, or constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic.”(27) This counter-intuitive move does not explain how the ententional property (the action-causing absence) emerges from physical functions at more basic material levels, but it helps free the search for an explanation from a search either for the basis of consciousness to which its phenomenological forms can be reduced or the sui generis emergent property to which basic physical forces give rise.

Mechanical causality transfers the force of one object with momentum to another object with momentum. The pool player strikes the cue ball with the cue, it hits the 8 ball at a definite angle, and the 8 ball moves along a predictable vector into the pocket. One material substance transfers energy to another material substance causing motion. But the decision of the pool player to strike the cue ball is distinct. They must imagine the shot before they actually make it. There is brain activity involved in the imagination, as we will see, but the idea is of a state which does not yet exist (the 8 ball going into the pocket) and motivated by a desire which can only be understood in relation to a symbolic universe of rules (winning the game). The mechanical sequence of causes is therefore caused by the idea of a future state that does not yest exist. Newtonian mechanics is indifferent to time: we can use Newton’s laws to predict future eclipses and we can use them to work out when eclipses must have occurred even in the past before there were human observers. Actions causes by ententional forces are not similarly indifferent to time: they bring about future states which would not have occurred simply by the operation of mechanical forces.

Although conscious life-activity reverses the causal relationship and basic thermodynamic tendencies at work in non-living, unconscious material reality, any acceptable scientific explanation must be compatible with quantum and mechanical physical forces. Unless the mediations that lead from quarks to atoms, atoms to organic molecules, and organic molecules to self-conscious living organisms can be worked out in detail, we will be thrown back on magical (idealist) explanations or quasi-magical substance-emergentist theories. Substance emergentism looks for the special sort of thing that consciousness is. The problem that it runs into is that it maintains without explanation of how that “emergent transitions involve a fundamental discontinuity of physical laws.”(159) Deacon takes the leading philosophical critic of this form of emergentism, Jaegwon Kim’s question seriously: “Why is there anything except physics?” (165) Deacon’s attempt to provide a non-question-begging, non-magical, non-dualist answer to this question forms the empirical heart of his argument (and also poses the most serious challenge to the limits of the understanding of non-experts).

Deacon argues that all the purportedly irreducible causal powers of life are ententional, but also that each emerges from and is explicable by lower order physical systems operating mechanically. Even at the simplest levels, natural processes display powers of spontaneous structure formation. The most basic natural process is entropy– the running down of energetic systems from highly ordered to disordered states. Deacon’s argument is that the roots of the highly organized structures of living systems whose existence depends upon their ability to constrain entropy (at least over short periods) are built up from the second law of thermodynamics. Amazingly (to my scientifically untrained mind) coherent structures emerge even in the simplest thermodynamic systems provided that there is a constant supply of energy.

Deacon gives the example of Benard cells: hexagons that form in a thin layer of liquid constantly heated to a certain uniform temperature. To the chagrin of intelligent design theorists going back to William Paley, Benard cells are geometry without a geometer. They naturally, spontaneously form because it just happens to be the case that hexagons are the most efficient shape through with the heat energy can be dissipated. (252) The law of entropy determines that the heat must be dissipated, so this most basic thermodynamic process is the source of the structure that emerges. Thus, all one needs for the formation of coherent structure is heat, the second law of thermodynamics (which states that the system’s energy must run down, its heat be dissipated) and geometry. So long as there is a heat source, these structures will reproduce themselves.

Of course, it is a long way from hexagons formed to dissipate heat to conscious intentional action, but these purely physical processes are the basis of all high-level structures. What they prove is that structure is a function of the most basic processes in nature. Once we have these purely physical structures, other possibilities– which seem magical, if viewed in isolation– become more probably. The shape of a protein is so complex it seems impossible unless an infinite intelligence designed it. But when we understand that nature is a billions years old dynamic energetic system that spontaneously gives rise to coherent but simple structures, we can start to look for mediating processes and not a magician or divine designer. The mediating processes explain how greater complexity is a function of the addition of elements to the basic processes of spontaneous structuring.

At the root of life and consciousness lies the homeodyanmic forces of thermodynamics. Energy naturally runs down into disordered states, unless constrained by a countervailing natural force. The result of the interaction between certain countervailing natural forces and the homeodynamic force of entropy is “morophogenesis.” Morphogenesis is the simplest type of structure formation. Benard cells are a purely physical example of morphogenesis, but the more relevant for the explanation of the emergence of life occur when we examine the spontaneous behaviour of more complex chemical systems. Crystal formation could be thought of as a link between the spontaneous geometry of Benard cells and organic chemistry: crystals form spontaneously into regular structures, but they lack the capacity for deliberate self-maintenance that characterises life. Life not only replicates itself, it maintains an environment that allows it to replicate itself and for this certain organic structures are necessary. Just as in the case of Benard cells and crystals, it turns out the more complex molecular systems can form themselves into useful structures (like tubules and other self-enclosed shapes that create a spaces in which higher-order organic functions can develop). These enclosures, so to speak, are absolutely essential to the emergence of life, but they can be explained by the way in which the molecules involved naturally shape themselves if a constant supply of chemical input is maintained. Deacons calls the structuring activity that creates functional whole morphodynamics: “the dynamical organization of a somewhat diverse class of phenomena which share in common the tendency to become spontaneously more organized and orderly over time due to constraint perturbation but without the extrinsic imposition of influences that specifically impose the regularity.”(237) In simpler terms, morophodynamics organize elements into regular, useful structures without the intervention of any outside organizer. Morphodynamics arise from homeodynamics and homeodynamics arise from thermodynamics. The causal uniformity of nature is not violated by the increase in self-organizing complexity.

Whew!

Got that, class?

As I noted, the book is challenging and I cannot say that I fully understand the details, but I do think I have grasped the basic lines of development that Deacon presents. If the most basic laws of physics not only allow for but explain very simple, self-organizing processes, then the emergence of life, the most complex self-organizing, self-maintaining, ententional, system, while still supremely difficult to explain, is at least not mysterious. Life is the most complex example of a natural system that Deacon calls an “autogen.” “An autogen is a precisely identifiable source of causal influence because it generates and preserves dynamical constraints — the basis for thermodynamic work.” (311) The simplest are not remotely conscious but they organize molecular structures in a self-perpetuating way- they are the physical mediation between life and not-life.

Life is not only self-organizing and self-maintaining but also (above the very simplest life-forms), self-directing. Whereas purely physical homeodynamic systems maintain a steady state, living things maintain a steady state by performing conscious work. Deacon thinks of work not as creative self-externalization (along Hegelian-Marxist lines) but as the imposition of constraints on systems that would otherwise be run down by entropy. Left to itself, a field would become overgrown with weeds. Agricultural work constrains this spontaneous outcome, but on the basis of ententional powers to observe and understand the pattern of weed spread and work out a practical series of steps to prevent that from happening. These powers are the functions of organs that are the products of 3 billion years of evolution. Natural selection preserves life-supporitng functional wholes, but the more basic structures which underlie functional organic wholes developed out of spontaneous morphogenetic patterns that emerge in material nature.

Natural selection explains how the simplest self-maintaining life-forms have developed into socially self-conscious human agents. The real question concerns how that logic of self-complexification got going in the first place. “Although natural selection offers a powerful logic that can account for the way organisms have evolved to fit their surroundings, it leaves out almost all the mechanistic detail of the process involved in generating organisms, their parts, and their off spring.”(422) Deacon does not claim to supply all of the necessary mechanistic detail, but he helps the process along by reinterpreting evolutionary processes according to his “work as constraint” metaphor. “Evolution is not imposed design, but progressive constraint.”(427) As he explained in discussion of autogens, spontaneous morophological processes can generate order and structure by purely physical means. Natural selection in essence ‘captures’ certain morphological structures– organic molecules and the more complex systems they spontaneously formed– and preserves them. Prior to the evolution of DNA, these spontaneous morphologies formed the molecular basis of life: “Evolution in this sense can be thought of as a process of capturing, taming, and integrating diverse morphodynamic processes for the sake of their collective self-preservation.” (427) If Deacon’s picture is correct, then the precise steps by which life and consciousness emerged are no longer mysterious or require exotic causal powers to explain. “So the first organism wasn’t a product of natural evolution. The constellation of processes that we identify with biological evolution ultimately emerged from a kind of proto-evolution, supported by a kind of protolife, that ultimately must trace back to the spontaneous emergence of the first molecular systems capable of some sort of evolutionary dynamic. Earlier it was shown that even a molecular system as simple as an autogen can give rise to a form of natural selection. the emergence of this constellation of properties enabling evolution … marks a fundamental shift in the dynamical organization of the natural world, a shift from thermodynamic and morphodynamic processes to teleodynamic processes.’ (430) The key to understanding the entire line of development from the Big Bang to your capacity to interpret this review lies in understanding the key transitional moments where qualitatively new energetic powers emerge.

Deacon applies the same methodological approach to explaining consciousness and agency as he does to explaining morphogenesis. He searches for the mediating term between unconscious morphodynamic systems and conscious life-forms. He zeroes in on sentience. Human beings design all sorts of sensing technologies (like thermostats), but sentience or feeling it is not only functional, it is intentional. The thermostat regulates the temperature in the room, but is not in the least intentional: it functions, but does not act for the sake of maintaining an environment that it requires to continue functioning. But sentience is the product of organic systems that evolved and as such have survival value. The higher level capacities of living things are the products of natural selection shaping, sculpting, and honing organic matter over billions of years. The crucial transitions are from self-replicating molecules to self-maintaining simple single cell organisms, from self-maintaining single cell-organisms to sentient life forms aware of their environment and able to work to maintain a life-supporting system state, and then from sentient life-forms to social self-conscious agents capable of building a human, social, symbolic world out of the givenness of natural materials.

With the emergence of sentience the universe crosses the threshold between being a meaningless thermodynamic system running itself down over time to a world of value and meaning. Value for Deacon is, at root, life-supporting material conditions. Sentient life forms feel their environment and therefore suffer (sense life-threatening changes) as well as, on the other side, experience joy– increase in their vital powers, as Spinoza would say. The important point is that Deacon shows how values are fully compatible with a complex materialist ontology (as I also tried to show, but in a much less scientifically rigorous way, in Materialist Ethics and Life-Value). The symbolic, meaningful human world has been created not simply through the manifestation of survival instincts in social life survival but the conscious shaping of the social world to serve and satisfy certain norms.

Human beings do not simply act for the sake of given ends, we are agents, capable of deliberately constructing the ends that we serve. The material of human norms is symbolic, not physical, but the emergence of the capacity for symbolic thought and the creative activity that it directs can be explained, if Deacon is correct, in a way that preserves the causal uniformity of nature. Human freedom is thus not, as Descartes argued, a function of the operation of non-physical, non-mechanical causality, but a function of the power of human beings to understand and intervene causally in the world. The secret to human freedom is that it is ententional, not spiritual or divine: it results from action in relation to an imagined end state not yet physically present. “What we are concerned with here is not freedom from but freedom to. What matters is not some disconnection from determinate physics, but rather the flexibility to organize physical world with respect to some conserved core dynamical constraints. This is not a breakdown of causal efficacy; in fact, just the opposite. Being an agent mans being a locus of causal efficacy.”(480)

With human agency the argument comes full circle. Deacon began from a picture of the universe as an energetic system governed by the second law of thermodynamics. Without introducing exotic causalities or question-begging ideal substances or divine intelligences, he has provided a coherent explanation of how life can emerge from non-life and consciousness from unconscious elements. I am sure that the experts in the various fields that Deacon’s rich and complex account draws upon would be able to raise problems that I am incapable of even seeing, but sometimes science must advance not by parts but by wholesale re-framings. As philosophy is always involved in wholesale re-framings (mechanism, after all, was as much a global philosophical world-view as it was empirical science), philosophers have to be a part of these conversations, even if they might not understand all the scientific details. Deacon is aware of the philosophical dimensions of his account and draws on philosophy where he finds conceptual problems with older frames and as he tries to explain and justify his novel approach. This is not a book for a lazy Sunday afternoon in summer read; it requires full attention and even then, non-scientists will be hard pressed to follow in some spots. But these arguments concern our being here, with the distinctive powers that we have. Who can fail to be fascinated by the answer that Deacon sketches?

On my trips home to visit my mom in Sudbury, I always stop on the side of the road to collect rocks for the garden. Most of them are Cambrian Shield granite, but I have a few pieces of the nickle ore that still forms the basis of the local economy. The ore was formed in a magma lake created 1.8 billion years ago when a meteorite slammed into the region.

Last week I was sitting in the garden with Josie when I brought her over to a piece of the ore and told her to put her hand on it. I do not remember exactly what we had been discussing, but I wanted to illustrate a point about the relativity of time, about how what seems agonizingly long from a human perspective is nothing from geological point of view. If the ore could sense and think, would it even be able to register the 80 or so years of a human’s life? It would be the briefest flash of light, gone before the rock could even concentrate its attention to see if something worth investigating had happened. Even the whole history of the human lineage, a couple million years, would not be to it as an afternoon is to us.

I made a point to find some ore because it reminds me of who I am and how I got here. Had the meteorite not slammed into primeval Sudbury, there would have been no nickle-copper ore, and therefore no mines, no smelter where my father worked, and so maybe no father, no mother, no me. My sitting in the garden with Josie is one act in a cosmic drama billions of years old. And so is your sitting wherever you are sitting. And the causal connections that led to my or your being here and there, and one person’s doing one thing and another person another, and people meeting and becoming friends and colleagues are so innumerable, so improbable, that thinking about them sends a shudder through me. Had any one thing been even a little different, I would not have been born, or I would have become something else, and made different friends, or not made any at all, and would have had to sit alone in my garden rather than with Josie.

But however improbable a life is, if you are living it, then the whole 14 billion year history of the universe has worked out in your favour. Whatever you achieve or do not achieve, your life is of singular value. Once you are gone nothing ever, no matter how many trillions of years the universe will last, will be you again. And that is why we feel such pain at the death of our friends.

Although our lives are near miraculous singularities and the rocks will long outlast us, we are conscious of the passing of our days. And yet, how many days do we waste, wishing we were doing something other than we are doing, or fidgeting, restless and bored?

No mortal creature should ever be bored because no one knows for certain which moment will be one’s last. As has happened too frequently over the past three years, I was brutally reminded again yesterday of this hard truth– harder even than the ore in my garden– when I learned of the death of my friend and colleague Cate Hundleby. I was working upstairs when Josie called for me to come down, a quiver in her voice told me that something was seriously wrong. A tree had fallen in our back yard the day before and taken down the power line. I was worried that it had begun to spark or started something on fire.

But the news was far worse.

Our friends Tory and Len were in the yard, telling us that Cate had died earlier that day.

One goes numb, not quite capable of feeling the meaning of that news. One’s mind immediately goes back to the last time one saw the person, the vividness of the memory resists the thought that one will never see them again.

I called Cate ‘Big Cat’ because of her Chesire cat-like grin. I gave her the nickname very soon after she came to Windsor. I was on the committee that hired her and we were friends from the moment that she started working and living here. She lived on the same street as Josie and I, only half a block away. We would see her walking her dogs, first Abbie, then Chloe, and now, never again. Like the Chesire Cat, she has disappeared, leaving only the memory of that grin.

Cate was a transformative addition to the department, not the first woman in its history but the first feminist philosopher. When she started working here she had made a name for herself as a feminist philosopher of science. As her worked developed, it turned towards argumentation theory, where she made original contributions to a feminist theory of argumentation. She authored the Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on feminism and argumentation, edited an important collection of essays on the work of Trudy Govier, and was instrumental in founding Canada’s first PhD Program in Argumentation. She was a loud and effective voice for change within the department, the university, and the philosophical community generally. Her arguments were not always easily received in the department, but we are the better for her efforts and contributions.

These are facts, but people are not just facts. We cannot capture the texture of a life, how they interweave with the lives of others and things, by saying what people did and what they were like. Life is experience and activity; our contributions have helped make things the way they are, but the person cannot be recreated from the traces that they left behind. Only memory can preserve the Élan vital.

Josie and I sat somberly in the garden yesterday, remembering our friend and toasting her. As we sat there, a hummingbird began to feed from a flower of a late blooming hosta. Neither of us could remember ever seeing a hummingbird in twenty years of living here.

I am a man of reason and science. I know that rocks do not experience that passage of time and that hummingbirds are just hummingbirds.

But our superiority over the rocks is that we can imagine, and pretend, and project meanings, and act as if.

And so we looked at the hummingbird and said good bye to our friend.

A few seconds later, it rose from the hosta and flew away.