… to be a conduit of light and nutrients,

a lens through which the world focuses itself

from one perspective,

for one moment,

gracious and receptive,

living not thinking

the wisdom of silence

of soil and rock and trees.

… to be like the black spruce,

that lets the older branches die,

grey, brittle counter-points

to the green apex,

straining out of this thin acid soil

towards the morning sun.

… to be like the white pine,

unafraid of asymmetry,

its lea-side branches

outreaching their windward brothers,

solemnly unbalanced,

but it does not topple,

clinging precarious,

by knuckle-roots

to the rocks

over which my footfalls

beat unrhythmically

to the lay of the land.

I am no-place,

neither a nor -a,

neither imposing nor yielding,

neither analyzing nor criticizing,

neither leading nor following,

neither wanting nor foregoing,

neither taking nor giving,

neither teaching nor learning,

neither reading nor writing.

neither speaking nor listening.

Freedom is no-place,

moving through without taking,

sensing not proving,

laughing

the emptiness of our self-spun webs of no-things:

slogans, platitudes, whinging-whining-special pleading.

The indifference of the material world

says: Nothing is special.

Worth-less

even than these glacial stones

abandoned on forest floor

by ancient receding ice.

Nothing is special

To the magnificent indifference of the material world.

There is no magic,

no gods,

or spirits, or souls, or minds,

or guiding intelligence,

or true self,

or telos.

Entropy+geometry=life:

an exuberance of forms.

Could there be any less philosophically interesting subject than taxation? The life of the button down accountant seems the purest antithesis to the impractical speculations of the philosopher, but in fact, the numbers and repellent jargon of tax law conceal important philosophical principles. Surprisingly, the most important of these principles is the one which Marx thought would govern production and distribution in a mature communist society: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Is this not the very principle which, although unacknowledged, justifies the principle of progressive taxation? And might there not be some sort of unconscious recognition of the hidden radicalism of the practice that fuels its ruling class opponents?

People who fancy themselves revolutionaries in the global north are rarely concerned with the mundane details of how a socialist society would operate. The poetic imagination paints inspiring pictures of a future world as a harmony of harmonies. Clean energy and artificial intelligence will free life from the bounds of material necessity and all people, as individuals and freely self-organizing groups, will simply pursue their interests unencumbered by the prosaic demands of life under capitalism. Far be it from me, philosophical dreamer that I am, to close the poetry book. But before one can transcend the workaday grammar of prose one must first learn its rules. It is easy to imagine a world in which all material problems are overcome. But social life is not a figment of our imagination. If it were, we would have solved all of our problems by now. Alas …

What I am trying to say is: socialism will require accountants, not to help citizens to avoid paying taxes (as at present) but to organize the rules by which the wealth produced by collective labour will be divided between funds for re-investment in plant and equipment, funds for investment in public goods, and appropriation by private individuals for their own self-directed use. The Critique of the Gotha Programme— the short work which contains Marx’s famous aphorism– wrestled with these general problems, but in a sketchy and and speculative manner. I do not want to examine that text here (but a new critical edition with an introduction by Peter Hudis is worth exploring). Instead I want to trace out some of the implications of the principle that are most relevant for contemporary public policy.

A principle of reciprocity underlay Marx’s conception. Note that he does not calibrate individual appropriation to the extent of contribution but to need. That is, one does not withdraw from the commonwealth in proportion to one’s contribution but contributes according to talent and interest and takes according to need. As Marx well-understood, both contribution and appropriation pose substantive accounting challenges: how to compare contributions in the first case and how to limit needs in the second. In a capitalist society these problems are settled by money: the ‘value’ of a talent is determined by the income it can command (which means, perversely, that a money-speculator who contributes nothing to the satisfaction of any need appears hundreds of times more ‘valuable’ that a sanitation worker, even though the latter’s work is far more life-valuable than the former’s). So too need: capitalism does not recognise the category of need as a normative term. Instead, it counts only “effective” demand: one needs only what one can purchase. If one spends one’s money on gold jewelry to the point where one cannot afford food, then one in effect says that they need jewelry more than food. From the capitalist perspective the objective harm that such behaviour would cause does not register as harm. The rank order of the purchases is an expression of consumer sovereignty.

But in a developed socialist economy money would no longer serve as a universal equivalent, means of exchange, and measure of value. Much of the Critique is devoted to dismantling the German’ Social Democratic Party’s efforts to work out an alternative means of value-measure and exchange. The details need not detain is here. Instead I want to focus on the implications of the aphorism itself.

The first point that I want to make is that while Marx saw it as applicable only in the distant future of a mature, stable socialist society, it underlies (but not explicitly) actually existing institutions like progressive taxation. The underlying idea behind progressive taxation is that society is a cooperative endeavour. Even if individual freedom is the highest good, people cannot simply will themselves free but require means, and some means are more efficiently procured as public goods. But public goods require public funds, public funds must be funded, and taxation is the method by which those funds are raised. Unlike Marx’s version, the principle of progressive taxation adds an element of proportionality (which would be irrelevant in the case of socialism, because there would no longer be class differences), but the more basic and important idea still operates: free citizens want to contribute to collective well-being, and a free society creates opportunities for everyone to contribute.

In a capitalist society, labour markets are not governed by the principle of careers open to talents but demand for labour power. Profitable industries will hire, unprofitable industries will go under, and workers must content themselves with what jobs that they can find. Since the nature of the jobs is also determined by considerations of labour productivity and not talent and interest, labour is doubly alienating: people are compelled to find work and they have to do what they are told while working. Labour thus appears to be an imposed and oppressive burden, when at a deeper level, if we abstract from its capitalist form, it is the practical expression of our world-building, creative capacities. As Marx also says in the Critique, once the alienated form of labour have been overcome, it will become our primary need. Freed of the need to work for a living, life will become centred around the free, creative contributions that we make to the common wealth, the fund from which each of us will draw to satisfy our needs. The developed socialist economy will be a virtuous circle: everyone willingly contributes and freely appropriates their share of the wealth that they have helped to create.

The so-called “free-rider problem” (brilliantly solved in the tale of the Little Red Hen), would be overcome because people would be motivated by an inner drive to do the necessary work. In the tale, the little red hen goes around the barnyard asking for help with the various jobs that need doing to bake some bread. One after another the animals tell her to get lost, but once the bread has been baked, they all want to eat. But now she she tells them to get lost: since they did not contribute, they have no legitimate claim on the product. They wanted to free ride, she puts a stop to it by refusing to share: If you want to eat you have to work.

Unfortunately, the red hen has to resort to coercive measures because the other animals are lazy. But if we come back to the real world, laziness is not a character flaw but a function of the alienated nature of work: people avoid work because they are under the thumb of the boss, forced into it by material necessity, and unfree to determine how they accomplish the required tasks. Even when work is life-valuable, its organization and pace are not controlled democratically and few individual workers enjoy any freedom of action once they are inside the office or plant.

Passive and active strategies to avoid work are thus met with right wing charges of laziness (the more impoverished and powerless the group, the louder the denunciations). Especially harsh criticism is reserved for addicts and the homeless. The right advocates coercive schemes to deprive people of benefits, force them into workfare programs, or simply remove them to penal institutions. Sometimes these schemes are are justified on the grounds that the addicted and homeless are blights on respectable society. However, one can also sometimes detect an inverted echo of Marx’s aphorism. Conservatives will sometimes argue that work is character building and by tying benefits to labour workfare schemes are in effect tough love which will benefit the poor in the long run. The argument reminds me of an ironic prose poem by Baudelaire called “Let’s Beat Up the Poor.” A man and his partner are dining when outside a beggar peers in hoping to attract the attention of a generous diner. The man notices, gets up, and starts a fight with panhandler. In the poem the man feels like he is affirming the dignity of the beggar by engaging him in honest combat, much in the way that Hegel argues that our freedom depends upon our willingness to fight to death. There is perhaps too fine a point put on physical combat in these stories, but there is an element of truth in both, as there is in the justification of workfare schemes.

No human being should ever be regarded as nothing but a victim or pitied for whatever state they are in. Social democratic forms of public service provision are not rooted in pity, but they do sometimes, wittingly or not, treat those who need benefits as passive consumers. They thus share something in common with their right wing critics: both tend to see impoverished people as incapable of solving their own problems: the right believes that bad character and bad choices lead to bad socio-economic outcomes while the social democratic left tends to see them as victims of greedy people or an unjust system. But neither tries to think of ways in which existing resources could be marshaled to create spaces in which addicts, or the homeless, or other groups in need of public support could work together to change their own social and individual reality.

Marx confronted an argument analogous to contemporary workfare schemes in the 1848 Revolution in France. Louis Blanc, socialist member of the national Assembly , tried to pass legislating that would empower workers to organize their own enterprises. What he ended up with was a pale compromise which in effect forced workers into state organized schemes, “workhouses in the open,” as Marx dismissed them. Nevertheless, Marx understood that the principle that motivated Blanc was the correct one: freedom for workers means freedom to work in democratically organized, life-valuable industries and service providing institutions. From each according to their abilities was thus an affirmation not only of the dignity of working people, but also the life-value of creative labour, both for society and for the individual. Self-esteem, self-respect, and self-worth are tied up with our being contributing members of society. The difference between Marx’s understanding and the right-wing version is that for Marx the drive to change comes from within workers themselves. Conservatives not only want to impose it from the outside, but they also want forced labour to fuel capitalist profits. Workfare participants are in effect unpaid labour for the capitalist: the state pays their wages and the firm reaps the profits. Socialized labour, by contrast, would be democratically organised for the collective and individual good.

But where does that leave contemporary society’s approach to the growing problems of homelessness and addiction? Current policy is bifurcated: there is no willingness to seriously regulate housing markets to bring down house prices and no plans to undertake the construction of genuinely affordable housing at the scale required to provide housing to all who require it. Laws around addiction are changing to allow for safe injection sites and decriminalization of possession. Whether or not those make drug use safer they are not solving the problems that deep addiction causes addicts, not the least of which is that it renders them incapable of doing anything more than satisfying their cravings: a one-dimensional existence that robs them of the opportunity to think, feel, and do more than alternate between being being sick and high. While housing market regulation and national public housing projects are necessary and decriminalization a good first step, none on their own engages the energies and potential of homeless and addicted people as agents. We cannot go from capitalism to democratic socialism in one fell swoop, but was can re-think public service provision in ways that might contribute, even if only in a small way, to building the sort of civic agency longer-term and more fundamental transformations would require.

There are a number of projects that can serve as guides to the transformation of public policy from passive service provision to actively engaging people in self-organised projects of social and self-transformation. The one that I am most familiar with (I wrote about it in my book Democratic Society and Human Needs) was organised by the Parkdale Area Recreation Centre in Toronto. PARC serves the relatively high concentration of former psychiatric patients living in the neighborhood. Instead of simply buying a building, paying to have it renovated, and giving it to those in need of housing, PARC instead engaged the labour and intelligence of the people who would live there. They helped renovate the space and they drew up a constitution that would govern life in the building. Needs were met, not through the initiative of government bureaucrats and social workers, but the collective and individual agency of the future residents. Professionals helped initiate the project and were their to assist and guide but future residents worked to satisfy their own needs. They changed themselves as they created the space in which they would live.

Conservative err when they lecture people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps because individual problems typically have social causes that individuals acting on their own cannot solve no matter how hard they try. But even here there is a grain of truth: the only lasting changes are those which engage the agency of the person involved. Victimization is real, but victims are human beings capable of changing themselves by working together to change the reality that victimized them.

Even though one could say that as a philosopher reading forms a large part of my work, my interests pull me in so many different directions that I feel I am perpetually behind (sometimes embarrassingly so), publishers’ lists in any particular field or genre. That is true for philosophy and doubly so for literature (which is better than philosophy, since it nourishes the mind but also pleases in a way that very few philosophical authors and their too-careful-to-the-point of verbosity prose are able to achieve). So it came to pass that I sat in my garden in July 2023 reading Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, published in 2006.

The Lay of the Land is the third volume of a trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and continued with Independence Day. In one respect, the trilogy is classic Americana: an epic that traces the domestic dramas of Frank Bascombe, former sportswriter cum New Jersey real estate not-quite mogul, on his journey from early to middle middle age, through his struggles to love his kids, divorce, re-marriage and its sundry complications, and finally to some sort of inner peace.

In almost all respects Bascombe is everything I absolutely rejected when I was younger. I disdained the social conventions that Bascombe lives by, never wanted to have children, valued ideas and art more than money, dressed in tight black jeans and a leather jacket rather than pale pastel golf shirts. But the power of literature (and all art) is to draw us into worlds which are not our own. The greatness of literature is not found in how accurately it “represents” this or that reality but with how skillfully it constructs its own reality for readers– who are not the characters– to explore. And if we have the courage to explore a world which is not our own we might find– sometimes to our horror, but always to our edification– that we see ourselves, or some aspect of ourselves, where we least expected to find them.

I have never been a sports writer (but I do spend too much time watching hockey and baseball), have never been divorced and have no children, but I am a middle aged man. Of course, the universe sends us no mystical signs, but it is amusing sometimes to think that it does. The delay of 17 years between Ford’s publishing the novel and my beginning to read it allowed my age to catch up with the protagonist: we are both 55. Perhaps occult forces were at work guiding my eye to this volume on a springtime book-shopping trip to Ann Arbor. Maybe the universe wanted to warn me about something (but I hope not, because Bascombe has prostate cancer).

Even as I shuddered at the thought of being caught dead in chinos and loafers, (not to mention being terrified of being diagnosed with cancer) the book made me realize the obvious: I was very far from being the cool near-teenager living in a basement apartment in Toronto but a middle middle aged (I hope 55 is middle middle age) man, sitting in the back garden of my two story brick house in Windsor. I was not a real estate agent but a Philosophy professor, decidedly middle class, living a very different life than my working class origins, and also capable of basic existential mathematics: every day on the planet increases the probability of my receiving the sort of bad news that Bascombe receives. The book forced on me the reality of the commonalities that age and class impose which run deeper than our chosen values. These commonalities do not negate differences of life goals and priorities, but they force us to be honest about the whole of what we become. That honest reckoning is difficult, because the funnest thing in life is self-deception.

But in order to provoke nourishing self-reflection and understanding, novels must please the mind. What pleases is Ford’s absolute mastery of economy of expression. His sentences are exquisite: “This Clevinger, entered the quiet, reverent classroom of test takers, walked among the desks and toward the front to where Ms. McCurdy stood, arms folded, musing out the window, possibly smiling. And he said to her, raising a Glock 9-mm to within six inches of the space just above the mid-point between her eyes, he said, “Are you ready to meet your Maker?” To which Ms. McCurdy, who was 46 and a better than average teacher and canasta player, and who had been a flight nurse in Desert Storm, replied, blinking her periwinkle eyes in curiosity only twice, “Yes. Yes, I think I am.” A scene of absolute horror is rendered with such quiet attention to the banal details that it renders the extraordinary ordinary in a way which better drives home the deeper point (which the rest of the novel explores) that each of us should cultivate the quiet dignity of Ms. McCurdy as we come closer to that inevitable meeting.

As I began the novel, storm clouds gathered quickly as they do here this time of year. The wind picked up and I became conscious of sitting under the limbs of a large mulberry tree. Directly overhead, jets headed out on a easterly flight path from Detroit Metro towards Europe. I thought: “If a branch fell or a 777 on its way to London dropped a piece of its wing on me, could I, in the fraction of a second before the tree or flap crushed me, answer the question with the same equanimity as Ms. McCurdy?” Probably not, because I do not believe in the God that gave her strength. Philosophy is not therapy. One can, with Socrates, extol the examined life and believe that philosophy is preparation for death (because it helps us live well and fully) and still spend most of one’s days trying to distract oneself from that relentless existential mathematics that I noted above. Every moment that you live is a subtraction from a finite sum of days.

I do not know how a younger man or a middle aged woman would experience The Lay of the Land. To be sure, the novel could still resonate for those at a different stage of life or experiencing it from a female perspective, but I am not certain they would feel the novel’s pull the same way a person in my position feels it. I am not saying that Ford had only middle aged men in mind when he wrote the book, but for me, its power lay in how perfectly it captures the way in which, no matter what one does at 55 (or thereabouts) one cannot deny that one is no longer young. Having adult children (like Bascombe) would put a fine point on that fact, but even without them one just feels (and looks) one’s age. And that is disconcerting, initially, whatever one’s walk of life, because it shatters the temporal illusion in which people live. Second to second, one does not look different, feel different, or worry about the next second being one’s last. But ruthlessly iterated over decades, we do change, our hair recedes, our knees ache, we would rather have a martini in our back garden and read Richard Ford than go to a club. Most importantly, we start to recognize emotionally, and not just abstractly, intellectually, that one second will be our last, and we are much closer to our final breath than to the first.

There is thus a deep intelligence at work beneath the surface narrative of the novel. Most people are not philosophers and do not ruminate on the meaning of life or grapple with their mortality by reading existential philosophy. Many seek spiritual comfort in religious communities, but many, like Bascombe, approach these essential problems through their memories. As we age, the number of days remaining to us shrinks, but we accumulate memories, and these become the substance of on-going self-examination: was I a good father or husband or partner, was I there when my friends needed me, did I make the right career choice, study the right subject, vote for the right candidate, speak up when the situation demanded. These are totally banal questions, and yet absolutely central to the only evaluation of one’s life that ultimately matters: one’s own. The difference between the philosophical and literary treatment of these issues is that in the latter case we experience them through the constructed feelings and thoughts of the characters: they are evoked, rather than laid out in the abstract. As soon as literature lectures it dies as art: if you want to lecture, become a professor; if you want to be an artist, trust that your audience will find their own way through your work.

There are no lectures in Lay of The Land. There are, unfortunately, some badly drawn scenes (Bascombe’s thoughts as he fantasizes about his daughter’s lesbian partner) and a melodramatic climax whose motivation I could not understand at all. The novel recovers from the fireworks of the climax and reaches a satisfying conclusion consonant with the tenor and the themes that Ford so wonderfully unfolds in this novel and its two preceding volumes. I do not know if Ford plans a fourth volume that would take us through to the end of Bascombe’s days but, for myself, I hope not. Sometimes literature, like life, is best when it leaves some things hanging in the balance.

In ancient Greece, to be a cynic was morally estimable. Cynics (exemplified by Diogenes the Cynic) were renowned for their honesty: brutal, but honesty nonetheless. They were regarded as truth tellers who were not afraid of power. Today, the term has come to mean almost the opposite of what it would have signified to the ancient Greeks. Cynicism retains its connection to honesty, but honesty in the pursuit of one’s own interests. Contemporary cynics can cut through bullshit, to be sure, but not to subordinate power to truth. The truth for a contemporary cynic is the truth of power.

It is in this light that we must examine the results of the recently conclude NATO summit. There is much that sounds like platitudinous hypocrisy, but beneath the platitudes are important political truths asserted cynically. What sound like universal principles are in fact bald expressions of the interests of NATO members, of which the United States is the most important. Below, I cite the most politically important of such passages from the communique issued on first day of its summit, July 11th 2023, and add brief, critical comments that supply what the communique leaves out.

“We, the Heads of State and Government of the North Atlantic Alliance, bound by shared values of individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, have gathered in Vilnius as war continues on the European continent, to reaffirm our enduring transatlantic bond, unity, cohesion, and solidarity at a critical time for our security and international peace and stability.”

Note that these values remain undefined and hence they cannot be used reflexively, to criticise alliance policy on the same grounds that they use to justify it. When we decode their meaning in the context of this document, liberty, democracy, and human rights are equated to the institutions of the member states. But whether people in NATO countries enjoy the means to live according to their choices, whether the expression of the collective considered judgements of the people as a whole governs policy and law, and whether the fundamental interests of human beings as asserted in key human rights documents are satisfied are not examined. Rhetorically, one is supposed to uncritically accept the claim that NATO defends democracy, etc., because NATO protects countries that call themselves liberal democracies. That those societies might need fundamental changes in order to become liberal, democratic upholders of human rights is not raised as a serious possibility. But this is not just hypocritical rhetoric: there is no reason to think that politicians and statespeople do not actually believe their platitudes. Their convictions are key impediments to change through rational argument (supposedly the primary political virtue of liberal-democracy, as understood by thinkers from Mill to Rawls). They simply cannot see their actual policies as their opponents might see them (undemocratic and coercive), and so could never be persuaded to change course. Opponents’ arguments re simply dismissed as propaganda while their own pronouncements assumed to be necessarily true.

“NATO is a defensive Alliance.”

It is true that in its origins NATO was formed to contain the Soviet Union and it did not undertake offensive actions during the Cold War. But it did bomb Serbia to help secure the independence of Kosovo (contrary to international law) and it also participated in the Afghan war, when the United States manipulated Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, falsely claiming that the 9/11 attacks were undertaken by the government of Afghanistan. (People forget that the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden if the United States provided them evidence that he was behind the attacks). Those are two cases of NATO engaged in offensive military operations with an aim to re-define the map and replace governments. I exclude the dozens of solo US interventions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“NATO’s three core tasks [are] deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security.

NATO played a deterrent role during the Cold War and it should have been disbanded when the Warsaw pact was disbanded. Instead, it carried on because of the inertial force that the past exercises on the future. The problem with anachronistic institutions is that uses must be found for them. Their existence prevents their supporters from seeing that new possibilities open up under new historical conditions. NATO no longer had an objective or historically specific function once the Soviet Union collapsed, but it carried on. Not only did it carry on, it grew. Not only did it grow, it expanded right to the borders of the Russian Federation, provoking the very sort of nationalist security reaction that underlined the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Hence this “defensive” alliance provoked the very thing it was supposed to prevent: war in Europe.

“We reaffirm our commitment to NATO’s Open Door policy and to Article 10 of the Washington Treaty. Every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangements.”

The policy that created the context for war in Ukraine continues, despite the catastrophe it has brought about. As I noted above, the contemporary cynic equates truth with their own power and cannot rise above to look critically at the objective results of its exercise. Thus, despite the fact that their refusal to negotiate Russian security concerns created the conditions for open warfare, they persist– but ambiguously– with teasing membership for Ukraine. This teasing of offers of admission without actually offering them all the while demanding that Ukraine sacrifice more and more of its men to the killing fields is the height– or perhaps better, the depth, of NATO hypocrisy.

Not only is this position murderous, it is also self-undermining if it is supposed to justify NATO policy and discredit Russia’s. It is of course true that every sovereign nation can choose its own security arrangements, but if this principle is the universal that it is asserted to be, it must hold for Russia too. Where there are competing security interests war, can only be prevented if both sides listen to each other and take one another’s concerns seriously. That did not happen in this case: Russia presented written proposals to the US that would have helped resolve the conflict. The US did not respond seriously. An agreement to end the fighting was negotiated in the early days of the war; the US and the UK urged Ukraine to reject it. They did, and now there are probably 100 000s of thousands of dead and no sign that the fighting will end soon.

“Peace in the Euro-Atlantic area has been shattered. The Russian Federation has violated the norms and principles that contributed to a stable and predictable European security order.”

In fact, NATO and the US de-stablised this order by failing to change their strategic thinking when the strategic situation in Europe changed after the Cold War. Russia was then in no position to invade Europe but sought deeper integration, which it achieved, as a major supplier of energy and resources to Europe. Russia had no reason to upset those trading relationships. That it did was a function of the Maidan coup (shaped by Washington policy) and later the refusal to implement the principles enshrined in the two Minsk Treaties.

“The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values. We remain open to constructive engagement with the PRC, including to build reciprocal transparency, with a view to safeguarding the Alliance’s security interests.”

It is unclear how does anything China has done domestically or in its own sphere of interest threatens Europe. European and United States’ capital has benefited tremendously since the 1980’s from off-shoring manufacture to China. In turn, Chinese policy has channeled resources into the biggest poverty elimination scheme in human history. Like every state, China has the sovereign right to organise its internal affairs and “determine its own security arrangements.” No country, including China, is above reproach or criticism, but problems of the Chinese state are for the Chinese people to resolve. Provoking a massive military confrontation will hardly promote the values of individual liberty, democracy, and human rights that NATO asserts that it upholds.

“Russia bears full responsibility for its illegal, unjustifiable, and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, which has gravely undermined Euro-Atlantic and global security and for which it must be held fully accountable.”

Russia bears responsibility for its decision to invade. That decision was egregiously stupid and has ensured the very encirclement by NATO forces that it was designed to prevent. Sweden and Finland have now joined the alliance, and whether Ukraine gains formal admission or not, there is no scenario in which it emerges outside of the Western security umbrella. The invasion was rash and will most likely end up being one of the major strategic political and economic blunders of the past 100 years. At the same time, those decisions were made in reaction to two decades of provocative NATO expansion. As with the Cold War, the people of a smaller nation are the primary victims of great power competition, made even more tragic because there were no objective economic or ideological causes of this conflict but only the inertia that prevents major power from changing course when the historical situation makes it possible to do so.

“We do not and will never recognise Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexations, including Crimea.”

That is probably true as regards Donbass, but Crimea will likely have to be formally ceded if there is ever to be peace. Whatever happens, this claim is the height of hypocrisy, given NATO’s role in cravinf Kosovo off from Serbia. Kosovo’s independence was forced by a 78 day NATO bombing mission.

“There can be no impunity for Russian war crimes and other atrocities, such as attacks against civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure that deprives millions of Ukrainians of basic human services.”

Fair enough, but of course the universalisation of the underlying principle would require the investigation and punishment of war crimes committed across the Middle East, Central Asia, and North and East Africa during the ‘War on Terror.’ Everyone knows that will not happen. Remember the hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi children that Madeleine Albright said were “worth it?” They died mostly because of the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

“We urge all countries not to provide any kind of assistance to Russia’s aggression and condemn all those who are actively facilitating Russia’s war.”

… while we continue to pump more and more offensive military hardware into the theatre of operations.

“We underline that this cannot be realised without Russia’s complete and unconditional withdrawal. While we have called on Russia to engage constructively in credible negotiations with Ukraine, Russia has not shown any genuine openness to a just and lasting peace.”

As I noted above and has been extensively documented, this claim is simply untrue. Russia asked for negotiations and was ignored’ they had an agreement worked out with Ukraine that the US and UK undid.

“We fully support Ukraine’s right to choose its own security arrangements. Ukraine’s future is in NATO.”

This claim sounds like a naked contradiction. According to whom is Ukraine’s future in NATO? The present government of Ukraine, it is true, is demanding NATO membership, but governments change. Is it not possible that Ukrainians, waking up to the way in which they have been sacrificed for US-NATO policy, will come to regard it as a de-stabilizing force and prefer some other security arrangement?

“Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path”Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path.”

Not according to Transparency International, which gave Ukraine a score of 33/100, ranking it 166th out of 180 countries. It has also engaged in a systematic campaign of Russophobic historical revisionism, including the inexcusable removal of Russian language books from the nation’s libraries.

“As part of a broader effort to better respond collectively to this threat, we will further develop Allies’ capabilities, and continue to engage with the Global Coalition to Defeat Da’esh and with partner countries in order to support their efforts and to help them build their capacity to counter terrorism. … Our approach to terrorism, and its causes, is in accordance with international law and the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, and upholds all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions on the fight against terrorism.”

Terrorism will never be defeated save by the elimination of its causes, of which armed invasion of small countries is a primary cause. Terrorism is a malign tactic in support of legitimate causes. Until the US stops interfering in the affairs of other countries there will always be resistance. Unable to match up to the US militarily, guerrilla and terrorist tactics will be adopted. In pursuit of its interests the US has never worried about international law. At this moment the US occupies parts of Syria in open contradiction to international law.

“Russia is fuelling tensions and instability across these regions. Pervasive instability results in violence against civilians, including conflict-related sexual violence, as well as attacks against cultural property and environmental damage.”

Indeed it does, and the US has been the major destabliser of “these regions” (in Africa). In the current conflict no African nation has openly supported the US. They have instead remained neutral and agitated for peace. having suffered from centuries of imperialist domination African nations are well-positioned to cut through NATO’s platitudes. They are certainly mistaken if they think that Putin’s Russia is a consistent opponent of imperialism, but they are correct to identify the US and Europe as the major historical sources of their own oppression.

“The People’s Republic of China’s stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security and values … he PRC’s malicious hybrid and cyber operations and its confrontational rhetoric and disinformation target Allies and harm Alliance security.”

As above, there is no evidence that China has any ambitions beyond securing its own borders and spehere of interest. It is does not claim the right, as NATO does, to decide policy for the whole world, but only insists on the consistent application of the principle which NATO purportedly believes, that each nation has the right to “decide its own security arrangements.” If African nations prefer Chinese to Western investment, that is again their sovereign right to choose. All the “confrontational rhetoric” blows into China from Europe and America.

“The PRC seeks to control key technological and industrial sectors, critical infrastructure, and strategic materials and supply chains.”

Has Chinese policy sought to embargo key technologies? Has China strong-armed allies to stop trading with the US. This assertion is an inversion of reality. Biden has continued Trump’s policy of economic war against China. He could in fact learn a lesson from the last forty years of Chinese history. The Chinese have used the wealth generated by economic growth to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yes, inequality has increased in relative terms, but no one can deny that there has been world-historical improvement in living standards, an improvements which the US seeks to de-rail.

“The deepening strategic partnership between the PRC and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.”

As a number of realist commentators in the US have pointed out, the alliance between Russia and China is a direct function of US policy.

“We reiterate our clear determination that Iran must never develop a nuclear weapon. We remain deeply concerned about Iran’s escalation of its nuclear programme.”

Even the US admits that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons. As with the Russian-Chinese alliance, the escalation referred to here is tactical and a direct response to Trump’s walking away from the agreement that the Obama administration reached, Biden, of course, has not rejoined, so whatever happens, America has only itself to blame.

“The threat to critical undersea infrastructure is real.”

Where better to end than on this astounding assertion. The destruction of Nordstream 2 was either brought about by the US directly, indirectly, or with its silent approval and yet the inclusion of this claim implies that forces other than the US-NATO were involved. Only a group that assumes that it makes reality rather than responds to it could make such a claim. As it is finding out– sadly, at the cost of other people’s lives– NATO’s beliefs do not constitute the world, but they do help make it worse than it might otherwise be.

While it is true that market forces are always shaped by laws and political regulations, anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as class-based economic power needs to think about what has transpired in Ontario this summer over government subsidies to attract automaker investment in electronic vehicle production. I live in “Canada’s Automotive capital,” across the Detroit River from the Motor City. Both Windsor and Detroit have faced decades of factory closings. So when Stellantis (the latest permutation of what used to be Chrysler) announced a partnership with LG, a Korean company, to build a new factory to produce lithium batteries for electric vehicles, it seemed to ensure the long term future of Windsor’s one remaining assembly plant (Canada’s largest factory). Construction began almost as soon as the agreement was announced, but it came to a crashing halt two months ago. The Canadian and Ontario governments had pledged an undisclosed sum to secure the investment, but they had also been negotiating with Volkswagen to build a similar factory in St. Thomas, about 150 kilometers away. Unlike the Windsor deal, the subsidy that Volkswagen would receive came out in the press: 16 billion dollars according to a report from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. No sooner had this deal been announced than work halted on the Windsor plant. Whether Stellantis demanded that an existing deal be re-opened or whether the deal had never been finalized was unclear, but what was clear to the city, the provincial and federal governments, and Unifor, the main auto workers union, was that the biggest industrial investment in Ontario in 30 years was in jeopardy.

Negotiations were re-started and a new deal was reached this week: Stellantis will receive 15 billion dollars in tax concessions. All told, then, two companies will receive 31 billion dollars in subsidies to build two factories that will create 1400 jobs in St. Thomas and 2500 in Windsor.

It is easy to criticize these deals, but they prove that corporations have the power to extract (extort) these concessions from governments. Governments will pay these subsidies regardless of their ideological stripe. The Ontario government is a right-wing conservative party and the federal government a classic example of Liberal centrism, but both scrambled to save the Windsor deal when it became apparent that it was in jeopardy. So important are large-scale manufacturing investments to the appearance that the economy is growing, and so central is the appearance that the economy is growing to the longevity of governments, that it is relatively easy for major corporations to start subsidy bidding wars between cities, regions, and countries. (A complicating factor in the Windsor deal was that the Biden administration passed its own massive subsidy program for green energy and manufacturing as part of its Inflation Reduction Act). In negotiations, one exploits one’s advantage to the fullest. Corporations hold the key to the decision as to where manufacturing plants are sited and they used this power to play countries and regions off against each other until they get the best deal for themselves. Even the most powerful government in the world tailors its policies to attract corporate investment. if governments will not pay, their countries or regions will not get investment.

(Whether these investments really do contribute to overall economic growth is more questionable: The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that the total aggregate economic benefit of the St. Thomas plant will amount to a .01 % boost to GDP. Mathematically, the economy is no further ahead than if the government had just kept the money it will pay out in subsidies).

Of course, economies are not mathematical equations but systems of production and distribution upon which workers’ lives depend. Workers live in one place rather than another and must concern themselves with the state of economic forces where they live and not in the abstract realm of aggregates and averages. Voters vote for local MPs and they expect that they will deliver the goods, especially if their local MP is a member of the ruling party. The Volkswagen plant might only generate .01% GDP growth in the country as a whole, but in St. Thomas its effects on the local GDP will many orders of magnitude more than .01. One cannot dismiss from on high the efforts of local governments to attract investment (especially in historically industrial towns like Windsor and St. Thomas) unless one has a ready-made better alternative for workers.

The ability of corporate capital to determine political policy proves that class-based economic power is real. While this ability confirms one core criticism of capitalism (that it subverts democratic power by determining government policy) it also undermines a key plank of capitalist ideology. Capitalism’s main supporters argue that free competition drives innovation and innovation drives economic growth, better standards of living, and technological progress. Visionaries and bold, risk-taking entrepreneurs constantly sail into the unknown, returning with new ideas, new products, new methods of production: all that governments have to do is stay out of the way. Sure, sometimes a homemade sub will implode while it takes adventure seeking billionaires to the bottom of the Atlantic, but cumulatively, over time, the risks return rewards that pay for the occasional failure.

But what risks are Volkswagen and Stellantis assuming here? None: at least in the case of large-scale investments, public money and not entrepreneurial vision drives “innovation.” The ability of corporations to determine public policy by playing jurisdictions off against one another thus proves the reality of class-based economic power at the same time as it undermines the myth of entrepreneurial vision as the driving force of capitalism. The actual marketplace is not a complex order of small competing firms pushing each other to innovate but a network of coercive power controlled by massive corporations able to bend governments across the political spectrum to their will. Syrizia in Greece was effectively destroyed by the power of German banks who threatened to destroy the Greek economy if Syriza heeded the will of the people as expressed in the referendum of July, 2015. In the Windsor case, Stellantis either reneged on an existing agreement or radically changed its demands. Governments scurried back to the table and added untold billions to the subsidy package.

Examples could be multiplied thousands of times, but the point to take away is that capital is not the source of innovation. It is not even the primary source of investment for large scale enterprises: national and regional governments provide the funds (directly and indirectly), engineering and scientific intelligence is the source of the know how involved in the manufacturing, and workers provide the labour power. The corporations risk relatively nothing but extract all the profits. Governments pay the bills because for the majority of working people “the economy” means “jobs” and jobs at large manufacturing plants tend to pay better, provide more stable employment conditions, can be effectively unionized, and provide better benefits. However, if governments provide the capital, engineers and scientists the ideas, and workers the labour power, the corporation is really an unnecessary middle man appropriating the value created by government and workers.

There is no reason other than ideological attachment to a mythical free market and its magic powers of innovation and wealth creation to prevent governments from actively cutting out the corporate middle man and simply investing in industries that will produce life-valuable products and services. Well, a critic will respond, that is all well and good but we know that “state industries” are not efficient and that governments lack the expertise to run complex systems. That might be true, but it is is equally true about private corporations (which often underperform because of managerial incompetence or greed). Corporate boards do not know anything about the physics of lithium batters. They hire scientists and engineers that do. Nationally owned industries do not need to be run by the cabinet of the government of the day. Competent managers can be hired along with the requisite scientific experts. Few people are so dogmatically attached to an idea of capitalism that they will turn down challenging careers just because their employer is publicly rather than privately owned. Plenty of right-wing economists happily toil for publicly funded universities (and some even participate in their faculty unions).

I conclude on this note because even as capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis people will argue that there is no alternative. Here we see a first systematic step towards an alternative right before our eyes: public control of the industries that public investment and collective labour build.

ChatGPT has set off a panic, not only amongst some educators, worried that it will encourage plagiarism (or perhaps even call into question the nature of authorship) but amongst media prognosticators and a few maverick tech mandarins (whom I always suspect of raising alarms only in order to raise share prices) that AI is coming not only for academic integrity, but our very humanity. They are not wrong to worry. A long history of science fiction dystopias have painted a picture of uncaring machines turning on their creators. Moreover, people who know a lot more about the science (forget about the fiction) plausibly speculate that an artificial intelligence would likely have very different motives than a natural intelligence, motives that we might find malignant but it would find normal. Hans Moravec, a robotics engineer and prophet of the post-human age argues that just as technologically advanced human societies conquered and exploited less technologically advanced societies, so too will an artificial superintelligence likely eliminate the fleshy form of life as inferior and irrelevant. Nick Bostrom, a leading transhumanist philosopher likewise warns his more cheery transhumanists that there is no guarantee that a superintelligent machine would care one whit for the joys and moral principles of human beings. I take these warnings seriously, but I also think that the nightmare scenarios that they paint of coming robot wars tends to distract from a less spectacular but probably more dire (because more probable) threat that the further development of AI poses.

Part of that threat concerns job markets: now that middle class intellectual and professional careers are threatened by AI they are desperately ringing the tocsin. The stoicism that they preached to generations of manual workers faced with technological unemployment is noticeably absent in their pleas to governments to start to regulate and restrain further AI research. Their hypocrisy aside, this side of the danger is real, and twofold.

On the one hand, we still live in a capitalist society where most of life’s necessities are commodities. In order to access the goods and services that we need we require an income, and for most of us that income means selling our labour power. That side of the problem could be addressed if the surplus value produced by our labour were collectively controlled rather than privately appropriated as profit. If collectively produced wealth were democratically controlled, we could rationally reduce socially necessary labour time. Surplus wealth would then create the conditions for everyone to enjoy more free time. Needed goods and services would be publicly funded and available on the basis of need. The realm of freedom, as Marx put it, would expand in proportion to the reduction of the realm of necessity (of having to labour for the sake of survival and development).

However, the second side of the problem would not be solved, and might even be exacerbated, if the liberatory promise of technological development were realized. The problem here is existential rather than social or economic. The technotopian dream behind the development of AI is to collapse the difference between freedom and necessity. Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near, argues explicitly that the emergence of machine intelligence is a new plateau of evolution. He interprets evolution in teleological terms as tending towards higher levels of integrated complexity and intelligence. The logical end point of this development is omniscience– God is not a transcendent spiritual reality but the future outcome of the development of life.

In Kurzweil’s view, human beings are but a stepping stone on the way to the emergence of omniscience. Artificial Intelligence is the necessary next step. Out of humanistic concern for well-being, he argues, we must have the courage to let our creations unfold along their own evolutionary path. Our transhuman present will become a posthuman future. There will no longer be flesh and blood human beings, but instead, our consciousness will be preserved within the neural networks of the superintelligence– God– that succeeds us.

One might be tempted to dismiss this speculation as utopian theogony and not science, but I think we have to examine carefully the way in which it understands human values and the good for human beings. As I argued in both Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and Embodied Humanism: Towards Solidarity and Sensuous Enjoyment, the real danger of technotopian arguments is not that they might be true at some distant point in the future, but that they change how we understand human intelligence, human relationships, and the good for human beings in the present. Although Kurzweil and other technotopians claim to be the inheritors of the humanist values of the Enlightenment, they in fact understand human intelligence and the good for human beings in machine terms. Consequently, they fail to understand the essential importance of limitations– another word for necessity- in human life.

Think of the importance for our psychological well-being of feeling needed. One of the signs of serious depression leading to suicidal thoughts is the belief that the world will be better off if one kills oneself because no one needs you. An effective therapeutic intervention involves convincing the person that in fact others do need them. But why does anyone need anyone else? Because we are limited beings; we cannot procure everything that we need to live through our own efforts; we cannot endlessly amuse ourselves but need to talk to others; the objects of our knowledge lie outside of ourselves and we must work to understand them. So too the objects of our creative projects: they must be built from materials with their own integrity which might not be receptive to our designs. We must therefore work to realise our ideas and have to have the strength to bear failure and the humility to change plans. The good for human beings emerges within this matrix of material necessity. The difference between having a real and an imaginary friend is that we have to work on ourselves to convince other people to like us.

Kurzweil wants, in effect, to abolish this difference. Once material reality has been absorbed by virtual reality there will no longer be a meaningful difference between real and imaginary friends. In a real and not metaphorical sense all friends– in fact, all of reality– will be a function of the imagination of the superintelligence. Since for Kurzweil everything, including inanimate matter, is information, nothing essential would be lost once the material is replaced by the digital simulation. We only hang on to this metaphysical distinction because our minds– our information processing capacity– remains attached to a needy body that depends upon connection to nature and other people. But that archaic metaphysics is maintained by fear: as the Singluarity approaches we must have the courage to die in our fleshy body to be reborn– as St. Paul said– in our (digitized) spirit body.

Just as love of one’s neighbor can easily be converted into a divine command to destroy the enemy, so too transhumanist philanthropy can become a war against what is most deeply and fully human. That is the real danger: that artificial intelligence will re-code the way that we understand our evolved and social intelligence and cause us to prefer the former to the (much more subtle, rich, and complex) later.

Science has long generated metaphorical ways of understanding life. Aristotelian science understood living things as active souls shaping passive matter; in the Enlightenment this conception gave way to a mechanistic understanding of life (as, for example, notoriously expressed in La Mettrie’s epochal Man a Machine (1748). Today that metaphor is giving way to the metaphor of life as information and intelligence as information processing. Since information processing is just what computers do, it is no exaggeration to say that we are coming to understand ourselves as a reflection of the machines that we have built. Whether or not they turn on us, Terminator like or not, they will kill something essential in us if that metaphor takes hold to the extent that we start to think that our intelligence is solely in our brain and our brain is an information processor.

I am not denying that the advances made by AI researchers are not real or much of our intelligence can be captured by computational models of neural activity. But that which makes human intelligence distinct from machine functioning is that it is inseparable from caring, meaningful relationships to the environment. We are not brains in vats, (as Hilary Putnam entertained in a famous thought experiment) but living intelligences standing in meaningful relationships to the natural world, each other, and the universe as a whole. As Teed Rockwell shows in his brilliant book Neither Brain nor Ghost, we cannot understand what brains do if we abstract their activity from the embodied whole of which they are a part. What we see, feel, etc. are not unique functions of the discrete activity of brains but are shaped by the whole nervous system in complex relationships to the world. And– as Marx argued, presciently in the 1840s– the senses themselves are affected by historical and social development. Would Aristotle hear music or unbearable noise if he were brought back to life and taken to a rock concert?

Thus the real danger of further AI development is that it will cause us to dehumanize ourselves and off- load more and more forms of meaningful activity and relationships to a virtual world. And I have no doubt that barring some global catastrophe that collapses social institutions, this result will come to pass (despite my best efforts in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and Embodied Humanism). Talk of regulating AI development is nothing more than hot air. If researchers are forbidden from pursuing their projects in one jurisdiction another will make itself available. The perceived economic and military “benefits” are simple too alluring for governments to seriously pass up. (I say “perceived’ because, as economic historian Robert Gordon has shown, the last decade of the computing revolution has not produced the expected rise in labour productivity).

Whatever the real or imagined benefits, as the technologies become more ubiquitous they will reshape our social relationships. Hartmut Rosa shows (in Social Acceleration) how a technology that is disruptive to one generation becomes the new normal for a later generation. Opposition to technologically driven social change quite literally dies out.

Old school humanists like me might fret at the loss of spontaneity and risk in social life, but a person born today will not understand the value of spontaneity and risk if they grow up in world where they expect all uncertainty to have been programmed out of existence. And that leaves me with a question that I cannot answer (well, perhaps I can, but do not like what I think that the answer might be): are the values of embodied social existence really universal and ultimate (as I have argued) or are they relative to an undeveloped technological era, perhaps to be admired by future cyborgs in the way we can appreciate the beauty of Aristotle’s hylomorphism without believe that it is true?

Just when I had assumed that the Ukraine war was settling into a stalemate in which each would try to bleed the other dry until some sort of negotiated settlement became preferable to lobbing artillery at each other, came news that Wagner PMC founder Evgeny Prigozhin has instigated some sort of coup. I do not have any definitive information about what provoked this extraordinary (and probably suicidal) gambit, but it proves yet again that wars that do not end quickly will take unexpected turns against the power that starts them. It is not fate or karma repaying the aggressor for their crimes but the result of the unique political pressures generated by war.

Wars play out on both the battlefield and civil society. The satisfaction of the need to mobilize the population to support the war physically, with their bodies, and morally, with their minds, requires the war be justified. The typical justification takes the form of the claim that there was no choice but to go to war (necessity) and that the prestige and dignity of the nation is at stake (justice). The longer the conflict goes on, the more of the second plank of the justification becomes dangerous for those who ordered the war.

Putin’s playbook has leaned heavily on the anachronistic idea of Russia as a great power. As the whole world can now see, it is a regional power dependent upon an extractive economy, with all the political-economic vulnerabilities to the customers for the products of its forests, wells, and mines that entails. While Russia’s economy did not collapse in the way that Western powers had hoped, it is in recession and the longer term effects of technology embargoes will continue to cause damage, possibly for decades. Markets especially dislike uncertainty, and armed insurrections, even if put down fairly quickly, are about as uncertain as societies can become.

I will be interested to see what China’s reaction to this coup attempt will be. Russia is uniquely dependent upon the Chinese market after being cut off almost completely from Europe and if there is one value above all that the Chinese leadership cherishes, it is stability. China has adopted a very cautious approach to the war, not condemning it but hardly vocally supporting it. Access to the US and European markets remains essential to China’s development (witness the productive talks between China and Blinken last week). This clear split in the Russian political and military leadership will most likely cause China to further distance themselves from the growing debacle.

Whatever the precipitating cause, it seems clear that the stalled war underlies the problem. Putin has staked Russia’s reputation on victory, but since the opening month of war has only lost ground (Kharkov and Kherson). His only “victories” since the first month have been, how shall we put this, pyrrich conquests of Melitopol and Bakhmut that required the total destruction of the cities at the cost of tens of thousands of lives on both sides and did not change the strategic balance on the battlefield. Nothing Russia does short of using nuclear weapons will change that strategic balance, because they are not fighting Ukraine, they are fighting the combined economic, political, and military might of NATO. There is no chance that NATO will abandon Ukraine the way that the US abandoned Afghanistan. There is simply too much, ideologically, at stake in this conflict for them to walk away. Weapons will continue to flow into the war zone until something that they can sell as victory has been achieved.

The coup attempt will also comes as bad news for those who, naively and without historical foundation, believe that Russia’s war in Ukraine is some sort of heroic anti-imperialist struggle. Putin has tried to sell it as such, but how reconquest of the lands of the Tsarist empire counts as anti-imperialism is beyond me. As the great American realist international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau wryly noted decades ago,the surest sign that a government is pursuing an imperialist policy is their claim to be anti-imperialist. Genuine anti-imperialist struggles are waged by popular forces struggling to free their nation from domination by foreign powers. The Russian speaking population of the Donbass could more plausibly claim to have been engaged in a legitimate national struggle, but Putin largely ignored it until he felt his struggle against NATO forced his hand. What we are witnessing– tragically, for civilians and soldiers on all sides– is an inter-imperialist conflict wasting lives for the sake of expanding or maintaining its sphere of influence.

Until this morning I had assumed that the conflict would end, grotesquely, with something like a reversion to the status quo ante of 2014. Russia would keep Crimea and claim victory on those grounds and some sort of federal relationship would be established between the Donbass and the Kiev government. Not formally losing those oblasts would allow Ukraine to claim its share of victory. Grotesque because it would have been an outcome that could have been achieved through negotiations now it is anyone’s guess how Prighozin’s move will affect the war. I cannot think of any possible world in which this fracture helps Russia.

Banal though the conclusion may be but it is nonetheless true: war is the ultimate destabilizer. It may be, as Von Clauswitz argued, politics by different means, but it is a means best avoided.

As I was writing this review, news arrived that Cormac McCarthy died. He was rightly celebrated as one of the giants of twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. Only a master could treat characters who commit acts of shocking violence with something that approaches tenderness. I do not know another author who could arouse sympathy for a murderous necrophiliac, but McCarthy does just that in Child of God. Without ever excusing the character’s crimes, he manages to make us resonate with the feeling that no one deserves to be reduced to the status of a hunted animal, and that there is as much evil in the righteous lynch mob as there is in the guilty criminal that they pursue. One shudders to think of the crime against art that “sensitivity readers” would have perpetrated on McCarthy’s excavations deep into the human heart of violent darkness had his manuscripts been subjected to such an abomination. These are not children’s books for moralistic minds nourished on platitudes.

However, at the risk committing a crime myself– disciplinary chauvinism– even authors as outstanding as McCarthy can sound naive when they draw general philosophical principles from the behavior of the characters of their novels.

In one of the rare interviews that he granted, McCarthy articulated the philosophical conviction that he explored throughout his literary career.

“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Anyone with a even a passing understanding of history would agree that there has been no such thing as life without bloodshed, but one cannot infer from that historical fact that future harmony is impossible. Even if it is true that the causes of violence are psychological as much as social, it is not the case that life is nothing but bloodshed. If there were no harmony there would be no life.

One of the main duties of literature is to explore the terrifying motivations which lurk deep in everyone’s character. One of the main duties of philosophy (and history, to which it is allied) is to study the conditions in which our potential for brutality and violence becomes actual. Even if the ideal conditions in which peace and harmony universally prevail can never be achieved, we must struggle for them, because the goods of life presuppose them.

McCarthy was not a gunslinger, robber, or necrophiliac murderer. He invented his characters in the (more or less) quiet, peaceful repose of his study (or wherever it was that he felt inspired to write). While some have written in the trenches (David Jones, for example), art is typically created far from the battlefield. To be sure, as Hegel said, history is the slaughterhouse of nations, but before we can kill each other, we must grow to maturity: we must eat and learn; someone must cared for us. If we are to eat and learn and be cared for, we must build and maintain institutions that satisfy our needs. If we are lucky, we will also have been loved before we are sent off to kill. Beneath episodes of explosive violence, therefore, is what John McMurtry calls the “life-ground of value.”

The main problem of human history, when it comes to dealing with the causes of mass violence, is to universalize the feelings which allow the members of smaller groups to work together cooperatively and to care for one another’s well-being. Thus far, practical successes have been partial at best and few and far between. Ideologically, there are many universalist and humanist philosophies and religions, but none have been successfully translated into stable political institutions. Notwithstanding this failure, the belief in peace and harmony are certainly not the cause– as McCarthy suggests– of the loss of soul and freedom. On the contrary: people lose their freedom to conquerors and dominating classes and nations, and they lose their soul when they desire to become conquerors and members of dominating classes and nations. The desire for peace and harmony is the opposite: a desire to globalize the conditions for free self-creation, collaboration, mutual learning, and collective development.

My thoughts have been drawn repeatedly to problems of war and peace this past year because of the war in Ukraine. There seems little prospect for peace in the coming year. As with all wars, this one too will end, but as with most regional conflicts between adversaries incapable of landing a crushing blow on the opponent, its outcome will most likely return the combatants to some version of the status quo ante. This likelihood is morally criminal and irrational: had all parties exercized more patience and took each others concerns serious, the most probable outcome would have been achieved without military violence.

However it ultimately turns out, this war was hardly necessary. NATO had no reason to attack Russia, Russia was no threat to Europe as a whole, and Ukraine, like every nation, can decide for itself with whom it will ally economically and politically. Had NATO been disbanded when it should have been– at the end of the Cold War– Ukraine’s membersship would not have become a causus belli. But like a ball rolling down a hill political and ideological mindsets move with inertial force without worrying about the damage they will causes when they run into an obstacle. Had anachronistic Cold War calculation given way to a more rational assessment of respective national interests, the civil war in Ukraine could have been resolved by the federal solution envisaged in Minsk accords, Russian security concerns addressed by the negotiations that Russia requested and the West rejected, and Ukraine left to negotiate what relationships it desired with Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world. The current conflict is neither the noble crusade against Western imperialism that Russia’s supporters fantasize it to be nor a heroic struggle for self-determination. Ukraine is being cynically used to weaken Russia while Russia appeals to the historic borders of the Tsarist empire– the one denounced by Lenin, recall– as justification for its annexations. Coherent anti-imperialism must condemn all sides and demand negotiations to end the violence. Nothing hardens reactionary nationalist sentiment than war.

In other words, the conflict could have been avoided had decision makers thought rationally about the causes of the tensions and addressed them with constructive policy. The importance of rational understanding connects the themes of war and peace to the second focus of the past year’s posts: the continuing precarity of philosophy and the humanities and the growing threats to academic freedom that plague the university system in Canada, the US, and the UK. Just when the world needs comprehensive intelligence most, the institutional future of the discipline that takes its cultivation as its primary focus– is threatened. I worry that a vicious circle has set it: demographic and economic forces continue to cause enrollments in the humanities to drop; falling enrollments lead to program cuts, program cuts make recruitment more difficult, enrollments continue to fall, and administrators make more cuts.

My concerns are partially self-interested– I make my living as a philosophy professor. However, beyond my own career needs I remain convinced that the fundamental problems that the world faces today, from climate change, to armed conflict, to growing material inequality, to the general malaise that has seized the populations of the liberal-democratic world, and the economic and cultural dislocations that developing artificial intelligence technologies are already causing cannot be solved without a radical transformation of values and goals. I respect the achievements of my scientific colleagues and am awe-struck by the insights of the natural sciences, but only philosophy and the humanities generally can discover and defend the universal human values that alone can motivate and shape solutions to any of those defining problems.

I seem to have settled in to a pattern of publishing about 2 posts a month. As I have said before, I do not want to write to a schedule but only when the spirit moves me and I think that I have something to say. I also think that the world could benefit from less writing and more thinking and listening.

I was in Killarney on Georgian Bay at the beginning of June and spent an afternoon by the water reading a novel. I love painting and music, but if some demon were to force me to choose between them and literature I think that I would choose literature. Books were my internet as a boy: no pictures save the one’s I imagined of alien planets and distant cities. In the silent interior dialogue with the poem or novel the mind becomes wonderfully open to imaginary worlds. The stream of consciousness is enriched in unpredictable ways. When you read you have to be quiet, sit still, and keep yourself receptively open to what unfolds– dying arts in our hyperactive world.

Because I like to collect things and because I think I occasionally hit on an argument or image that might be worth preserving I have, as in years passed, collected last years posts here. Thank you for reading and I look forward to the next year: lucky thirteen for the blog.

Howard Woodhouse is Professor Emeritus and Co-Director of the Saskatchewan Process Philosophy Research Unit in the Department of Educational Foundations, University of Saskatchewan. Critical Reflections on Teacher Education is both a resume of his long career as a philosopher and teacher and a diagnosis and suggestions for cures of the malaise of the school system and teacher education. In this slim but complex volume he argues that the continued intrusion of capitalist market values into schools has extended to the curriculum and methods of faculties of education. If left unchecked, this tendency will undermine the capacity of future teachers for critical reflection and autonomous judgement, turning them into little more than transmission belts for government policy and corporate interests. “Without a basic understanding of philosophical issues and their relationship to educational practice” he writes, new teachers “will become lost in the demands of hierarchical school systems that emphasize conformity to rules and policies, which negate the necessary autonomy of qualified judgement defining their profession.” (1)That this transformation would negate the vocation of educators to enable students’ intellectual growth is of no concern to today’s self-styled “reformers.” Woodhouse’s argument alerts educators to the crisis, explains the importance of philosophy to teacher education, and makes a number of practical suggestions for the transformation of classrooms at all institutional levels.

He supports his argument with evidence drawn from his own long career as a philosopher, from the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell (and to a lesser extent, John Dewey), the philosophy for children movement, and the place-based educational philosophy and practice of Indigenous communities from whom he has learned in Saskatchewan. He integrates these distinct strands of argument by showing how they are forms of “life-value,” a term he adopts from the work of John McMurtry. McMurtry’s epochal philosophical achievement was to have demonstrated that all values are functions of the needs and capacities of living, sentient beings. Whatever is of value either serves living things as a resource that satisfies their needs or is an expression of their sentient, intellectual, or creative capacities. The Russell’s’ understanding of education as growth, the cultivation of the philosophical capacities of children, and the First Nation’s understanding that scientific knowledge grows up out of lived experience of the nurturing power of the land are all expressions of this underlying principle.

His latest critique of the intrusion of market values into the educational system extends the reasoning of his previous book, Selling Out, from the university system into the primary and secondary school systems. Both books build on the pioneering argument of McMurtry’s “Education and the Market Model” (Paideusis, 1991). In that seminal paper, McMurtry contrasted the values that rule the capitalist market place (all goods are understood as saleable commodities available for purchase by anyone willing to pay the price) with the value that organizes educational systems (the growth of intellect and sensibility through conjoint efforts with teachers in structured but open-ended inquiry). As is evident, the value that organizes educational systems is undermined to the extent that market values invade. To become educated, students must struggle to understand; the burden of inquiry cannot be alleviated through a cash transaction. The work must continue until insight has been achieved, only to start again, in search of deeper and more comprehensive understanding. If education were a commodity then the insights could be purchased, but even if one could buy diplomas they would not acquire the cultivated intelligence that the piece of paper signifies. The problem is solved, McMurtry and Woodhouse both worry, by transforming the content of education. Instead of open ended inquiry schooling becomes a matter of mechanical skill acquisition, efficiently delivered and standardized tested.

The book is organized into five pithy chapters. Each begins with a short personal reflection that motivates the philosophical argument to come. Despite their concision, each is richly illustrated with appropriate historical evidence. The first chapter details the way in which the market model has infiltrated faculties of education in Canada, the UK, and the US. The consequence for future teachers is that their careers will be “reduced to that of technicians working to advance the goals of the market.” (11) However, even that reduction is only a first step. The ‘reformers’ ultimately aim at doing away with living teachers altogether. Woodhouse cites Robert Heterich, president of Educom, an academic-corporate consortium, who advocates “‘remov[ing] the human mediation … and replac[ing] it with automation’ … to reduce unit costs and programme students for the market.”(24) The emergence of ChatGPT perhaps brings this dream closer than educators might have feared.

To the objection that machines cannot teach because machines cannot think, technocrats will respond (as they do in the case of “artificial” intelligence), by redefining teaching as that which the teacher bot can do. Human intelligence is bound up with our self-conscious awareness of our vulnerable being-in-the-world. Therefore, it is not algorithmic, even if some basic operations can be formalized and replicated by machine functioning. All intelligent reflection and action is bound up with meaningful interpretation and caring interacting with the natural and social environment. However impressive the operations of technologies like ChatGPT, they are not alive, do not care, and therefore cannot produce meaningful interpretations of the problems their creators claim they can help solve. However, this objection disappears if intelligence is defined as the machinic assembly of sentences. If students are taught that intelligence is the execution of algorithms then, after a few generations, that is what everyone will believe intelligence is, and the existential basis of the criticism will be undermined.

The same fate awaits teaching if technocrats like Heterich win. All teachers have to rely on routines and rules of thumb which those who would eliminate the teacher believe can be formalized and programmed into a machine. However, as with human intelligence, the affective and communicative core of teaching would be eliminated. Teaching is not the efficient transmission of information; teaching is the multi-sided ability to frame problems in such a way that students form the desire to investigate it on their own. Only through their own efforts can students grow intellectually. The role of the teacher is to help them find their way into whatever problem is under investigation. If students are taught that education is simply the efficient assimilation of skills and data, then they will lose the affective connection to problems that genuine education stimulates. The result will be that the human project terminates in our having replaced ourselves with machines. What will replace the role of effort and striving as sources of meaning in our lives no one can say.

Woodhouse exposes the supreme danger of these trends. He anchors his alternative vision in the educational philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell. Woodhouse demonstrates that, despite his occasional lapse into scientism, Russell was, at heart, a humanist and the educational philosophy that he and Dora developed placed the free development of the student at its centre. For the Russells, educational systems should be modelled on the principle of living development that governs the natural world: “The metaphor of growth runs throughout Bertrand and Dora’s educational philosophy … “the humanistic conception of education” they write ‘regards the child as a gardener regards a young tree … as something with an intrinsic nature, which will develop into an admirable form, given proper soil and air and light.”‘(34) Gardening is both joyous and terrifying: one plants the seeds in well-prepared ground but one cannot force them to grow. So too with teaching: the teacher prepares the ground by framing the problem in ways that the students can understand, but then must trust the students to do the work themselves. As the gardener cannot force the tree to grow, so too the teacher cannot brow beat the students to learn. Their task is not to force but to enliven the inner principle, the “desire to know” which, as Aristotle said, lies at the root of human relationship to the world.

Even when well-intentioned, the move to turn teachers into testable skill-transmitters would destroy the nature of education. Anyone can memorize times tables; writing Principia Mathematica requires imagination and drive, not just mastery of the rules of formal logic. ChatGPT can assemble sentences, but until it feels the joy of awakening each morning and the utter desolation of the loss of a loved one, poetry will elude it. Education enables students to find their own voice: some as mathematicians, perhaps, and some as poets, but all as sensitive, reflective, confident but not dogmatic citizens of the world. To become educated is to become alive to the world as a question. Thinking is– as Dewey understood–active intervention into the order of things, the very opposite of parroting the correct slogan or learning what you need to say to get the job. The world will always exceed our grasp, but that is a good thing: the inherent questionability of things ensures that there will always be something meaningful for the next generation to do (as long as there is a next generation).

Despite Russell’s reputation as a stuffy and conservative analytic philosopher, criticism was central to his philosophical practice. “The essential characteristic of philosophy,” he argued, “which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism. It examines critically the principles employed in science and in daily life, it searches out any inconsistencies there may be in these principles, and it only accepts them when, as the result of a critical inquiry, no reason for rejecting them has appeared.”(32) One can immediately see the importance of this practice of philosophy for teachers and students. If education is not to degenerate into indoctrination, then teachers must be able to think critically about the curriculum they are being asked to teach, and to have the intellectual courage to oppose curricula that suffocates thinking under dogma. By being critical themselves they will instill in students the need to intervene when unsupported arguments circulate as facts or when narrow ideology demonizes and attacks. However, a genuinely critical practice is humbling: no one has all the answers, every position can be questioned, and when one is the target of criticism one knows that one owes one’s interlocutor a reasoned argument.

This capacity for (self)-criticism is central to the vocation of philosophy and education, but it can also– if it is practiced as an end in itself– conflict with philosophy’s positive, life-serving dimension. Life is not only opposition (although we must have the strength to oppose). Life is ultimately worth living because it is an opening to the beauty and magnificence of the universe. Social problems are problems precisely because they impede those who suffer from them from living– feeling, thinking, acting, relating, savouring, enjoying– to the fullest. The principle of life-enjoyment is the root which feeds all struggles. Criticism has to maintain connection with this root lest it degenerate into nihilistic skepticism or despair. Everything is open to challenge, true, but for the sake of expanding understanding, not drowning it in doubt. Woodhouse does not explicitly pose this sort of challenge to Russell’s definition of philosophy, but the final three chapters make clear that he is implicitly aware of these sorts of dangers.

The third chapter focuses on the principles and practices of the philosophy for children movement. First developed in distinct but related directions by Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp, the effort to incorporate philosophy at every level of education was motivated by the goal of freeing education from rigid bureaucratic structures. Instead of a teacher standing in front of the class drilling students until they can perform the appropriate repertoire, Lipman, Sharp, and their followers reconceived the relationship amongst learners as a “community of inquiry.”(61) Inspired in part by John Dewey’s understanding of education as problem-based inquiry, the proponents of philosophy for children wanted to turn the class room into an incubator of children’s native curiosity.(62) The teacher would be more shepherd and less drill sergeant and the child viewed as a unity of affect and intellect alive in wonder to the world, needing guidance but able to find their own way together with their co-explorers. Thinking of themselves as a community they would feel united in common purpose, but they would also understand that as a community of individual minds, each person sees the world from their own angle. Hence students would also discover for themselves the inevitability of disagreement, the need for dialogue, and respectful argument as the primary means for resolving disputes.

The movement has made some headway in Canada, the UK, the US, but Woodhouse is keen to stress that the trend has been away from philosophical education of any sort. Obviously, if teachers lack philosophical education they will be in no position to cultivate philosophical dispositions in their students. Philosophy is essentially a practice, not trivial familiarity with this or that thinker from the past. Woodhouse defends philosophy first as disposition and practice and second as an academic discipline. The life-value of the academic discipline is not expressed by the fact that exists but in the difference that it makes to those who study it. The development and nurturing of a philosophical disposition towards intelligent criticism in the service of truth and life-enjoyment must be the guiding idea.

No institution is more human than education. Animals learn but their cognitive capacities, no matter how impressive, are minute in comparison to human thought and feeling. It can expand to the edge of the universe and ask what still lies beyond; it can shrink to the size of a quark and imagine the world from that perspective; it is capable of the most tender and subtle refinements of meaning and a generator of metaphorical connection without limit, but poorly educated it is also capable of justifying genocidal violence. Thus, it is not hyperbole to argue that the human future depends upon the quality of our educational institutions and educators.

Woodhouse makes this connection between education and survival through the example of climate change. The final two chapters focus on the link between philosophical education for teachers and their ability to motivate students to understand the problem and become the sort of engaged citizens who can help solve it. In order to advance his argument, Woodhouse draws inspiration and insight from the place-based learning at the heart of Indigenous societies. Drawing on the knowledge of both Elders and Indigenous intellectuals, Woodhouse shows how the holistic (affective, intellectual, practical, and spiritual) understanding of the complex interrelationships upon which life depends must be integral to life-valuable climate change education. Woodhouse cites Marie Batiste and James (Sa’ke’j) Youngblood to explain the connection between Indigenous and “Western” science. “The traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous peoples is scientific in the sense that it is empirical, experimental, and systematic. It differs in two important respects from Western science, however: traditional ecological knowledge is highly localized, and it is social. Its focus is on the web of relationships between humans, animals, plants, natural forces, and landforms in a particular locality, as opposed to the discovery of universal laws.” (89) While I agree that this difference is real, I do not think that it is best understood as a difference between Indigenous and “Western” forms of science.

The more important point that Batiste and Youngblood are making here, I would say, is that science has a common, practical root. Chemistry does not originate with the periodic table, but with cooking and other forms of life-serving transformation of substances. Taxonomy does not begin with Linnaeus but with long-evolved local understandings flora and fauna and their uses. Medicine does not begin with the MRI machine but with caring attention to vulnerable bodies and the medicinal properties of plants. It is true that the science that has developed since Galileo and Newton demands generalization of results expressed as mathematically formalized regularities, but I think that this demand should be understood as continuous with and a development of that much longer practical history of science rather than as cliched “Western” alternative to older forms of knowing. The mathematical notations that supposed “Western” science employs are not Western in origin but Egyptian and Greek (geometry), Indian (the all important value of 0), and Arabic (algebra). Science, practical and mathematical, has always been an international and cross-cultural practice. Like all forms of knowledge (including religious and philosophical) science can be deployed in ideological ways to justify domination. The best means to oppose this very unscientific use of science is to demonstrate its deeper and more cosmopolitan origins rather than (ironically) allow “the West’ to take credit for the extraordinary and undeniable achievements of post-17th century mathematical natural science.

That said, the more important point is to insist upon the connection between genuine knowledge and the understanding, maintenance, and development of natural and social life-support systems. Woodhouse integrates the various strands of his argument by invoking McMurtry’s “primary axiom of value.” The axiom holds that all value whatsoever either serves life as a means of satisfying a need or expresses the sentient, intellectual, and creative powers of living things. The value of the engaged, reflective, and critical form of education that Woodhouse depends is clearly explained by the axiom. The human intellect needs education in order to develop its full range of abilities, and the educated person experiences life more fully, is capable of a greater range of activities, and is reflectively aware of the interests of others, other living things, and nature as a whole. Life cannot be lived anyway one wants or is able to pay for; since the world exists outside of our won minds and skins we must take into account the needs of others, contribute to their satisfaction in some way, and, overall, strive to live in way which are to “coherently inclusive” of the needs and goals of others.(98)

Education is our first and last line of defense. It must be approached as the hard but joyous work of exploring our universe and the problems of human social life together, in respectful but sometimes difficult argument. Cats and crows can master a few skills and we should admire them for it, but human intelligence is not the mastery of skills and teaching is not the transmission of information. If Covid taught teachers anything, it is that on line platforms are useful for transmitting information, but make actual pedagogical communication extremely difficult. The desire to learn develops best when living learners work together in shared space, challenging and inspiring each other to expand the circle of understanding ever wider.

In his correspondence with Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi argued that when “there is war, the poet lays down the lyre … The poet will sing the true note only once the war is over.” (The Mahatma and the Poet, 93). Note that Gandhi does not say that when war comes the job of the poet is to rhapsodize about the glory of armed conflict, but that the poet has to stop composing verse and contribute to the cause. Gandhi thus implies an opposition between war and poetry. When there is war, there is no time for verse. But war is not something to be celebrated but endured and overcome. The true note can only be sung after the conclusion of hostilities.

I think something similar can be said of philosophy. If it comes to a fight then the philosopher, as a member of a community under attack, has to put down their pen and fight alongside their comrades. In other words, where war begins, philosophy, like poetry, ends. The poet does not glorify and the philosopher does not justify; they fight, if they must, for the the restoration of the conditions in which thought can unfold and verse can be composed free from fear and violence.

I was motivated to reflect on these issues by an article I read by a philosopher who abandoned his work to take up arms in Donbass. I am not judging his decision to fight, but I do question his understanding of the relationship between philosophy and war. Andrey Korobov-Latintsev argues that philosophical argument is analogous to war and philosophical education akin to military training:

“For a philosopher, the military path – the path of war – is quite natural. In reality, such a scholar is always engaged in this process – the conflict of ideas. He understands that war is the forefather of all things and since he is looking for the origin of everything, turning to war, both as a subject and an element of existentialism, is natural.”

Heraclitus argued that all things are born of strife, but strife comes in many forms and is not necessarily military in nature. But setting aside the historical question of whether or not “war is the forefather of all things,” Korobov-Latintsev is wrong to draw an analogy between the conflict of ideas and armed violence. In truth, they are opposites, not analogues. The conflict of ideas leaves both parties to the dispute standing; military violence tries to kill the enemy. War begins where argument fails. One might say that war is the failure of philosophy, and not, as Korobov-Latintsev implies, philosophy by other means.

I would go further: philosophy is not, first and foremost, a conflict of ideas, but a search for the most important truths of human existence: where did we come from, what is our purpose on earth, how ought we treat each other, are shared values possible, are there definitive answers to these questions? Philosophy begins, as both Aristotle and Descartes noted, in wonder. Before we answer, we question, before we categorize, we are open to what presents itself. We look to the heavens in awe, feeling insignificant and unique at one and the same time. The universe is immense and we are as nothing. And yet, the stars- distant, silent, beautiful- cannot ask themselves about their place in the whole. Only we can. And so far as we know, we are the only creatures who ever could, can, and will be able to ask those questions.

Real questions, questions posed from a position of receptive openness, are peaceful. The interrogator’s questions are violent, but they only ask what they already know. Their question is meant to intimidate, to terrify, to elicit the confession that will justify the punishment that has already been decided. The philosophical question is peaceful: knowing what they do not know, philosophers open themselves to the universe and ask it what it all means. Not hearing an answer, they go in search of others for help until they find a truth. Having found it, they do not keep it to themselves but immediately share it with everyone who is willing to listen. Openness to what presents itself and a desire to share the truths that have been found: those are the dispositions of the philosopher. As Plato argues in Gorgias, philosophers have a “thirst for victory when it comes to knowing what the truth is,” because the truth is “a good, common to everyone.” The philosophical victory does not leave the enemy vanquished, bloody, and dead on the battlefield, it elevates everyone by showing them what they really need to live fully.

Korobov-Latintsev traces the origins of “just war theory” to Plato. I am not sure what work he is thinking of, but Plato does discuss the origins of war in The Republic. However, his goal is to understand its causes, not to justify one side or the other. War breaks out, Plato argues, when a society becomes motivated by superfluities. Once human desires grow beyond the basics of what we need to live we become undisciplined and greedy, and once we become undisciplined and greedy, we require more resources. Once a society exhausts its resource base it must appropriate that of a neighbouring society. War is the means by which others’ resources are seized.

Plato is not concerned with the justice of war. According to the definition of justice he later defends, all wars would be unjust because they ultimately result from a disharmony in the souls of those who demand more than their fair share. If anything, Plato tries to understand the causes of war so that armed conflicts can be avoided. Certain desires and policies make war necessary, not just. But since people can reflect upon and change their motivations, this necessity is embedded in a deeper layer of contingency. Given a set of unquenchable desires as motivations, people will demand ever more resources. People come into conflict with their neighbours, in other words, because they are in conflict with themselves. Cure the malaise in their own souls, Plato implies, and they will live in peace with others.

Whatever one thinks about the details of Plato’s politics, I think that these arguments continue to teach us important lessons. They teach us that the aim of philosophy is not to justify either side in a war but to understand its causes. Philosophy, like poetry, is a peacetime pursuit: if philosophers want to promote the conditions in which everyone can reflect on the fundamental problems that shape our time on earth, then it is our job to contribute what we can to the solution to the underlying conflicts that start wars. Plato’s account of the origins of war is speculative but contains an important truth, confirmed time and again in history: resources are at the root of most large scale conflicts. If no group ever sought to appropriate the lands and labour of others, there would be no war. Demonizing and chauvinistic ideologies arise to justify armed violence but they are rarely its cause.

Unless philosophers want to accept the truth of those ideologies then they are obliged by their vocation (to understand the causes of events) to oppose argument to violence. It is never the part of a philosopher to justify one side or another in an armed conflict, because the existence of the armed conflict is proof that rational argument has collapsed into a hardened conflict between one-sided positions. That philosophy is opposed to war does not mean that philosophers are indifferent to injustice or believe that victim groups should simply accept whatever treatment their tormentors impose on them without fighting back. People have the right to protect themselves and their societies.

But philosophy, as fundamental inquiry, serves the cause of justice by working beneath particular arguments pro and contra war to draw attention to the underlying drivers. Unless we are satisfied with a world where the solution to one conflict immediately gives way to another somewhere else, then we need the sort of abstract, general inquiries into causes that philosophy can provide. The point is: one or another side may have legal and moral right on its side, but philosophy is not concerned with that historical question but the deeper problem of how members of the same species, who share fundamental needs and capacities, who prove themselves capable of understanding one another and getting along, degenerate into violent conflict.

Thus, we should approach the problem of war in the register of necessity, not justice. If a society’s lands are invaded, if their people are enslaved, then they will fight back. The right of self-defence follows from the physical necessity of self-protection. But having exposed the particular histories that lead up to the outbreak of warfare, I argue that philosophers have to go one step further to expose the deeper layer of contingencies from which necessities emerge. I mean that historical events are never absolutely necessary. Given decisions a, b, and c, d becomes necessary. Philosophy re-traces this history but argues that while d follows from a.b, and c, a itself was not necessary. If instead of a.b, and c, the group had chosen policies 1,2, and 3, then 4, not d, would have followed. Philosophers have the difficult task of trying to walk their fellow citizens back to the moment where there was a real choice between a and 1.

For fulfilling this duty philosophers can expect to be attacked. They will be denounced as fence sitters, or worse, enemy agents. But philosophy does not sit on the fence. It is militant and partisan, but on the side of truth. Unless someone looks out for the truth: not the truths that link a,b, and c, but the deeper truth, that different values and goals lead to different possibilities and that reason can uncover common ground, then we will be condemned to stay stuck in the cycle of armed violence. Different combatants will rotate in and out but the wheel of destruction will always be setting one or another part of the globe on fire.

Korobov-Latintsev concludes that wars are ultimately justified by their results. He points to the principle of “‘jus post bellum’ (rights after war),” explaining that “this means that the world after the war should be better than the world prior to the war.” However, he does not specify the time frame for analysis. Over a long enough time frame, the traces of even wars of extermination will fade. One might argue on this basis that World War Two was justified because it gave rise to the EU, the UN, and catalyzed anti-colonial revolutions. But note; we are justifying the war to living people, not to the people who fought and died in it. If there was a way to create international institutions that, at least in principle, offer legal and diplomatic alternatives to war, if there had been alternatives to colonization, then the world that would have followed had they been chosen would have been better than the world that followed the war, because the same good results would have been achieved without the deaths of 60 million people. The people who died fighting for the cause would have been alive to enjoy the benefits.

Yes, but philosophy must deal with reality or consign itself to irrelevance, my opponent will say. In the real world people must fight. Talking about what might have been the case is a cowardly distraction from the battlefield action. Even a pacifist like Gandhi recognizes the necessity of war.

Too true, I respond, philosophy does deal with reality, and sometimes one must fight. But reality is not so simple as the historical links between choice a and consequence b. Human reality is a field of possibilities. Once Frost’s traveler on a snowy evening has chosen his road, the alternative disappears behind him. The politician is like the traveler after he has had made his choice: to him, there never was any other road. But although it cannot be seen from where the traveler ends up, there once was another road, and he knows it. Philosophy is the reminder that the other road was real.