41.9695 N 83.5359 W

Now: Presence/Absence

To be: a receptive surface

accepting, (as gift, not property),

the sand that yields to my foot

and the fugitive mist

that lingers behind and looms before.

I wanted to stop and see myself

as if in a cloud.

But where I am, it is not.

We move in time,

a dance of impress and erasure.

The air is still but

a winter chop

curls and crashes

ashore.

Maybe it’s windy in Sandusky.

The air is clarifying

but too warm for February?

I will not follow

the arc of the land all the way

to the vanishing point.

The waves beat time for my footfalls

until I stop, lingering,

limpid eyes

looking off shore.

The lake: grey slate spackled with occasional sun dazzle,

a cool exhalation

against my unshaven cheek.

Long ago I heard a man, an old country doctor,

say on the CBC

that people want to live forever

but are bored to death on Sunday afternoons.

And Faust: he wanted a moment he could live forever.

But a moment that could be lived forever

would not be a moment,

nor such stasis,

living.

Nature/Culture

The land slides away:

from shore weeds to pebbles to mucky sand

tickled by the foaming water.

Broken zebra mussels and

the last of the Great Lakes clams;

beer cans plastic bottle caps

stones with pleasing shapes

and a rusty old nail, a rampike

in a 2×8 that has washed in from somewhere;

a weathered chestnut shell and ground down brick,

fishing tackle and work gloves,

bird bones fish bones fossilized ferns and an old dead carp;

charcoal briquettes and beach glass,

the footprints of solitary walkers

and an empty bottle of of “Pink Whitney” flavoured gin

smuggled in

by teenage girls from Leamington

for a secret summer party.

It is getting cooler.

I turn and retrace my steps.

Near an old log,

fit for sitting

someone has lost a pen:

a love letter that will not be written.

A Thesaurus of Adjectives

In a recent Jacobin article, Ben Burgis argued that if Biden somehow loses the Presidential election to Trump, the US Left should blame him for timidity and not voters for stupidity. The article is refreshing on two fronts, but symptomatic of a restricted understanding of political motivation long typical of the Marxist and broader left.

First, the good: the argument is practical and free of the academic ultra-leftism that too often characterizes socialist approaches to “bourgeois democracy.” For better of for worse, “bourgeois” democracy is all that we have got. It is vastly superior to the known alternatives, because it does not pre-determine how the political space for mobilization that it opens can be used. Different parties can be created, candidates chosen, and policy options pursued that can make real differences in real people’s lives.

Second, it avoids the supercilious contempt for working class Trump voters that one sometimes hears from liberals. Burgis reminds readers of the slogan Clinton supporters chanted after Trump’s victory” “if Hilary had won, we would all be at brunch right now.” But they forgot to add: probably being served by people who voted for Trump because you treated them like shit in the restaurant. Recall Hilary herself and her global dismissal of Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables. Some working class Trump voters might express deplorable positions, but to reduce their politics to some sort of character defect is antithetical to the political engagement with them that the broad left needs to undertake.

Political engagement begins from trying to understand where people are coming from. If one is going to understand where people are coming from, one must inquire of the routes they have traveled to reach their current position. Isn’t that what a historical materialism should examine? If people adopt anti-immigrant positions, is that because they are inveterate racists? Or is their attitude shaped by the fact that they occupy precarious jobs and are worried that they will lose them to more desperate workers willing to work for even less than the nothing that they are being paid? Or are they are concerned that scare space and meager public services on which they rely, and for which they pay taxes, will be given to newcomers free of charge, and they do not see the fairness in that arrangement? Scolding, hectoring, and lecturing does not address those concerns nor will it change peoples’ minds. Quite likely, it will harden their positions and their heart.

Which brings me to a worry that is analogous to the worry I expressed in the previous post. I wondered about the role that ambivalence plays in causing social problems. While I broadly agreed with Marx’s confidence that human history creates the conditions for the solution to the problems that it causes, I wondered about why every major social revolution causes new problems. Could part of the explanation be that there will always be people who start out wanting to solve problems and end up wanting to seize power, because the drive for power and dominance is real (although not equally present in everyone). And could that drive for power not itself be an expression of an even deeper drive, a perverse need that some feel to wreck things– not so much Freud’s death drive but Schopenhauer’s and Spinoza’s contention that stability is boring and people sometimes just choose conflict. “Unsettled souls” George Santayana argued (but I cannot remember exactly where) “prefer unhappiness.”

Unsettled souls prefer unhappiness and insulted souls prefer spite: could there not be an element of spite at work in the souls of Trump voters? “Think I’m a deplorable, do you? Fuck you and your oat milk latte!” Spite contains an element of the irrational (working class voters who think a megalomanical billionaire is going to protect them from global market forces are not thinking clearly about who will best serve their economic interests), but also affords a degree of emotional satisfaction. When one acts out of spite one might ultimately hurt oneself more than others, but the action feels good because it restores the person’s self-respect. Axel Honneth did not have Trump voters in mind when he argued that political movements cannot be understood in socio-economic terms alone but must also be interpreted as demands for recognition. As self-undermining as it will prove to be on the socio-economic plane, voting for a candidate who speaks the language of the street and who openly skewers arrogant blowhards who do not disguise their contempt for those without Ivy League degrees satisfies a genuine need to be heard.

Systematic disrespect generates legitimate demands for recognition from people who are the objects of disdain. When these demands are made from a position of relative powerlessness against supercilious people who parade their principles as morally mandatory, the spite-effect comes into full force. How else to explain the intense antipathy towards the “Squad” of left-wing Democrats from a large segment of working-class voters whose socio-economic future will ultimately depend upon the implementation of policies like the Green New Deal? Yes, on-line anonymity increases the likelihood of obnoxious verbal abuse, but there has to be something more at work than fear of change, ignorance of one’s real interests, and the opportunity to vent spleen on-line.

Historical materialism has tended to ignore the function of emotions in political choice but it cannot afford to do so. The patrician air of some on the US liberal Left who turn their noses up at working class Trump voters only further the alienation of those voters from the Democratic Party and make it more rather than less likely that Trump will be reelected. This arrogance is noticeably and refreshingly absent from Cornell West’s campaign, but given the structure of the American electoral system he has no chance of winning. No one can accuse of West of ignoring the realities of American racism, but he does not attribute it to some essential character flaw inherent in white Trump voters, but tries to understand it as an effect of the way in which social and economic forces are internalized in a political context where blue collar working class concerns are ignored.

When large sections of the liberal left ignore those concerns or demonize them as a function of some inner essential racism they do not go away. They fester and fuel malign political movements. The January 6th rampage is a case in point. Since when does the Left regard existing state structures as sacrosanct, or extra-parliamentary action illegitimate? The problem was that the mobilization was in the service of a lie. Here is the philosophy professor in me talking: to challenge lies one must be willing to engage, patiently and respectfully. Respect does not mean making concessions to nonsense, but it does mean listening and addressing claim with counterclaim. Arguments go on as long as they need to go on until one side or the other is convinced. But as soon as one’s dialogue partner begins to indulge in ad hominem insults about the other person’s intelligence, the conversation will end and spiteful recriminations begin.

Political change cannot occur unless different people are willing to talk to one another. Just because someone owns a gun, listens to country music, and drives a pick-up does not mean that they are incapable of intelligent argument, if they are addressed as intelligent beings who have reasons for the lives they lead and the political choices they make. Likewise, laughing only at politically correct jokes, listening to Beyonce, and being vegan does not mean that you have the solution to all of life’s problems. But lecturing other people– who also have problems and face challenges and have to negotiate life day to day– as if one is the only person to have been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land will ensure one’s own relative political isolation from the majority in society.

Both the left and the right today share a tendency to grossly exaggerate the power of progressive movements. A Pew Research survey of over 10000 Americans in 2021 found that only 6% identified with the “progressive left” of the Democratic Party. This small group was majority White and well-educated. An earlier Pew Research survey found an unequivocal correlation between level of education and political perspective. While 31% of people surveyed who held a post-graduate degree identified as “consistently liberal” only 5 % of people with only high school degrees so identified. These results are consistent with Thomas Piketty’s findings in Capital and Ideology) that social democratic parties in Europe (and the left of the Democrats in the US) have lost all organic connection with the blue collar and service industry working class and have become parties of educated urban professionals. This alienation between workers in threatened manufacturing industries and service and precarious employment and the political parties which historically defended their interests is a direct cause of the success of the European far right and Trumpism in the US.

However, the perversity of these results also proves that the correlation between politics and material interests is real, but not mechanical. Working class voters persuaded by the Melonis and Trumps of the world think that they are voting their interests because successful far right politicians focus on the here and now, promising immediate solutions. Too much of the left is given to what we might call moralistic “symbolitics,” to searching for the magic mix of adjectives, an incantation which will magically arouse the masses to revolt. The symboliticians are too much given to catastrophizing about the future, to admonishing people for paying attention to their own lives when there is so much suffering elsewhere, and to inefficacious and sometimes mad acts of narcissistic self-immolation (literal and figural).

Judging from people’s behaviour across centuries, they agree with Oscar Wilde: socialism takes too many evenings. Only a relatively small minority of people have any sustained interest in being political activists (and few of those manifest it sustain it across their lifespan). Many working people cannot afford to worry–in the monetarily literal sense of ‘afford’ — about what the climate will be like in 2050, or about a ceasefire in Gaza, because they are broke, the rent is due tomorrow, and their kid is failing school. Enthusiasts are moved by one another’s slogans, but most people ignore images, slogans, and stunts that concern problems that they do not regard as their own. The right- seems to understand political psychology much more than the left: they recognize that most people simply try to go about their lives, prioritizing the near term over the long term, the local over the global, and the concrete over the abstract. Moreover, they know that those who have been disrespected relish the opportunity to laugh when the ego-balloons of hectoring know-it-alls are publicly burst. Schadenfreude.

I think the left ignores these psychological dimensions of political motivation at its considerable peril. If it wants to beat back the latest right-wing surge it should do what it has done when it has made the biggest political strides: propose policies that demonstrably serve working people’s interests and defend them in clear, everyday terms. A CNBC poll in 2019 showed broad bi-partisan support in the US for progressive policies that used public resources to improve living and working conditions. Obamacare still exists despite Trump’s attacks because the left focused their response on the universal value of being able to afford to go to the doctor when one is sick. In this case at least the usual tiresome fractal parade of identity-group particularisms was avoided.

Coming back home across the border, two very significant steps were just taken in Canada with the introduction of a national Pharmacare program and a national dental care program. The Liberal government would not have implemented these significant extensions of public health care unless the social democratic NDP pushed them. Their initial shape is inadequate to the full scope of social needs, and comes at a time when the Liberals are also allowing provinces to erode public health care by floating the Canada Health Act. But they are unarguably progressive steps in the right (socialist) direction.

Painful as it is to say, the Left does not need philosophers right now, it needs policy wonks. Concrete, immediately realizable policies that better satisfy shared material needs will be the key to winning and maintaining political power. Workers are not children. Grown adults can decide for themselves what is “appropriate” and what is “problematic.’ People will laugh at jokes they find funny and listen to music that moves them and resonates with their experience. People will eat what tastes good to them and take an interest in some people’s stories and not so much in others. There is no magic word that will convert people from concern with their own life to concern with the whole future of humanity. In order to achieve their practical goals, earnest activists must stop implying that unless people live their lives 24/7 in commitment to every worthy cause they are morally fallen. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht from St. Joan of the Stockyards, what matters most is not that we were good, but that we leave a good world.

Ambivalence, Antipathy, and Historical Materialism

In his much discussed and sometimes reviled Preface to The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx wrote:

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”

The passage brims with the confidence of a humanism infused with the spirit of scientific advance, but it also raises a number of difficult philosophical questions with important political implications.

The most fundamental question that it raises is: What are its truth conditions?

This question breaks down into three more particular questions:

What are the sorts of ‘tasks’ that Marx has in mind?

Does he believe that human beings inevitably solve those tasks for which they provide themselves with the materials for solution?

Must a solution be permanent in order for it to be declared a success?

I will try to answer the main question about truth conditions by way of answering these three secondary questions.

To begin, one must keep in mind that work is a preface and that Marx is attempting to sum up in a few paragraphs the basic principles of historical materialism. The main argument of the preface is that periods of social revolution arise when the tensions exerted by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production cannot be contained by the existing institutional structure of society. Marx’s confidence that human beings do not set impossible tasks for themselves is a function of his understanding of this contradiction as the underlying driver (beneath the consciousness of human beings taken as abstract individuals) of historical development.

“No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

The qualifier “superior” indicates that Marx believes that there is a direction to historical change. Productive forces (the technical capacity and intellectual know how as well as the concrete labour required to convert raw materials into goods useful for some purpose) grow, Marx believes, until the way in which labour is organized (as well as the justified customary, legal, and ethical justifications for the relations of production), restricts further growth. The constriction of productive capacity generates social crises which are– eventually–resolved through the revolutionary transformation of the relations of production.

However, the growth of productive forces is not simply a matter of more, it is equally a matter of better. The development of productive forces is the material condition, Marx thinks, for richer and more comprehensive forms of human individual development. Human problems are ultimately problems of how to organize societies so that people can lead meaningful, satisfying, and enjoyable lives. However, without resources (which must be produced through collective labour) those values are just words. Marx is not indifferent to the philosophical evaluation of different forms of life but only insists that unrealizable ideals are not real values. Values make a difference when they are expressed in forms of life that are actually enjoyable by real people.

Therefore, I think that the tasks that Marx has in mind are not simply technical tasks, but political, social, and existential tasks as well. If Marx were referring to technical tasks only, then the paragraph would simply assert a truism, since it is true by definition that scientific-technical problems cannot be understood as problems unless the concepts in which they are expressed exist. Before one can remove bugs from a computer program, the mathematical logic which underlies programming language must exist and the engineering problems involved in building computational machines must be understood.

The argument is only interesting if Marx means that human beings not only set themselves technical tasks for which they have the means of solution, but also political, social, and existential tasks. But what are the tools that human beings create that can serve as the means to solve those value-laden tasks? Here the problem becomes more complex, since Marx also believes that the solution of social, political, and existential problems requires revolution. Societies break down because, under the pressure of stagnating economies, the old justifications for the existing structure of rule break down. The old gods fall along with the collapse in the production of life-necessities, and new gods must be created to justify new relationships.

That does not mean that the solution to social problems is a function of ideas alone: we solve social problems by transforming our societies. Radical transformation involves ideas and arguments but also the practical means of embodying them in new institutions. Marx thus believes that the tasks that history poses to human beings are on the one hand technical (how to improve the forces through which we produce our means of life), and on the other social (how to organize our societies so that improvements in productive capacity are translated into improved lives). Feudalism’s task was to solve the problems left in the wake of the collapse of Rome, and capitalism’s problem was to overcome the stagnation that ultimately beset feudalism. Socialism, likewise, faces the problem of solving the problems caused by capitalism.

The second question concerns whether Marx believes that human beings inevitably solve the problems that history sets for them, or only inevitably create the conditions that a solution presupposes. The starting point for charitable interpretation is the words the author uses, so let us be charitable and note that Marx says that human beings inevitably give themselves the means of solving problems. He does not add that they will inevitably use those means.

If that is what Marx intends, then the claim seems difficult to falsify. Failure in any particular instance would not disprove the claim because it could always be explained by a failure to use the means at our disposal to solve the problem at hand.

The cost of choosing the more modest interpretation of the claim is that it undermines the obvious belief in historical progress that colors the Preface as a whole. As Marx said in the final Thesis on Feuerbach, the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. And not only to change it (making things worse is as much a change as making things better). The point is to solve the problems (injustice, inequality, exploitation, meaninglessness, violence) that philosophers have argued about for millennia. Once people stop thinking about these problems as timeless abstractions and tie them down to concrete social contexts, definite institutions, and human relationships we will see- just as we saw in the case of technical-scientific problems– that the solution has been prepared by past historical development. The solution to the problem of justice– getting what one deserves– is to distribute the collectively produced social product according to need, to give but one example.

Our answer to the third question thus affects our answer to the second. If Marx counts as solutions only practical changes that improve people’s lives, then he must believe not only that we give ourselves the tools to solve problems in the historically concrete forms in which they confront us, but also that, eventually, we will figure out how to use those tools properly. Failure of one attempt does not prove that subsequent attempts will succeed, assuming that people learn ‘the lessons of history.’

But here is where things become difficult for Marx’s position. While there is abundant evidence that science learns from its mistakes because it operates according to a self-correcting method that can be applied by different scientists working anywhere on the same problem, the only way to correct social problems is to build or change existing societies. Is historical change recursively self-correcting like repeated experiments in science, or does the solution of one set of problems improve the lives of some in some dimensions, but create other, unforeseen problems for others in other dimensions? And if the latter answer is the one best supported by historical evidence, does that have political implications for how we set about solving the tasks which history sets for us?

The problem with determining the truth conditions for Marx’s statement is now clear. Since the implications of historical change can only be determined in the future, one can never be certain that we have correctly applied the tools that past historical development has furnished us with to solve the problem, because new problems can always arise. Thus, if Marx believes that socialism is the solution to all the fundamental problems of human life, there would be no way of determining the truth of that claim until the moment just before the end of human history. Only at the end of a process can one say definitively what its results have been.

But perhaps those conditions are too stringent and we have to adopt more modest criteria for the evaluation of claims about historical developments. I would be inclined towards relaxing the criteria and conclude that since Marx’s claim refers to a dynamic historical landscape and not to timeless realities, we can only assess its truth in definite historical contexts. That is, what Marx is saying is that social changes solve the problems that older societies could not solve, but that does not mean that new and unforeseen problems may not arise. The history of capitalism and revolutionary socialism both contain examples of very serious unforeseen problems.

Industrialization resolved the problem of absolutely scarcity of life-goods, but it reconfigured an older problem of unequal distribution of those same goods while also creating the entirely unforeseen problem of human-caused climate change. No one in the nineteenth century understood the changes to atmospheric chemistry that burning fossil fuels would have leaving those of us alive now, in the twenty-first century, to solve the problem. The technical means exist– or are being rapidly developed– but whether the political, economic, and social changes required to fully realize the promise of renewable energy sources remains an open question.

The example of climate change thus supports Marx’s argument. Even though it was an unforeseen problem of industrialization, we have the scientific and engineering capacity to solve the problem. The social and economic changes required to fully realize the technical potential of green energy lag behind scientific progress, but there is a growing understanding of the need to make those changes. We therefore have the political tools that we need to solve the problem, now we just have to use them.

On the other hand, the history of revolutionary socialism perhaps challenges the optimism that underlies Marx’s claim. Neither the Soviet Union nor China were able to solve the economic problem of replacing the use of market forces to allocate resources, direct investment, and distribute income with a planned economy. The Soviet Command economy proved adept at rapid industrialization and made impressive technological and scientific strides, but at monstrous human cost and on the basis of a central planning system that ultimately could not compete with Western capitalism. China, facing the same sorts of problems, addressed them not by moving towards a more decentralized, democratically planned economy but backwards, towards the use of capitalist market forces. While it is true that the state retains significant power to direct investment (a power which it has used to raise hundreds of millions of people out of poverty) it might be better to call the model that has developed since the late 1970’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” rather than “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Since the Chinese experiment is on-going, perhaps the safest approach is to wait and see what unfolds, and especially how the Communist party responds to what appear to be building structural tensions in their model, but however the future plays out, China, like the Soviet Union, encountered severe difficulties building a non-market based economy.

A charitable reading of Marx must allow that he claims only that we can solve the problems that confront us with the tools that past development makes available, but can his optimism survive apparently backward historical turns? Or is it just the case that Marxists have not yet discovered the right economic model of socialism? While one must not foreclose on the future or ignore the deep structural crises that capitalism generates, at some point one must call “time” on the evaluative frame of reference. How many revolutionary socialist experiments will be sufficient to declare the project a definitive failure? Or is the lesson of the twentieth century that the mistake lay in believing that socialism could only be constructed through the armed, revolutionary overthrow of the old society and the new one created through conscious planning by a relatively small cadre of disciplined experts?

The problems with the later appear immediately, for it is obvious that there cannot be ‘experts” in the creation of the future. How to tear things down is easy enough, but how to build a completely new set of economic institutions cannot be clarified by studying the past, because the past will only contain examples of the system that one is trying to replace. If one group walls itself off from the masses as a set of vanguard experts, the results seem to be that very ancient human problems will quite quickly emerge that spell doom for socialism as a democratic and progressive alternative to capitalism.

Marxists tend not to focus on the dark side of the human personality, chalking up malign psychological dispositions and misanthropic philosophies to alterable social conditions. But if it is true, as Marx says in the Second Thesis on Feuerbach, that the doctrine that maintains that human beings are functions of circumstances forgets that it is human beings that make circumstances, it is also true that the human beings that make those circumstances are not society-building machines. They are, as Nietzsche would say, human, all too human, and can be motivated by ambition, bloodlust, and a zeal to destroy that overawes their desire to create. One can say that the chaos that followed the Russian Civil War created the conditions for a strongman like Stalin to arise, but one also needs to ask themselves how a Stalin is possible. Not everyone is capable of murdering tens of millions of people. Those who are cannot simply be functions of circumstances because if they were, everyone would be able to step into the breech. There are darker drives in us that are more pronounced in some than others. There is little reason to think that those drives will ever be entirely eliminated.

Does that claim imply anything of political importance? I think so. I think that it cautions us to be wary of human beings: we are ambivalent creatures who (as Spinoza, at the beginning of Part Four of the Ethics) says “see the better and choose the worse.” Selfishness, dogmatism, and violence are transhistorical phenomena. Are we driven by a death instinct, as Freud believed, or a desire to wreck things just to avoid boredom, as Schopenhauer mused? Perhaps those are over generalizations, but it would be naive for thinkers who claim to form their ideas by studying history to ignore the abundant evidence of the existence of antipathetic and malignant sides of human desire and behaviour.

People who claim to study and learn from history cannot be selective in the conclusions that they draw from it. I think that Marx is correct: we do only set ourselves problems for which the solution (in principle) exists. But history also teaches, I think, that theory should be translated into practice via modest experiments whose social implications ramify overtime. Perhaps in that way the ambitious and over-zealous can be exposed before they accrue the power necessary to sacrifice the movement (and millions of other people’s lives) to their own ambitions.

In science, there is no experiment of experiments that will prove everything once for all. Most scientists, therefore, prefer incremental progress to a betting it all on a giant leap that might blow up the lab and prevent further research. Stalinism blew up the revolutionary socialist lab, but democratic mobilization and open ended struggles against the structural problems that capitalism generates remain tools bequeathed by past generations to present and future generations who should put them to work intelligently today and tomorrow.

Penny Foolish, Pound Foolish

Seismic waves continue to radiate outward from the Gaza war epicentre to rattle Syria,Jordan, Iran, the Arabian peninsula, and the Red Sea. The obvious solution to the instability and danger to life is to stop the war. But the contending parties vow to not stop the war until their objectives are met. But if the objectives are mutually incompatible (the destruction of Hamas vs. the survival of Hamas as the legitimate governing power in Gaza, freedom for Israeli hostages vs. freedom for all Palestinian prisoners, Israeli security vs the creation of a Palestinian state) only the complete destruction of the other side can secure the victor’s demands. But if neither side can be destroyed, permanent conflict must ensure, unless …

… both sides realize that maximalist positions guarantee conflict, conflict guarantees periodic eruptions of violence, and violence destroys the lives that both sides claim to want to protect and improve. Unfortunately, compromise requires leadership of a sort that is rare at moments of severe crisis. The typical response– on abundant display in the current crisis– is adolescent male chest-thumping, posturing, and head-butting. Israel digs itself into a hole by promising the total destruction of Hamas– a goal that it cannot accomplish because Hamas is not an army, but a political movement deeply embedded in the lives of 2.3 million Gazans. Hamas responds by promising the total destruction of the “Zionist entity,” an even more preposterous goal, considering the overwhelming military power of Israel, unflagging US financial and military support, and the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders of Israel under international law. Peace seems unimaginable under these political conditions.

On the periphery are a host of equally tough-talking actors. Iran and Hezbollah keep threatening unspecified catastrophic consequences for Israel and its supporters if the war continues. The US bombs Iraq, Syria, and Yemen in reprisal for the deaths of three US soldiers. The Houthis vow to respond to the response. Meanwhile, people across the region continue to suffer not only the immediate effects of violence but the economic and social consequences of instability and war. Yemen and Gaza are amongst the poorest places on earth, Iraq and Syria have riven by decades of hot and cold civil war. Iran’s highly educated youthful population chafes under the impact of sanctions and a sclerotic theocracy. The racist venting of Israel’s far right and the pitiless ferocity of its war alienates elements of even its staunchest allies.

Presumably, the point of this conflict, like any conflict, viewed from the perspective of any of its protagonists, is to improve the lives of the people the contending sides represent. While Hamas must certainly have counted on an Israeli ground invasion in response to October 7th, they probably did not bank on the level of destruction that Israel has inflicted. Beneath the rhetoric of destruction lies the positive value of Palestinian self-determination. And beneath the rhetoric of extermination that the Israelis have voiced lies likewise the positive goal of security and life-protection. The idea that the Israeli state as such is illegitimate has no basis under international law. Thus, those who would invoke international law to criticize Israeli tactics in Gaza as genocidal and decry the on-going denial of Palestinians their right to national self-determination must not ignore international law when it comes to the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

There is war, there is resistance, there is rhetoric, but there is no security, no life-protection, no self-determination, just war setting the stage for more war, if not ad infinitum, then at least as far as the eye can see.

Commentators on the left typically focus on the objective causes of conflict in order to insist- not wrongly– that unless objective causes are addressed, conflict and violence will continue.

This insistence is not wrong but, I would argue, it is one-sided. It matters, I think, how objective causes are addressed. The left favours the language of smashing, liquidating, and destroying, but this language betrays, to my mind, the universal value that underlies its criticisms of capitalism and colonialism: the harmonious development of human capacities in a world no longer riven by class conflict, atavistic nationalisms, and fundamentalist obscurantism. Achieving that goal presupposes the satisfaction of both the objective and subjective conditions for the creation of a world of self-determining peoples sharing the wealth and joys of our world. Resistance and struggle are not ends in themselves.

Until leaders that thrive on tough talk and demonization of the enemy are replaced with leaders who can argue, listen, respectfully acknowledge the legitimacy of the interests of the other side, and work out pragmatic but honourable compromises, the realization of that universal value is impossible. Objective conditions matter, but so do subjective conditions. Imagine had Stalin and not Gorbachev been the leader of the Soviet Union in 1989. How many millions more bodies would he have piled up in a doomed attempt to save a dying system? Good leadership does not depend upon superior moral virtue, but on the capacity to discern what the historical moment requires. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet economic model could no longer compete with the West. He also understood, more importantly, that no heroic efforts on his part could save the system. His people were done, fed up, no longer willing to be ruled in the old way, as Lenin said. The people of Eastern Europe were even more disillusioned. Wisely, instead of trying to murder his way to political security, he simply let the empire go.

How different, then, was he from Ben Gvir, or Netanyahu, or Yahya Sinwar. Their main failure as leaders is that they they believe that sheer force of will, determination, courage, and ruthlessness can alter the basic structure of the problem that they face. But the problem that they face is precisely that neither one side nor the other can achieve their goals without compromise from the other side.

The adolescent boy challenged to a fight thinks that backing down is weakness. But refusing to fight a futile battle is not weakness (or strength), it is intelligence. In daily life we do not celebrate the person who responds to an insult by kicking the offender in the head. We do not erect statues to parents who beat their children to death. But political leaders are celebrated as decisive and tough-minded for being willing to pay the price of victory, even if that price runs to millions of lives destroyed.

The world does not need saints. It needs intelligent leaders who can study a conflict dispassionately and see the deep structures that prevent resolution on their terms only. Rational understanding can then furnish the political strength needed to tell one’s own side that the old ways cannot work, that the legitimacy of the interests of the other side must be acknowledged, and that a workable compromise, one that creates space for new forms of peaceful self-development, is needed. As new forms of peaceful self-development evolve, new forms of peaceful interaction between formerly mortal enemies can evolve. We know they can because they already have, many, many times in the past.

Justice can be the enemy of peace when it is asserted in absolute terms against an opponent who can be expected to also invoke it as their justifying value. However, if justice is a universal value, then it demands that all people have access to the natural and social resources that free self-development requires as well as effective political institutions through which that collective control can be organized and managed. No one has exclusive right to what we all need, but until leaders are in place who recognize and act on this simple truth in the simplest of ways– through negotiation and comprise– war will continue to destroy the very lives in whose name the violent struggles are justified.

Security, national self-determination, and whatever other political value statespersons invoke to justify themselves are only good if there are people alive to enjoy them.

Endgame?

Are Canada’s universities heading towards an epochal crisis of relevance? Writing in The Hub, a university administrator in a “senior leadership position” at a “well-respected university” worries that they are. Her concerns are not directed at the rising costs of post-secondary education for students, the funding crisis plaguing the institutions of some provinces (especially Ontario), or budget models that tie resources to enrollments and enrollments to employment. She instead focuses on the purported weakening commitment to scholarly excellence and academic freedom. The culprit: woke obsession with the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion agenda, students who need coddling and are incapable of rising to the challenge of higher education, an expanding cohort of student support functionaries with no background in higher education, and the rule of group unthink amongst senior administrators. I think that she raises legitimate concerns, but also exaggerates the extent to which contentious debate has been suppressed within Canada’s universities.

There have been, to be sure, egregious exceptions to the principle of academic freedom. The most serious is the firing of Frances Widdowson from Mount Royal University. According to Widdowson, she was fired because of her criticisms of the school’s Indiginization initiatives. Her case is currently being argued in front of an arbitrator in Alberta. She has received the support of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, a group who traces its origins to the struggle for academic freedom. CAUT was also involved in protesting the decision of the administration at the University of Lethbridge to cave into student and faculty pressure to cancel a talk that Widdowson was supposed to give on campus. She had been invited by Philosophy professor (and my former colleague at McMaster University) Paul Viminitz to speak on her case and the surrounding issues of academic freedom.

The concerns that the administrator raises in her essay have some basis in reality. I have argued consistently and will continue to argue that any student or faculty member who is incapable of listening to and responding with cogent argument and criticism to positions that differ from their own because they assume that their position is necessarily true, just, and beyond rational dispute contradict the ethos of free inquiry upon which the university depends. Universities cannot exist without the free exchange and articulation of arguments. As the poet and University of Toronto English Professor George Eliot Clarke wrote in a recent edition of the CAUT Bulletin, the “cancellation” and “gangstalking,” i.e., bullying and harassment conducted to censure, censor, or silence academics (and other intellectuals, including writers) … are strictly heinous when backed by other members of the intelligentsia– citizens whose work relies upon free speech guarantees.” (CAUT Bulletin, 18 Vo. 70, No. 6, Sept-Oct, 2023, 18).) Clarke is correct to insist that no one group has the right to decide what positions are publicly articulated and defended. As I have said before, the truth will out, if and only if differing positions can be freely analyzed and criticized. There is no higher value in the university than free exchange, analysis, and criticism of ideas and arguments concerning all of the dimensions of human experience: the natural world upon which we depend, the social worlds that we construct, and the systems of thought and expression (science, philosophy, spirituality, artistic sensibility and practice) through which we try to understand and interpretet. The political value of universities is not determined by any party line. Their political value is that they educate people to think clearly and critically, to evaluate and marshal evidence in support of a position, to rationally convince others or be rationally convinced themselves. Self-righteous posturing and preaching to the choir supports an ethic of indoctrination to which the value and power of human thinking must always oppose itself.

Universities must reject, as Hegel said, “the conceit that refuses to argue.”

The question is: are DEI initiatives necessarily expressions of that conceit.

But are DEI initiatives opposed to academic freedom? Writing in the same issue of the CAUT Bulletin, Executive Director David Robinson acknowledged that there are real tensions between some interpretations of DEI initiatives and academic freedom. “We have … seen more prescriptive requirement that ask candidates to submit statements demonstrating how their work aligns with the institution’s specific EDI strategy. This can violate academic freedom.” Where there are grounds to worry about the transgressions of the principle of academic freedom, faculty unions need to do their job and have demands for such statements removed from application requirements. That is not to say, Robinson adds, that the mere existence of DEI requirements violates academic freedom. “CAUT policy has long stated that all hiring and promotion decisions should be based only on considerations relevant to .. effective performance .. Arguably, such professional responsibilities today include the ability to teach an increasingly diverse and inclusive student body.” (CAUT Bulletin, Vol 70, No. 6, 7). Agreed. Therefore, there is no necessary contradiction between institutional efforts to more fulsomely include historically marginalized voices and the right of academics to organize their courses according to their expertise and professional judgment.

In a related vein, the president of PEN America Suzanne Nossel argued in a recent essay that the university system in a pluralistic society has a responsibility to ensure that there is space for the expression of all socially relevant perspectives on the problems of human experience and knowledge. Both Robinson and Noessen bring to light what to my mind is the key to resolving the conflict between DEI and academic freedom: academics have a responsibility to teach the state of the art in their disciplines. This responsibility obligates them to revise their own curriculum in light of changes in the field. Academic disciplines cannot be determined solely by political forces outside the academy, but they do not float free of those forces either. Therefore, where pervasive social struggles, such as the renewed struggle against racism in the wake of the George Floyd murder steer academic work in new directions, everyone working in fields so affected have a responsibility to inform themselves of that work and incorporate it, where relevant, into their course designs, not because some bureaucracy, but because good teaching, demands it.

The anonymous administrator invokes the Enlightenment in defence of her position, but the Enlightenment was contradictory, typically (but not always) invoking different standards for the judgement of European and non-European societies. The French Revolution proclaimed the universal rights of “man and citizen,” but executed Olympe de Gouges when she demanded that the rights of women be equally recognized. As great an anti-imperialist as the Marquis de Condorcet could, in the same work (Sketch for Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind) both denounce the violent racism of slavery-supporting tyrants and argue that the best fate for Indigenous people in the Americas was assimilation.

The political legacy of the Enlightenment is thus highly ambiguous. Methodologically, what was most valuable is the opposite of the good administrator’s assumption. The Enlightenment began the process of freeing thought from attachment to eternal natural kinds and fixed moral hierarchies. The key thinkers of the French, Scottish, and German Enlightenments began to ask crucial questions about how societies came to be organized the way that they are, who benefits from that organization, and how people came to be convinced that the way things are now is the way that they naturally should be? When we understand the Enlightenment as the origin of critical-historical thinking, feminism, critical race theory, and the critique of colonialism become continuations of its methodological heritage, not its opposite. “The Enlightenment” was a historical period, contradictory like all historical periods, and not a crystalline structure of truth floating free from social interests.

That said, everyone who teaches or studies at a university must treat their work as an argument and not as gospel truth to be preached and never questioned. Refusal to treat opponent’s positions as arguments but as anathema to be banned is a direct violation of academics’ and students’ duty to treat the institution as a space for open inquiry and free debate. That duty applies equally to everyone: again, the political function of universities is not to promote some undefined and therefore meaningless “social justice agenda” or to combat the deep structural inequalities of the world. Universities educate, that is all, but under the assumption that educated people can weigh evidence, detect contradictions between principle and practice or within principles, develop coherent arguments to justify the claim that there is a contradiction, suggest alternatives, all the while remaining open to counter-argument and to the incorporation of sound criticism into revised thinking.

That is the hope, in any case. And while I agree that there have been egregious examples of cowardly administrators caving in to some students and faculty’s misplaced political demands to regulate the free play of argument on campus, I do not see that this problem has reached a point where the very existence of the institution as a space for free inquiry has been threatened. The author of the piece lists a now familiar set of concerns: targeted hiring of historically underrepresented groups, Indigenization initiatives, and students more concerned with mental health support than intellectual growth.

But there is no detailed meat of analysis and evidence put on these bones of critique. She does not prove, for example, that targeted hiring of underrepresented groups compromises the quality of research and teaching or that there is a contradiction between such hiring initiatives and academic excellence and commitment to choosing the most qualified candidate. The author is a woman, and she would know better than me that exactly the same arguments were launched 40 years ago when institutions began making systematic efforts to increase the proportion of women academics. Does she regard herself and her female colleagues hired over the past 3 or 4 decades as as a mere “equity hires? I would guess not. So why does she think that black or Indigenous colleagues hired more recently are not equally fit for their positions? If, as she implies, she thinks that (at least some of them) are, she needs to provide some evidence.

As for students today, well, students today are who they are and they are different from the author and I when we were students 30 or 40 years ago. Her elders told her, I am sure, as mine told me when I was an adolescent, that I would grow old enough to be driven crazy by teenagers and young adults, and they were correct. The tone of the essay too often sounds like late middle age grousing about “kids these days.’ Now I admit, there is both necessity and pleasure in late middle age grousing about “kids these days’ (if it was so much better in our day, we can reconcile ourselves more easily to getting old) but grousing is not proof that there is a systematic problem. Before one condemns contemporary students, one must look at the social and economic context in which they are trying to study (high tuition, the consequent need for many to work and try to go to school, uncertain job prospects, to name only the most significant).

We oldsters must also remember that those of us who became professors were bookworms and lab rats: a very small proportion of our graduating classes. Now that we teach or administrate we have to keep in mind that the vast majority of students do not want to be scholars and intellectuals. To be effective teachers we have to come down to where most of our students are in order to encourage them to take a few steps up to where the ideas live. We also have to keep in mind that our study habits were forged before the internet, before people held the power of real time instant global communication in the palm of their hands. Our social identities were formed in a vastly different cultural-technological matrix.

As we were different from our parents, so too are today’s students different from us. They are not, I do not think, a catastrophe that will destroy the institution, but they will force the institution to change. As the Gang of Four sang in “I Found that Essence Rare,” “the worst thing in 1954 was the bikini.” I can imagine academics in “senior leadership positions” in the 60s fussing about the complete corruption of the nation’s morals in response to student demands for co-ed dorms.

Again, there are serious concerns raised in this essay and there are examples of institutions abdicating their responsibilities to protect academic freedom. However, I want to suggest– gently, and with respect– that if the problems really are as serious as she argues, she has a perfect duty, as a “senior leader’ to open her mouth in meetings and challenge her colleagues. And a further part of that duty is to sign her name to articles that call into question the academic integrity of the university institutions that have given her a career. If that which we depend upon not only for our paycheque but our existence as intellectuals is threatened, and we believe that the institution’s social value is in jeopardy, then we have a duty to protect it, or resign from a “leadership” position and go back to the faculty ranks. It is not only the communists of the world that should disdain to conceal their views, it is all concerned citizens. If one is afraid to sign one’s name, why should anyone believe what they say? After all, an essential part of the free exchange of ideas that the author claims to value is answering criticism of your arguments. But if one does not put name to paper, one cannot be held to critical account.

Rufo and “The New Right”

Chuffed by his role in forcing former Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign, Christopher Rufo has just penned a call to arms to “new right activists” to “win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.” He does not tell us what “rightful ends” the state should serve or what those who disagree with them whatever they turn out to be should do. As a manifesto, it lacks the poetry of Marx and Engels. Its fussing over the capture of American institutions by the “far left” is derivative of the anxieties of late 60s and early 1970’s conservatives worried about the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist youth. And its plea that the right emulate the political left’s strategy of capturing the leadership of major social institutions is ironic, given that many leftists (Srnicek and Williams, for example) have argued that leftists need to take a page from the way the right recovered from their defeats in the 1960 to dominate the 70s and 80s.

In short, the content and tone is predictable and superficial, but Rufo does raise important questions about the purpose of public institutions that are worth thinking through.

Rufo’s screed begins by telling his fellow travellers that both the old (nineteenth century) liberalism and conservatism are dead. Warming the right-wing heart with memories of Reagan will not work; the new right needs a new action plan for new times. He does not mention Trump and I do not know what his position is on MAGA Republicans (they certainly have organizing power, but Rufo is perhaps too much of an intellectual to go in for their manifold absurdities). Rufo focuses on stopping “establishment conservatives” from retreating any further from the core values of the “political tradition of the west– republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia.”

I found the inclusion of eudaimonia next to ‘shared moral standards’ in a conservative argument odd. Without saying anything more about what ‘shared moral standards’ he has in mind (Judeo-Christian morality, I presume) the value of flourishing (eudaimonia) pulls in the direction of individual difference and self-creation, not shared substantive values. Aristotle could assume shared moral principles, but in a pluralist country like the United States, shared moral standards are the problem, not the solution. Individual flourishing presupposes access to resources and, therefore, (if you ask me) any society that prioritises flourishing must institutionalise the principle (common to socialism and egalitarian liberalism but foreign to the classical liberalism or libertarianism) that everyone should be able to access the basic resources, relationships, and institutions that the flourishing of their lives requires. But as for religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and the content of the lives people choose to pursue, those would necessarily differ. Without further unpacking his thought, Rufo leaves his position open to questions about its normative and political coherence.

However, as I noted, the essay is a short call to arms and not a political philosophy paper. “The Right doesn’t need a white paper,” he argues, it needs activists willing to go to battle– as he did in the Harvard plagiarism scandal– to take back institutions. Unless the right takes back control of schools and statehouses, all talk of ‘righteous ends’ is just academic hot air.

But a battle against what forces? Rufo provides further support for an argument that I have made for decades concerning the connection between postmodern critiques of objective truth and the right-wing. Rufo argues that “while postmodern theorists who reduced politics to “language games” may have overstated the case, … they were right in one respect: language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society: in law, arts, rhetoric, and common speech.” Rufo (and the postmodernists) are correct that language is the operative element of human society, but they are wrong to infer that political power is a function of control over language. Power does not stem from control over the OED or the barrel of a gun (Mao), but from control over the resources (natural, technological) upon which everyone’s lives and livelihood depends. Control over the language is often used in a purely ideological way make it seem as though substantive social changes have been made when in reality the class dimensions of political and economic power have not been changed at all.

Such is the case with the language of ‘Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” that drives Rufo so crazy. Let us confine our attention to the universities for a moment. Rufo believes that the leadership of universities has been seized by a far left cabal bent on destroying academic standards and turning America’s halls of academia into madrassas of political correctness. I have worked in universities for thirty years and can assure everyone who is worried that they are not led by far left activists and that the biggest threat to academic freedom is the role of private money (as l’affaire Harvard also proved) and the ubiquitous demand made by public funders that university curricula serve the interests of business by producing “job ready” applicants that can be fed into the most dynamic sectors of the economy.

Anyone concerned with academic standards and freedom should be concerned when any extraneous political agenda is imposed upon academics and students, whichever side of the political aisle it claims to serve. Curricula needs to be determined by the state of the art in the field and not preachy administrators hoping to cure the ills of the world through changed reading lists. At the same time– as Rufo’s own arguments admit– the world has changed. The most important change– in the humanities at least– is the emergence of long silenced voices that demand– rightly– to be heard. The state of the art in the field should determine the curricula in all disciplines, but certainly in the humanities the state of the art means including the works of historically colonised people, critical race theorists, and others who have been demonstrably oppressed by the dominant structures of power and wealth. Including those voices does not mean that they should dominate the conversation to the exclusion of older perspectives, but it does mean that they have to be heard.

Rufo’s intervention does not go into details about how he would reform institutions in general or universities in particular, but the general arguments he does make contradict themselves. He calls out the left for its “euphemistic rule,” but then concludes that the new right must “replace contemporary ideological language with new, persuasive language that points towards clear principles.” Two points are in order: first, persuasive language need not be true, and second, clear principles can be ideological. Rufo intends his readers to conclude that his feet are planted in the soil of objective truth, but he himself admits that he is mobilizing power to prosecute a political– ideologically partisan– agenda.

Rufo’s penchant for making bald faced contradictions perhaps explains why works for a think tank and not an academic institution. If he worked as an academic, he would have to defend his arguments from critics who would expose his contradictions. As a private researcher, he is free to deal in platitudes about the superiority of passion to reason and re-setting the public agenda on the basis of “clear principles.” (He also does not have to fend off charges of plagiarism, which is good for him, because he flat out plagiarises Hume’s argument, from Essay on Human Nature, that reason is the slave of the passions. Maybe Claudine Gay should expose him).

In any case, the problem with Rufo’s criticisms of the “euphemistic left” is that he wants his readers to think that his “clear principles’ are objectively true, while at the same time arguing that all principles are political and that public life is really a Nietzschean battle to impose one’s own preferred ‘truths’ on everyone else. He writes that “no institution can be neutral– and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology.” If true, it follows that this argument applies to Rufo as well, and that, consequently, his real agenda is not to protect objective truth from the infamies of the ‘far left,’ but just to impose his ideology on everyone else.

But institutions can be neutral, in the partisan political sense, and yet passionately commit themselves to fulfilling their purpose. To speak again only of the universities, the belief that they must serve a cliched left or right wing agenda is simply false. Faculty and students have political positions, which they must be free to defend (not impose) in the context of academic argument, but the university itself, if it is to function as a space for open, free, intellectual inquiry, criticism, and debate, cannot serve any political master. There have been egregious cases of faculty being hounded out of their positions, not had their contracts renewed, or fired, for running afoul of EDI platitudes. I have criticized these violations of academic freedom and integrity and will continue to do so. But the solution is not a “new right” take over of the universities (as has happened at New College in Florida), but a recommitment of all members of the university institution to the discipline and courage of argument. The purpose of the university is not to spread any particular group’s “truth” but to expose every truth-claim to the test of open examination and criticism. The truth will out, but not because one group is more committed to its partisan principles than another. The truth is what survives contestation and criticism. If Rufo is serious about returning institutions to their purposes, he needs to stand on the side of critical engagement and not on the side of forcibly silencing opponents who annoy him.

Win the Political Argument, not the Court Case

The decisions of the Colorado Supreme Court and the Secretary of State of Maine to bar Trump (pending appeals to US Supreme Court) from the Republican primary ballot in those states gives practical urgency to abstract debates about the relationship between constitutional principles, the rule of law, and democratic self-determination. On the surface– whatever one thinks of Trump– having judges and a secretary of state (from an opposing party) take pre-emptive steps to remove a candidate from ballots and thus prevent voters from exercising their right to vote for a candidate of their choice seems rather like the ‘election interference’ of which Trump has been accused.

On the other hand, elections are governed by rules and– again, whatever one thinks of those rules and whatever one thinks about how democratic ‘actually existing democracy’ is– there is an argument that Trump has disqualified himself by his actions on January 6th, 2021. The Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State appealed to the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution’s ban on “insurrectionists” running for office as justification for their decision to remove Trump from the ballot. At issue, legally, constitutionally, is whether or not Trump’s actions on January 6th amounted to insurrection. At present, no court has found him criminally guilty of such a charge, which predictably raises suspicions– and not unjustified, within the rules of the American electoral system– that Democratic justices and officials are trying to disrupt the Trump campaign because- as incredible as it might seem– he has a legitimate chance to beat Biden in the general election.

The US Supreme Court will decide the constitutional issues one way or the other, by either refusing to hear the case (and thus letting the decisions stand) or hearing arguments and rendering judgement. Here too partisanship is almost certain to come into play. The 6-3- conservative-liberal split and the fact that three of those 6 were appointed during Trump’s term as President increases the probability that the court would render a verdict favorable to Trump. However, the real issue that these decisions raise is political and goes to the heart of the value that underlies democracy.

The Secretary of State of Maine argued that since “democracy is sacred” she had no choice but to bar Trump from the ballot, for Trump, apparently, is the antithesis of everything democratic. But is he? What makes democracy sacred? And what does “sacred” mean? Setting aside the overtly religious connotations, sacred means, I would argue, something like “not for sale at any price or exchangeable for any superior good.” So, if democracy is sacred, office cannot be bought at any price but must be the function of the choice of the citizens. Moreover, it cannot be sacrificed to any higher good, including, presumably, constitutional principles.

Let us set aside the obvious role that money plays in US federal and elections and focus on the substantive political problem. That problem is: do constitutional principles exist for the sake of democracy or does democracy exist for the sake of constitutional principles? The question has haunted American democracy from the beginning, when the question of how to regulate (tame, subordinate?) the popular energies unleashed by revolution was debated in the Federalist. The problem that Hamilton, Madison, and other founders of the America state faced was the unbridled nature of democratic energy. Popular power is unfocused but must be channeled this way or that. They worried that democratic power would be captured by majoritarian movements that would wield state power against opposed minority interests (especially the minority interest defined by class power rooted in control over wealth and resources).

The debate has raged since Madison’s critique of popular democratic power between supporters of its subordination to constitutional limits and defenders of its essential vitality. Defenders of democracy argue that by its very nature democracy must leave the question of governing principle open: democratic peoples decide fro themselves who will rule them and by what principles they will be ruled. Sheldon Wolin, criticizing Rawls for the anti-political and undemocratic thrust of his theory of justice, makes the general point clearly: Rawls tries to ‘cut democracy to the specifications of constitutionalism” he argued, and “fit ‘democracy’ into an undemocratic social framework.” Rawls’ makes these moves, Wolin contends, because his starting point, “is not democracy, but … ‘stability.”(“The Liberal/Democratic Divide” Fugitive Democracy, 275.)

For Wolin, one cannot have democracy without struggle and contestation over what is and is not a fit matter for public debate and decision. “The problem of the political is not to clear a space from which society is to be kept out but it is to ground power in commonality while reverencing diversity … Diversity cannot be reverenced by bureaucratic modes of decision-making. Diversity is the nightmare of bureaucracy.” (“Democracy and the Political,” 249) The problem of diversity– a problem of which Trump is a paradigm example– is that the forms it takes cannot be predicted in advance. It is a nightmare for bureaucratic thinking precisely because the forms it throws up cannot be regulated in advance. When a movement arises which seems to break the established pattern the response of bureaucracy– as exemplified here by the Colorado Supreme Court and the Secretary of State of Maine– is to try to suppress it, eradicate it under cover of legal or constitutional principle. The result– if Wolin is correct, and I believe that he is– must be undemocratic.

Wolin did not live long enough to see Trump, but Trump is not, in fact, a novelty in US politics but the latest in a long line of right-wing populist iconoclasts. None of these figures scared Wolin away from his affirmation of democracy over its constitutional strangulation, so I doubt that Trump would have either. What Trump’s opponents forget is that democracy is not first and foremost a substantive moral doctrine but a form of distributing power. In a democracy, different groups and movements struggle for power. One side in this struggle cannot cloak itself in the mantle of “democracy” as justification for banning other players from playing. To do so is obviously to try to stack the deck in one’s favour and thus undercut by one’s practice the very value of democracy to which one appeals as theoretical justification.

To support unbridled democratic contestation between rival parties and movements does not mean supporting Trump or other demagogic forces or rejecting the existence of genuine, shared, fundamental interests anchored in basic natural and social needs. What it does mean is that commitment to democratic politics elevates the principle of self-determination above expertocratic, top-down forms of enacting policies to meet those needs. In short, a commitment to democratic self-determination requires that democrats accept risk. Unless one want to be ruled by an expertocracy (like Iran’s Council of Experts that vets candidates for office, or return to the days of Enlightened despotism, or- as technotopians urge– turn our public affairs over to an AI system that will mechanically churn out win-win solutions to all problems– one must accept the possibility that majorities will coalesce around demagogic figures like Trump. That is precisely the reason why Plato believed that democracy will always undermine itself. but he did not appeal to constitutional constraints– because he knew they would not work– but to a plan of rigid social order which allowed the majority no say at all in choosing their rulers or determining the laws they would have to obey.

Are Plato and contemporary Platonic-technotopian critics of democracy correct? Are the hoi poloi (or even the whole human race) too stupid to run their own affairs? If the answer is yes and the solution to turn our affairs over to quasi-divine Philosopher-Kings or machines, then I suggest that our time on the planet is up. We should decide–democratically!– that the human experiment has run its course and failed.

If we are not ready to vote for voluntary extinction or to turn political life over to a computer system, then we must assume that we are mature enough to determine our collective life in accordance with democratic principles. Trump’s opponents want to use constitutional principles like a computer algorithm to select out Trump in advance of democratic contestation. As I noted above, following Wolin, this cuts into the very heart of democracy: one cannot anticipate in advance what sorts of movements democratic power will create and coalesce around. The only democratic antidote to democratically emergent but substantively undemocratic movements like Trumpism is to defeat them, politically, through the force of better arguments and superior mobilizing power around an agenda more demonstrably in people’s shared interests.

As Wolin argues, ‘The mode of action that is consonant with equality and diversity is deliberation. Deliberation means to think carefully.” We must think carefully because what is at stake is the exercise of human power” (249) But Trump is unreasonable! opponents will respond. But is he? He is actually a skilled rhetorician and politician, but in order to understand the logic of his positions, one must think politically and not in abstractly logico-empirical terms. That is, Trump, like all politicians uses speech to moblize power, not to advance truth-claims. Pointing out his “lies’ will never defeat him, because his supporters are not following him because of the abstract truth-value of his assertions, but because they think that his agenda serves their interests. They are worried about jobs, their communities, their traditions, and so they can be mobilized around an anti-immigrant, isolationist, protectionist agenda. An effective response has to acknowledge the legitimacy of people’s fears in ways that opens their ears to counter-argument.

People cannot deliberate when they are afraid or angry, and many of Trump’s supporters– in 2016, 2020, and still today, are afraid and angry. The problem is the social context which makes 77 million people willing to vote for a Trump. I say ‘a’ Trump and not ‘Trump’ because unless the political fight is won with his supporters another right-wing populist will arise to take Trump’s place. Trump is a symbol of unmet social needs: how to channel those who feel those unmet needs in a democratic rather than demagogic direction is the real problem that Trump’s opponents face. Hoping the constitution will save democracy is both in vain and undemocratic.

Windsor Spaces 5: Alleys of Riverwest

A few weeks ago I went to have my car fixed and I hung around this old garage while it was being fixed. It’s in that kind of punchy village, poorer village. Everything is crumbling and slums and the garage is full or dirt and oil. And you like that stuff, you know, rusty stuff, that kind of atmosphere. You know how one always feels connected with deteriorating things.

Phillip Guston, Conversation with Morton Feldman

Perhaps we feel an affinity with deteriorating things because we are deteriorating things. Life winds down and past a certain point you cannot deny that truth. But it’s ok; that’s life, as the saying goes. Rust is natural and nothing has a claim on eternal existence.

Or perhaps Guston is simply expressing an eccentric aesthetic position. In any case, I know what he means and feel the same way. I like oily garages and grimy factories and broken machines and the patterns of eroding surfaces. I grew up amidst enormous smelters and giant smokestacks and old cars and junk abandoned to the bush. People who grow up in big cities romanticise the bush as pristine wilderness, but if it is anywhere near a town or city it it is full of the shit people think that they have a human right to discard anywhere they please. The romantics would no doubt see these artifacts of human industry as ugly violations of the integrity of the forest, but the pretty and picturesque are easy and boring. Human beings build things that break: junk is our record of having been.

Where would archaeologists be without the refuse of peoples? And if our junk is a trace of our having been, why should we not look at decaying materiality as beautiful? Comedies are fun, but tragedies are art.

One does not need to walk in the bush to discover decaying structures. Cities are also full of corroding objects and the random interactions of nature and culture. The back streets and alleyways of any city are like the bush: hidden spaces where people dump their old appliances and furniture because they think that no one is looking.

Like other cities, Windsor is Janus-faced: an outward-facing cross-hatch of arterial roads and residential streets and an inward-facing, hidden world of alleys running behind backyards and store fronts. In a less regulated country than Canada the alleys might be a second world of informal-economy workshops and kiosks like one finds in the Medinas of Marrakesh and Fez.

My neighborhood is something like the punchy village where Guston waited while his car was fixed. It is certainly no Fez or Marrakesh but mostly students houses, a little grimy and unkempt. Riverwest- as our neighborhood association re-christened the area a few years ago– has its problems, but also its charms. Most families have left the few blocks near the university where we live and their houses are now filled with mostly international students. There are no kids playing road hockey but there are Indian students playing driveway cricket and setting off fireworks for Diwali. What the neighborhood now lacks in well-manicured middle-class order it makes up for with a genuine urban energy. The main street is lively with pedestrian traffic, we have the best Chinese and Indian restaurants, the river is only a block away, and behind almost every street there is an alley open to the solitary walker.

I feel that it is a duty of those who live in a neighborhood for any length of time to fully immerse themselves in the spaces that might be hidden from the casual passer-by. The long-time resident should know the shortcuts, the hidden gems, the trouble-spots, and alleyways.

I began my mental mapping of the alleys during Covid. Lockdown after lockdown, frustrated, enraged at the ultimate pointlessness of being confined to home, and with nowhere else to go, I would take long walks. I am a creature of habit but also appreciate variations on a theme. The streets got old quickly, but I learned to distinguish driveways from the entrance to alleyways. Languishing under Covid-induced boredom, even the most banal discovery seemed exciting. I felt like a spelunker might feel discovering the new entrance of a cave, but also a little twinge of anxiety as I entered, wondering whether there was an exit or if I would have to turn around. I have passed the age where anyone would suspect me of lurking, waiting to break into a garage, so I was free to explore the backspaces where no one else– I have never encountered another person– treads (not because they don’t dare, there is no danger, they just don’t think of walking up the alleys).

And so I would walk, but not for exercise, but to look. I think of walking as an essay on looking. Most people see the obvious: a lot of garbage, over-grown patches, boring graffiti tags and cartoonish portraits. The challenge is to look again, and then one finds the sort of accidental art and sculpture that I think that Guston was referring to when he felt drawn to the grit and grease of the small town garage.

To look at the familiar in an unfamilar way is to frame the visual field in a deliberate way. From a distance, paint peeling off a wall is just paint peeling off a wall, but impose a novel visual frame and it becomes abstract painting as interesting as any you will find in a gallery.

A rusty autopart separated through some violence from the car is just a piece of metal trash, but look at the material form and it becomes an accidental sculpture.

Given how so much contemporary art is derivative of Duchamps’ ready-mades, save the thirty bucks major public museums will charge you and go for a walk. Look differently at the things and surfaces that you encounter. Our back spaces are free open air museums of the random deterioration of things which produces material forms far more visually compelling than Duchamps’ coat racks and urinals. Decay sculpts and paints: unintentional transformation is still creative, i.e., productive of that which would not be were it not for that process.

Ours is a visual culture, people say, but it is a visual culture once removed from material reality. The screen is the frame through which most people see the world. The smart phone manufacturer and the content creators pre-determine and limit the experience of the virtual world. These photographs are my way of seeing the alleys, others would frame things differently. On-line, one scrolls and swipes and imagines that one is active when in reality that which one experiences has been determined by the engineer and the uploader.

To walk the alleys is to explore, and to look, concentrate, narrow or broaden one’s focus is a completely free act (in both senses of the term). That which is there to be seen is given, but what one sees when one looks is an act of concentration and imagination, a collaboration, even, between the natural and social forces that structure the physical environment and one’s conscious, active attention.

Report of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Postsecondary Education Financial Sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hill

My winters were spent in unbordered bush n snow drifts

n on The Hill

behind the school

where everyone would

slide.

A city of children, classless, kinda

cause no one had fancier coats

or thought they were better than anyone else

cause they weren’t:

everyone’s dad worked in the mines

n their moms at shops in town

or cut hair in their living rooms

to earn a few extra bucks.

Day n night the Hill would draw us

together on toboggans

or solo on a Krazy Karpet

n if you didn’t have either

you could use some cardboard

or even old

boots whose treads had worn out

(but not a sled: sleds were snow machines

in case ya didn’t know).

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

before we had scrambled back to the top

but ya just had to take it

you couldn’t be a suck in those days.

Later, when we had become jaded teenagers

we would still go sliding

drinking rye from the bottle

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

It was like falling over a cliff

drunk as hell.

Everyone crashed before the bottom

but that’s what made it fun

n the bottle waiting for us

back at the top

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

I never thought about it then

but I did the other day, that

probably there are classless cities of children

in the desert

n maybe they go sliding down sand dunes,

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

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

in the desert

but maybe they have other stuff to drink

but whether they do or not

I bet

if they are alone in their city of children

doing whatever kids do in the desert

they smile

cause they feel safe

n together

n even if the bigger kids push the little ones around

its all in fun

n you can’t be a suck

in the desert either, but ya learn to

laugh n take it

just like on our Hill.

I haven’t gone sliding in decades

but I can still feel

the dirty February snow spraying my cheeks

and freezing to my toque.

When I think now about what I have been doing

I guess I’ve mostly read:

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

I have thought up n down

over, under, n sideways,

in straight lines n spirals n circles,

even dialectically.

I have thought long, and I have thought hard

n me n all the serious people I have read

think we know what’s what

but whatever we think we know

it’s not been enough

to stop the same shit from happening

over n over n over.

Today I can’t say

that I know anything much fer sure,

so I could be wrong

but this much seems clear:

that babies who need to be in incubators

should not have to be wrapped in tin foil

because they had the misfortune

to be born into somebody’s war.

I really don’t know much for certain anymore,

so I could be wrong

but it seems clear to me

that if the price of whatever

is that tiny creatures

who don’t want anything except to be warm

have to be wrapped in tin foil

to survive the night

then that price is too high

and whatever it is

that caused people to destroy

the cocoon that those babies needed

is not worth it.

One more thing seems clear to me,

but I could be wrong,

still, I think that anybody

who– every cell vibrating with terror-

doesn’t run away

cause babies can’t wrap themselves in tin foil,

those people who stay behind and maybe tell those babies stories

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

or whatever–

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

and grow up and go sliding

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

I think maybe those people should be leaders,

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

in the future

but do what must be done.

right now.