Tuesday afternoon and into the early evening I was expecting a Harris win. Then, when CNN declared a victory in Iowa for Trump, I started to think that the polls showing Harris ahead or tied with Trump in most battleground states could be wrong, as, indeed, they were. As dawn broke, the scale of Trump’s victory was becoming evident … and the predictable bloviating from anti-Trump quarters had begun to make the rounds on social media.

Whether the second Trump presidency will prove to be the fascist take-down of “American democracy” his critics are warning about remains to be seen. I am not inclined towards catastrophising in politics: capitalist political institutions are system-preserving. Liberal democratic institutions have served American capitalism very well. They enjoy broad support- as we will see, Trump was not elected because his supporters want to destroy “democracy.” Most, I will argue, want it to work for them and not just wealthy urban professionals and bankers. They have, as they did in 2016, made a very bad choice, but one should remember that they did choose, by the rules of the democratic game as it is played in America. The “power” the people exercise in actually existing democracy is meagre: the economic power by which the ruling class shapes public life and policy is regulated by the state but never fundamentally compromised no matter who assumes office. That does not mean that it does not matter who gets elected; party policy can make a difference in peoples’ lives. But it remains true that the machine rolls on no matter who is at the helm. My suspicion is that just as in his first term Trump will produce more smoke than heat. More importantly, the damage that he threatens to do to targeted groups can be resisted– if people organise, rather than mourn.

Two broad explanations have been offered for Trump’s victory. Each expresses one side of a more complex truth and say at least as much about the politics of those who authored the explanation as the dynamics of the election itself. The first is the most predictable and the least supported by the available polling evidence: the Trump victory is a victory for racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. For example, Moustafa Bayoumi writing in The Guardian argued that “The very idea of another Trump presidency is devastating. His entire campaign consisted of unbridled race-baiting, woman-hating and fascist-in-waiting messaging, yet still he prevails. This is what succeeds in this country? The answer, it’s now clear, is a resounding yes.” If true, then it must be the case that everyone who voted for him is racist, misogynist, and xenophobic. Some Trump voters undoubtedly are racist, misogynist, and xenophobic, but the scale of his victory and his performance with a wide variety of voter groups suggests that overall, his voters were not motivated primarily by hatred.

Trump’s improved standing amongst women, Latino’s and (to a much lesser extent) Black men, and Harris’ corresponding underperformance suggests strongly that what fueled Trump’s victory was a repudiation of the Democratic party’s campaign as much as it was an intrinsically pro-Trump vote. While inflation has slowed, it dogged the last years of the Biden administration and its consequences for living standards pushed voters towards Trump. The the actual results as expressed in a series of exit polls reported by CNN paints a picture that is not easily explained by the argument that Trump rode a racist wave of poor and religious whites to victory: 46% of Latinos voted for Trump, 65% of Native Americans voted for him and, in the crucial Michigan battleground, only a quarter of Arab-Americans voted for Harris. Those groups were not motivated by racism. While it is true that about 8 in 10 Blacks voted for Harris, that was down from 9 in 10 that voted for Biden. But 3 in 10 young Black men under 45 chose Trump- a small but noticeable statistical increase over the general pattern. The results prove that people do not simply mechanically vote their identity but think about the available options. Many Latino’s voted for Trump despite the bad joke about Puerto Rico at the convention because they too are concerned about immigration levels and many are opposed to anything that smacks of “socialism,” given their experiences in Cuba and Venezuela. One might disagree– strongly– with their choice, but to simply dismiss Trump voters as racists and misogynists risks displaying the “contempt for the masses”‘ that Ernesto Laclau argued underwrites elite criticisms of populism (On Populist Reason).

The competing explanation, better evidenced than the first, argues that the reasons that Trump won were primarily economic. Thus Bernie Sanders argued that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Sanders echoes concerns that have been expressed in a number of quarters, none more carefully argued than Thomas Piketty’s critique in Capital and Ideology, that social democratic parties in Europe and the Democratic party in the United States (which functions symbolically as a centre-left party even though it is not) have indeed abandoned the working class: in terms of policy, in terms of culture and ideology, and in terms of their mass base. Social democrats and the Democrats are becoming the party of urban professionals and highly educated youth. This group is not a class, as critics of the “professional managerial” class argue, but are better understood as class fraction– the educated and cultured upper tier of the petite bourgeoisie. While many (professors, for example) have material interests in government spending, they are united less by objective economic concerns and more by a general cultural outlook- the “diversity and inclusion agenda” pilloried by critics of ‘woke” politics and the target of Trump’s and the right’s generally satirical rhetorical attacks. Whereas “inclusion” used to be thought of in material terms: furnishing historically oppressed groups and exploited classes with the resources that they required to satisfy the full range of their needs and freely develop their life-capacities– the basic political economic goal of socialism, broadly construed– today it has become– or, what amounts to the same thing, successfully portrayed as becoming– an out of control ideology adrift from both material rationality and the culture of large sections of the population. The economic explanation of Trump’s victory argues that people flocked to Trump because they are tired of having their material interests ignored, that they believe in fairness but reject the interpretation of fairness that involves downplaying the interest of one section of the working class (whites) against other sections of the working class (minority groups), and they believe Trump when he says that he will work for all Americans. Polls and interviews support this interpretation, but also abstract from some important splits noticeable in the working class vote.

The most important split is between unionized and non-unionized workers. Exit polls showed that 55 % of unionized workers voted for Harris and only 43% for Trump. Now, 43 % is not nothing, but what we should pay attention to is the per centage gap: 9 per cent is a huge difference in politics, and it suggests that unions remain spaces for political argument. That is, where leaders can engage members and members can engage each other, a majority of workers can be brought round to seeing what might seem obvious but, politically, is not: a billionaire blow hard property developed is not going to work in the interests of the working class. What this fact further suggests is that Sanders and other left critics of the existing Democratic agenda might indeed have a point: if Democrats concentrate on those economic concerns that link and unite the experience of different members of the working class they will be able to undercut the apparently unifying but actually divisive arguments of Trump. (The same argument holds in Europe, where the far right has gained at the expense of social democratic parties who, like the Democrats, have been abandoned by working class voters).

But I think that not only do the policies need to change, so too does the rhetoric. What I called in my book The Troubles With Democracy “the politics of commas” (a political claim is asserted and is then followed by an endless list of every particular group and sub group to ensure that no one’s “story” is left unacknowledged) needs to give way to a politics of concrete universality. The term is technical but the meaning is simple: humanity is a self-determining species; unlike rocks, we are capable of shaping our social and individual reality. Those self-determining capacities are expressed in distinct ways: different languages, different philosophies, different cultural traditions, different cuisines, different modes of making art, different family patterns. Patterns are good or bad not according to their content (secular versus atheist, English versus Spanish, heterosexual versus gay marriage, etc), but according to whether their organization and practice depends upon the domination and oppression of other groups. So long as some citizens’ worship of the god they believe in does not impede others from living as atheists, so long as one person loving the person they love does not impede another from loving the person they love, then both are good. Everything good in human life is a living expression of our human capacities to make sense of our place in the universe and forge mutualistic bonds across differences. The principle that the best society ensures the satisfaction of everyone’s natural and social needs so that they can live the lives they find meaningful and valuable, so that everyone can make contributions to the common (social, cultural, and economic) wealth– has to become again the organizing centre of left politics. That was the principle that early animated the socialist movement and it has to become the animating centre again.

However, it is also important to register concern with the degree to which a culture of conservatism has taken hold amongst those sections of the working class that voted for Trump. The problem with this culture is not necessarily its content– there is nothing inherently wrong with the nuclear family, or heterosexuality, or being white. Clinging to any or all as the bedrock of civilization and attacking other forms of social relationship and ways of life is the problem: every bit as much the problem as the identity politics and the woke agenda that conservatives attack. The political problem with both form of identity politics is that every group silos itself in defensive reaction to the mere existence of other groups, no one can talk to one another, and arch-opportunists like Trump– who, if you ask me, believes in nothing except his own power– are able to exploit the divisions.

In one of the more perceptive analyses of the election that I have read, Ben Davis drew an analogous conclusion. He argued that “while the new right has made great hay of returning to a communitarian model of politics, economically populist, socially conservative, and focused on family and society, the truth is that the Trumpist movement is the opposite. It is hostile to the very concept of society and community. To combat this, we need an unabashedly pro-society left. The way to win back power for a solidaristic and humanist politics is to rebuild working-class democratic institutions. In 2020, Sanders asked the question: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” This is the question we must ask over and over again and the work we must do is making sure the answer becomes yes.” A pro-society left, I would argue, goes deeper than just working class institutions to the foundations of social life in need-satisfaction. The problem with identity politics is that it starts from difference and has no way other than (often cloying) pleas for solidarity based on the unique vulnerabilities of the group doing the pleading. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s attack on the “wretched and pinched style” of his socialist contemporaries (The Will to Power, 77). Today’s style– platitudinous, preachy, and above all self-righteous– annoys, but the bigger problem is that moralistic pleading does not work (and when poorly articulated because too easy a target for sarcastic critiques from the right).

Solidarity must be built up from common interests and those interests are grounded in shared natural and social needs. Properly nourished, everyone’s body can dance in its own way. Coherent valorization of differences must start from their roots in shared human needs and capacities for self-making and self-expression. Only once differences are understood as the expression of underlying, universal human needs and capacities can people learn that they enrich themselves by appreciating other people’s dances, even if they would not dance that way themselves. Once a common basis of understanding has been established, hard cases of conflict can be resolved through good will, honest but sharp debate, and compromise.

On Tuesday, November 5th, 2024, between 45 and 50 per cent of eligible Americans who choose to vote will cast their ballot for Donald Trump. The 2024 election will be the third time running that up to half of American voters decide that a man who has a civil conviction for sexual assault on his record, is facing a panoply of criminal charges stemming from his first term, has made open threats to use the power of the Office of President to revenge himself on his enemies, who has vowed to use the military to forcibly expel immigrants who entered the country illegally, and gives free play to his boorish and bullying personality (but now expressed more erratically than in his first two campaigns) is the better choice to lead their nation. His cross class alliance of the ultra-wealthy, the least educated segment of the white working class, evangelical Christians, and rural voters retains its political integrity despite objective differences of material interest (tax cuts for the rich, for example, deprive working class communities of the resources they need to invest in the public services they require). The solidity of this coalition induces exasperation amongst Trump’s opponents: recall Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quip and Biden’s exasperated reference to Trump voters as “garbage.“

There are, no doubt, some deplorable figures surrounding Trump and much that comes out of his mouth is garbage. And yet, his attraction, to those for whom he is politically attractive, has not been diminished by the tireless efforts of journalists to expose his lies, lawyers to expose his crimes, and his opponents to warn that at best a second Trump term would result in the most partisan authoritarian Presidency in American history and at worst, the fascist destruction of American democratic institutions.

They have reason to worry. I have already noted his threats to his opponents, but these might be dismissed as bluster. More troublesome is the historical similarity between the cross class alliance he has constructed and the social basis of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s. European fascism was spawned by deep socio-economic crises and was designed to save capitalism by destroying working class opposition. However, it succeeded by advancing an organicist view of the state which deflected attention away from the political economic causes of the crisis. The ruling class mobilized workers for a fascist solution by constructing demonized “internal enemies” (paradigmatically, in Germany, Jews and Communists). The projection of the causes of crisis onto ethnically and politically stigmatized scapegoats proved effective in bringing working class supporters on board for a project that soon liquidated their traditional economic and political defence mechanisms: social democratic and communist parties and trade unions. Having destroyed the organized opposition, the fascist parties were free to remake the nations they now ruled- Spain, Italy, Germany– into totalitarian states ruled by overt violence.

While the class basis of Trump’s electoral alliance bears some similarities to the social foundations of fascism, and his rhetoric is certainly authoritarian and fascistic (most notably, his constant references to illegal immigrants as a racialized enemy within), and some of his supporters manifest the fanaticism of the SA– armed gangs that the Nazis employed in their early days to intimidate their enemies– there are important differences. While his most extreme supporters are fanatical, they lack a coherent institutional structure. More importantly, Trump does not command an ultradisciplined paramilitary force akin to the SS. Whereas European fascist parties could count on the complicity of the armed forces, all the available evidence suggests that the senior commanders of the US Armed forces and its officer corps are deeply opposed to Trump and would almost certainly refuse to obey orders to deploy against fellow citizens. There is also no evidence that rank and file soldiers are itching to mutiny and become an armed phalanx of the MAGA movement. Moreover, the American ruling class, like American society generally, is deeply split, unlike the ruling classes in Europe in the 20s and 30s, which were more solidly behind a fascist solution. As Micheal Roberto reminds us, it would be wrong to conflate fascism as an extreme solution to the structural crisis of capitalism with the form that it took in the 1920s and 30s, but I think it would also be wrong to ignore the dissimilarities and much deeper wells of opposition that Trump would face were he to actually try to abolish the formal rule of law, criminalize political opponents, and destroy the institutions of the democratic state (weak as they might already be). (see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth)

But what interests me here is less precise social and political analysis of the class base of Trump’s movement and more the reasons why it is so impervious to the astounding pile of evidence that can be marshaled against his record and program. Least effective of all has been the attempt- which those who make the charge think of as their ace in the hole– of branding him a fascist. True, there is a sizeable internal Republican opposition to Trump, but the tens of millions of people who are going to vote for him are not in the least dissuaded because of media and academic criticism of Trump’s authoritarian, and perhaps fascist tendencies.

That none of his committed supporters are moved to rethink their support by credible arguments that he is a fascist is cause for serious concern. But does it mean that MAGA is an incipient fascist movement just waiting, like the Nazi’s, for a Bundestag fire to seize power and install one-party, totalitarian rule? There might be elements within that movement and amongst Trump’s more virulent advisors who would implement something like this strategy (Project 2025 ), but I am not convinced that America is on a 1933-knife edge. As I noted above, I think that there is simply too much organized opposition to Trump and too much of a mass basis of resistance to any overt moves to systematically dismantle the constitutional order for him to succeed, even if he were to try.

But I suspect– and of course, I could be wrong– that, just like Trump’s first term, his bark would be worse than his bite, and that his supporters, save the most rabid, also think that way. Like people laughing at a politically incorrect joke they take some of his more extreme bluster with a grain of salt, making his most vociferous critics sound like prigs with no sense of humour. People might be naive when they dismiss Trump’s threats, but I think that it is true that critics of Trump still often misunderstand his tactics: he makes outrageous claims (for example, that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio), not because he thinks that they are true, but because he knows it will make his opponents apoplectic, and he can then use their reaction to make the real move that he wants to make. The real — and politically effective– move that Trump wants to make is to paint his opponents as people who do not care about, are actively opposed to, the material interests of the “ordinary American.” So, he will say something for which there is no evidence and, when the absence of evidence is pointed out (as it was, in real time, about the cats and dogs, during the debate) he pivots. He does not admit the falsity of what he says but sows uncertainty- during the debate he shrugged and said “we’ll find out.” But this act is all prelude- what he really wants is for his opponents to rise in defence of the community that he attacks. He wants them to do this so that he can say to his constituency: “see, they care more about “them” than they do you.” He thereby creates a wedge between those who Trump identifies as ‘real” Americans (not exclusively white, it is important to add– “real” Americans for Trump are people who were born in America and vote for Trump) and migrants, whom he portrays as invaders.

But why does his tactic work? Because, like all effective political tactics, it connects with a real element of people’s experience, but it abstracts that element from its historical background causes and proposes a solution which, when analyzed, appears laughably (or damnably) simplistic and unworkable, but is read by supporters as a genuine response to their concerns. During the 2016 election Trump mobilized his base by threatening to ban Muslims from visiting the US and promising to build The Wall all along the US-Mexico border. The Muslim ban did not survive court challenges and The Wall stalled due to its extreme costs and logistical challenges (bark, bite), but they both served Trump’s political aims. His aims were to exploit fears about the link between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism (a link which is real) and people’s belief that illegal immigrants unfairly jump the queue and deprive needy American of resources for which they pay taxes. The Muslim issue is less front and centre in 2024, but the immigration issue remains Trump’s most important mobilizing tactic. It would not work unless it addressed real concerns felt by ordinary people– and not only whites’ concerns, as Trump’s critics are too soon to charge. Black communities are also affected and have expressed frustration that while their needs have been ignored for decades, resources are found almost overnight for migrants.

By careful abstraction, isolation from historical causes, and sloganeered simplicity of solution political realities are constructed out of material reality. Critics have to understand the process of construction and why it is effective: life is short, people suffer when their needs are unmet, and they want them satisfied now. The further down the socio-economic ladder one goes, the more unmet needs there are, making a large subset of those groups fertile ground for recruiting to politicians like Trump. The fact is, Democrats (and social democratic parties in Europe, many of whom have lost badly to far right movements in recent elections) have failed to deliver meaningful socio-economic benefits to their working class constituencies. They are portrayed, and not without reason, as run by effete elites who are afraid to get their hands dirty “doing an Honest day’s work” and despise those who do. They are not interested in criticisms of Trump as a fascist because they are not interested in political theory but the integrity of their communities. They feel that their ways of life are derided and, like people who feel disrespected, lash out defensively. They end up at odds with communities (immigrant workers) with whom they have more in common than the ruling class false saviors for whom they vote. That underlying commonality needs to be the starting point of effective response to the Trump’s of the world.

Instead of demonizing Trump supporters as garbage, Democrats have to start by taking their concerns seriously. It is true, sadly, that some Trump supporters do seem to be beyond the pale: fed a steady diet of on-line right-wing conspiracy theory and closed to any confrontation with counter-evidence, they perhaps cannot be convinced by anything other than a smashing political defeat, and even then, they might still not change their minds. I do not know what per centage of Trump supporters fall into this category, but I believe it is a small minority. The rest (of his working class voters) are motivated by real concerns: there are legitimate questions about fairness when it comes to the distribution of housing and other resources to migrant communities when millions of Americans are unhoused or poorly housed. Climate change is a reality, of that there can be no rational doubt, but, if you are a worker in an industry that is threatened by the necessary energy transition, you might well feel personally threatened and search for a simplistic solution: it is a hoax, and Trump will dispel it.

Effective political argument must begin from the opponent’s premises. As Socrates understood, what matters initially in a political and ethical argument is not whether what the interlocutor believes is true, but that they believe it. Of course, Socrates not only failed to convince his interlocutors, he was sent to the grave for his troubles. It may prove to be the case that too many Trump supporters put themselves beyond the reach of critical political reason, but opponents must try to get underneath the fear, bluster, and anger and encourage Trump’s working class base start to consider problems in a more comprehensive light; to ask themselves if they really believe that a selfish, narcissistic, failed property developer and self-promoter understands their problems and has any concrete plan to solve them?

I was visiting my mother in my home town up North over the Thanksgiving weekend. The weather was mostly glorious: cool, dry, sunny. There were still leaves on the trees: red maples, yellow birches, orange oaks, iridescent spikes amidst the grey-green needles of spruces, pines, and cedars. I was able to indulge one of my favourite simple pleasures: to walk aimlessly in the bush in the morning, impelled by the joy of forward motion, enlivened by the autumn chill, stepping without orienting goal, just moving in open space, alone for an hour, my mind and eye open to whatever presents itself– maybe I tarry with a thought, but most I let go, perhaps a bird or tree catches my attention, but I don’t stop– I am not hunting for stories to tell but seeking release from the demands of projects, the freedom of moving my feet.

I wondered: what if, instead of baroque boardrooms and imposing wooden tables covered with laptops, important papers, and crystal pitchers full of water, surrounded by aides and flunkies, cameras and microphones, the political leaders of two sides locked in conflict met at the edge of the bush and walked side by side, deeper and deeper into the trees, without security personnel, unobserved by the media, in whatever clothes they normally wear at home when no one is looking. It takes profound trust to walk into the bush with a stranger. Each would be wary, the first steps around the corner past which they could not be seen would be taken with trepidation. But if they kept going they would both feel that release from tension that all good walks produce.

Then, maybe they could start to think outside of the self-enclosed dogma-worlds of politics. Looking down, they would see their different shoes supported by the same ground. Listening, they could hear the silence of the earth and feel its indifference. The earth supports whomever walks upon it; it does not recognize borders; it does not care about traditions; it does not speak human languages. Above, the sky would not look down upon them: it too is just there, indifferent to what goes on down below. If they could hold their tongues (but, alas, as Spinoza says, even though “the human condition would would indeed be far happier if it were equally in men’s power to keep silent as to talk … experience teaches with abundant examples that nothing is less within men’s power than to …hold their tongues.” Ethics Part 3, Scholium Proposition 2) but if they could, perhaps the felt indifference of sky and earth would help them put their historical conflicts into geological perspective.

History is short, geology is long. A century of tension and war is as nothing to the 4 billion year old planet, the 13 billion year old universe. Maybe, if they shut up long enough, and there were no cameras to posture in front of, no one to hear the pithy catch phrase or slogan, the thought would take shape in both of their heads that neither of them, nor the people they represent or claim to represent, live for even a century, and, therefore, if they are to enjoy the goods of mortal life, they have to enjoy them right now and not in some future that never arrives in which absolute justice would have been been attained.

Perhaps cool, still morning air would calm their passions and their measured steps would slow their thoughts. After kilometers, perhaps, Spinoza’s desire to talk would overcome them and they would both start to speak at once, but, freed from the coiled tension of enclosed spaces, they would both stop and say: “you first.” And that willingness to mutually yield would teach them that both of them have something to say and the right to say it, but if they shout slogans at each other at the same time, neither one will get across what they intend to say. And then, perhaps, they would realize that they are capable of staying silent and listening, and that it takes strength and courage to hold one’s tongue so that the other can speak.

They would have to mutually adjust their pace so that they stayed side by side so that one could hear when the other talked. They would give themselves over to the spontaneous logic of footsteps and conversations: walks end when the walker gets tired, talks end when neither side has anything more to say. A walk is not a race, a discussion is not a speech. Just as there is strength in silence there is strength in giving ourselves over to spontaneous dynamics. We lose sense of the passage of time, we lose sense of our self as controlling ego, we become part of a process that embraces our interests but in a more comprehensive unity with the interests of others and the world in which those interests are formed. We recognize ourselves as an active power, but in an order of things that we did not invent and cannot one-sidedly control. All understanding is understanding of limits; all understanding of limits is recognition of the implications of interconnection and relationship.

Socialists have paid much attention to political and economic structures, historical forces, and the dynamics of social struggle, but relatively little to the people that stand in social relations to each other. They have paid little attention to the inner dynamics by which people might change themselves, to free themselves from ancient hatreds, from the desire to punish and harm, convictions of absolute superiority and the righteousness and heroism of sacrifice They have tended to see personal transformation as a sub-political problem that will be mechanically solved by institutional changes. But people who are motivated by hatred, by belief in their superiority, by the need to be absolutely right will not transform into receptive, open, people capable of understanding others’ perspectives just because they succeed in making an institutional change. They will just be the same people in different institutions, and treat people as they have always treated them: as subordinates whose job is to do what they are told. Resources might be spread around somewhat differently, but social relationships, at a depth, emotional-ethical level will not have changed. Old conflicts will re-appear in new forms so long as we cannot walk side by side with people and listen to what they have to say.

Political conflicts are ultimately relationships between people, and in relationships, both sides are causally implicated in their dynamics. If they are dysfunctional, both sides will have to understand their role and change themselves. Activists might fantasize that the opponent will be completely overcome by the righteousness of their cause, but total victory that would eliminate the opponent entirely is never possible, and even if it were, it would require such monstrous levels of life-destruction that the outcome would be as bad or worse as the system it was supposed to replace and improve upon. There will be no solution to destructive human conflicts until individual people learn to relate to each other as human beings: free from ceremony and symbolism, free from history, free from rhetorical posturing, free from ritualistic displays of power and superiority, and, most of all, free from the belief that their side is absolutely right and the other side absolutely wrong.

Another way of putting this point is to say, simply, that warring sides need to learn to communicate. Communication is reciprocal: one side talks, the other side listens, back and forth until agreement is reached. Marxists tend to pay most attention to Hegel’s master slave dialectic, but they have to keep reading, to the end of Chapter Six, to find out how Spirit becomes self-consciously present to itself. Individuals recognize that they are essentially spirit (social self-conscious agents) when they forgive each other for their failures. Forgiveness is the highest form of recognition: since we are finite and fallible mistakes are inevitable, but since we are all parts of the same social whole, we have to live with each other. Freedom becomes a concrete reality in a society in which each recognizes themselves as parts of a greater whole, accepts their own and, crucially, others’ limitations. Cooperation presupposes that on its own each side is incapable of accomplishing its goals, but together they can create a world in which each of them can fully develop, contribute, and enjoy. Until people want that for the other as much as for themselves there will be no end to violent antagonism.

I developed my initial reaction to the October 7th attacks through a critical dialogue with a blog post written by Gilbert Achcar. Achcar explained the historical context that prompted the attacks but also criticized Hamas’s fundamentalist fanaticism and the potentially severe consequences their terrorist adventure might have on ordinary Palestinians. I agreed with the thrust of his position but in my own (on-going) analysis I tried to steer clear of the issue of the historical background to this latest phase of the conflict, not only because most everyone on the Left was focusing upon it, but, more importantly, because I think that the conflict will never be solved if both sides keep appealing to history to justify their failed tactics and strategies.

My two major conclusions at the time were:

“The Netanyahu government is composed of open racists who
have long dreamed of a pretext to crush all Palestinian national liberation struggle if not expel
the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories outright. Shockingly, Hamas has given
them this pretext. All oppressed people have the right to resist oppression and to choose the
means by which that resistance is pursued. But it is the most lunatic, abject, political stupidity to
launch an invasion of a state with vastly superior military means under the assumption that a
spectacular assault by a few hundred guerrillas will be a crushing blow.”

and:

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

The year that has passed since October 7th 2023 has not given me any reason to revise those initial arguments. However, it has given me more reasons to believe that unless movements on both sides of the violence emerge and convince people of the need to free their thinking from attachment to past atrocities, the present problems cannot be solved and a future peace never constructed. Impossible as it might sound, Palestinians and Israelis have to sit down and start talking about what happens today, for the sake of tomorrow. That means no one at the table invokes the Holocaust or the Nakba, to say nothing of God’s will. The problems are human-made and can only be solved by human creative intelligence focusing on the way in which the current cycles of attack and counterattack are undermining everyone’s most basic interest in the social peace necessary for the secure enjoyment of life. Policies which manifestly undermine the interests that they are intended to achieve are materially irrational. Rational people, regardless of which side they are on, should be able to recognize this fact.

However, “utopian” would seem to be too mild a criticism of this argument. Materially irrational or not, everyone is, for the moment, locked into the thinking that generates revenge cycles. Ayatollah Khameini argued that Iran’s missile attack at the end of September was “legal, legitimate, and rational.” I doubt that it was legal, perhaps it was legitimate by the rules of the existing game, but it was certainly not rational, given Israel’s (in alliance with the United States) capacity for disproportionate response. Following the strike, and entirely predictably, Israel assured the world that it would respond in kind. Netanyahu argued that Israel had a “duty” to respond to bombs with bombs. If politicians have duties towards their citizens they would be, first and foremost, duties to ensure that the conditions of life-security and life-development are met. Those conditions have deteriorated for Israelis since October 7th. If Netanhayu is serious about duties, and Khameini is serious about rationality, and if the different Palestinian factions and their allies are serious about making political progress towards some sort of political solution, radically different strategies and tactics are needed.

Again, “utopian” seems too mild a criticism of this argument. The problem is not only leadership– although that remains a major problem. The problem is that the general population on both sides of the conflict seems to have given up hope that peaceful co-existence is possible. The recent “Pulse” Israeli-Palestinian poll, jointly conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University found, unsurprisingly, that the two camps were more polarized than ever. Almost identical numbers viewed their people as the primary victims of the conflict (84% of Jewish Israelis and 83 % of Palestinians) and there is an almost total absence of trust between the communities (94% of Israelis and 86% of Palestinians say the other side cannot be trusted). The reason why? 66% of Jewish Israelis and 61% of Palestinians believe the other side wants to eradicate them.

But is the situation totally hopeless? There do seem to be constructive political attitudes, at least on the Palestinian side. Notwithstanding the almost complete destruction of Gaza and repeated attacks across the West Bank, more Palestinians support a two state solution (40%) than a single state in which the Jewish population would enjoy limited rights (33). Implicit in this finding is the sort of constructive thinking that can free people from revenge cycles. Those who prefer the two state solution view Palestinian self-determination as a creative, forward-looking project and not an opportunity to punish Jewish Israelis by depriving them of the rights that Palestinians have been denied. They understand that ‘resistance” is not an end in itself. Ultimately, political struggles for national self-determination are about creating an institutional structure in which people exercize collective control over the resources and institutions that good lives require. Resistance movements must ultimately justify themselves on the basis of positive results for the lives of the people they claim tor present. Rhapsodizing about heroism and martyrdom as hellfire rains down from F35’s ensures only that the pile of bodies and rubble will grow higher.

Unfortunately, as support for a two state solution rises in Palestine, it has declined among Jewish Israelis. Twice as many Jewish Israelis support annexation of the West Bank without equal rights for Palestinians (42%), as those who support a two-state solution, (21%). That figure represents a 13-point decline from 2022 and the lowest since the early 1990s. 14% of Israeli Jews support a single democratic state.

If one wanted to view those results with rose coloured glasses firmly on, one could say that it is encouraging that even a quarter of Jewish Israeli’s have not abandoned hope in favour of a policy of expulsion and eradication. But to believe that they can win the political battle within Israel would seem naive in the extreme. Half a million Israelis demonstrated in favour of a negotiated ceasefire for the sake ensuring the release of the remaining hostages. Instead, Netanyahu delivered an invasion of Lebanon. The first step towards calming this conflict as a precondition for renewed negotiations towards a political solution is going to have to be taken by the one actor outside the region who could halt the fighting tomorrow: the United States.

While US policy seems rudderless and ineffective, people should recall a few months ago, prior to the invasion of Rafah, when Biden halted delivery of 2000 pound bombs and demanded that Israel vastly increase the quantity of aid allowed into Gaza. The result was immediate. Israel complied with US demands. It is also true that they soon resumed ignoring US concerns about the invasion of Rafah, but the lesson I take from that incident is that credible US threats to halt military assistance get Israel’s attention. Hence, a credible threat to suspend all military aid would force Israel to the bargaining table, first for the sake of a ceasefire and then– if consistent and credible pressure were maintained– toward a political solution to decades of violence and dispossession. Without US leadership the conflict can continue indefinitely, to the detriment, primarily, of Palestinians and their allies. Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas can effectively repel Israeli airstrikes and Iran, although it is too large to conquer or subdue, could be seriously damaged by joint Israeli and US strikes. I doubt that the restive population of Iran is interested in the further erosion of their living standards for the sake of Khameini’s foreign adventures.

Everyone concerned, therefore, has a reason to climb down and start to learn how to work together. As it is with people so too with peoples: the free development of each is the precondition of the free development of all.

The seemingly unstoppable Israeli ultra-violence in Gaza and now Lebanon is a paradigmatic example of what happens when structural social and political problems become personalized. When people think about social structures as the source of problems they can reason constructively about how to fix them. However, when they think of distinct groups of people as the problem, the passion to destroy the enemy is aroused. The decision-maker cannot rise above their enmity and lashes out, ensuring that the history of trying and failing to solve a social and political problem by eradicating the enemy will be repeated. Failure and mass life-destruction are guaranteed in equal measure.

The locked-in pattern of kill and response currently plaguing the Middle East is another sad case in point. Presenting its operations as a response to evil, the current Israeli leadership cannot see what is obvious to almost everyone else: that it does in spades what it accuses Hamas and Hezbollah of doing– indiscriminately killing innocent civilians. The 8 year old daughter of the Hezbollah member killed in the exploding pager attacks is hardly responsible for her father’s political convictions. But instead of rising above the provocations and appealing directly to those Israeli’s in the street demanding a ceasefire, Hamas and Hezbollah militants respond in kind, giving Israeli fundamentalists exactly the rhetorical ammunition they need to work around growing global condemnation of their way of conducting the war and to continue it with even greater destructive force.

There are of course deep historical causes to this conflict, but there is also a subjective dimension which must be exposed and understood. Self-righteousness in a political cause fuels the cycle of life-destruction. As soon as any group or movement convinces itself that it is at war with an irrational, evil enemy, it becomes capable of the most outrageous atrocities. It cannot understand its actions as atrocities because it does not see suffering human beings on the other side but only an enemy, a thing to be exterminated. Once that ethical blindness to the underlying humanity of the people constructed as the enemy takes hold, rational argument cannot get leaders to change course.

That political struggles always involve two sides and that both sides construct a narrative to justify their actions does not mean, as Nietzsche argued, that there is no right and wrong but only clashes of perspective and afterwards the winner defines the truth. There are structures of power and those that benefit from them and those that suffer. Struggles are justified when ruling structures deprive groups of what they manifestly need as human beings: basic life-security and life-resources as well as control over social institutions where history has shown separate institutions to be necessary for basic life-security and access to life-resources. Perhaps we will evolve beyond nation states and distinct societies towards a new cosmopolitan system of political and social organization in the future. Right now, oppressed people and nations require control over their own state in order to protect themselves from the predations of the more powerful states in which they are forced to exist without rights, protection of the law, and, perhaps most importantly, respect as fellow human beings.

Struggling for the basic conditions of survival is to struggle for the most universal of human needs. Any group who enforces a system that structurally deprives other human beings of what they manifestly need because they belong to some demonized identity-group knowingly harms those victims. One can say, with justice, that they behave in an inhuman way. No one is obliged to suffer inhuman treatment meekly and without response. The hard part is to struggle against the inhuman structures and the groups who impose and maintain them without dehumanizing the opponent and conceiving liberation in terms of their liquidation and destruction.

I have been thinking about the ethical foundations of creative and transformative political struggle while working on a new book about the moral economy of peace. I was motivated to undertake the new work first by the political irrationality of the Russia-Ukraine war and convinced to continue by the on-going horror show provoked by the October 7th attacks. As part of this research I have recently been reading the work of B.S. Chimni, a Marxist critic of international law but also a sensitive thinker influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of militant non-violence. Unlike most Marxists, Chimni is interested in the impact that different subjective ethical dispositions have on the effectiveness of struggles for fundamental social change. Reflecting on how he was led through Marx to Gandhi, Chimni wrote that he “wished to understand the meaning and salience of the relationship between self and social transformation. I was seeking a response to the question whether we can bring about human emancipation and protect nature by altering material structures alone or whether it requires an evolved ethical and spiritual self.” (“The Self, Modern Civilization, and International Law,” 1160) His reflections have convinced him that Gandhi’s general political-ethical argument was correct: history teaches that violence can change systems but not create the conditions for all-round human security, need-satisfaction, capacity realization, and life-enjoyment. Leaders who take it as their primary object to destroy the enemy rather than create the conditions for peaceful co-existence and mutually affirmative, egalitarian , creative interaction and relationships. New leaders might succeed in installing themselves in power, but will then prove incapable of ruling in the universal life-interest. History under such leaderships and movements thus ends up being an exchange of one tyranny for another.

Where we find progress in history it is not a function of the violent overthrow of dehumanized enemies but overcoming the structural constraints that existing institutions impose on the need-satisfying and life-serving use of resources. Progress has indeed required political struggle, but those struggles are progressive not because they kill a hated enemy but because they free resources for the sake of more comprehensive need-satisfaction, self-creation, and life-enjoyment. At the level of human interests, genuinely progressive struggles free the people who are the object of struggle too from their own prisons of ethical narrowness, one-sidedness, and hatred. It is easy to forget that Marx too taught that members of the ruling class were functions of the structures and dynamics of capitalism and that they too were alienated from what is most human in themselves. It is also true that he argued that the ruling classes were happy in their alienation, but that happiness is a delusion if it must be purchased at the cost of other people’s lives when an alternative that satisfies everyone’s shared life-interest is available. Socialism was not about liquidating the class enemy or smashing the state– cliches that resound most hollow when they are intoned by academics sitting safely in their campus offices far from the front lines. Socialism was about creating the conditions in which ‘the free development of each was the condition of the free development of all.” That goal cannot be achieved by people motivated primarily by hatred.

Politically, successful construction of a life-affirmative society requires patience. Patience is contrary to the passionate demand for justice. The sufferer wants an end to suffering right now; they want the complete restoration of what has been wrongly seized; they want, as Walter Benjamin insisted, vengeance for all their murdered ancestors. But the demands for absolute justice are contrary to the facts of human mortality and the pace of human historical progress. Horkheimer was correct to remind Benjamin that the dead are dead for ever; they cannot be brought back to life to enjoy the goods of which they were cruelly deprived. If hatred of what the enemy has done is used to fuel struggles oriented by the impossible goal of making good the sacrifice of earlier generations of victims they will succeed only in creating more victims on the other side. Instead they have to be directed against the system that crushed the dreams and extinguished the lives of past victims and proceed by the argument, expressed while looking the enemy squarely in the eyes, that it is never in the real interests of human beings to deprive other human beings of what they need and to protect that structure of oppressive deprivation by exterminatory violence.

The time is not always ripe for that sort of ethical-political argument. One can imagine the dead rejoicing at the final liberation of their community and one can hope that sheer force of will expressed as courage on the battlefield can accelerate historical change. Unfortunately, societies cannot be radically transformed until propitious objective conditions have emerged: the society cannot be ruled in the old way because its internal structures are collapsing, and the oppressed masses cannot tolerate being ruled in the old way. Hamas and Hezbollah have calculated that Israel is now in such a position. Hamas leader Yayah Sinwar claims that Hamas is prepared for a long war of attrition that will eventually break Israel’s will to fight. The evidence suggest, rather, that every militarized reaction from Hamas’s allies in the region increases Israel’s willingness to fight. Moreover, unlike America in Viet Nam and Afghanistan, Israelis are fighting on their home turf. No academic analogies about parallels between the settler colonialism societies built by Europeans in North and South America and Israel are going to change the facts of international law or the long view of Jewish history. Israel’s pre-1967 borders are legally legitimate and Jewish people have historical ties to those lands in ways that European settlers in the “new world” did not.

But the more important point is that everyone is where they are right now, and the task is not sending anyone elsewhere but addressing the legitimate historical grievances of the Palestinian people wrongly and violently dispossessed in 1948. The most powerful tool the Palestinians now have is the political force of world opinion which is turning more and more against Israel’s unjustifiable scorched earth policy in Gaza (and now Southern Lebanon), but the armed wing of the movement keeps giving Israel political room to breath by continuing an armed struggle that they are not in a position to win and exacts far greater costs from innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians than it imposes on Israelis. Both sides must somehow stop valorizing their struggle in terms of exacting a maximum price of pain from the enemy and instead find someway to begin reasoning with each other, starting from the premise that, since neither side is going anywhere, some sort of rapprochement is going to be necessary. If the problems can only be solved by negotiation and compromise, and every day that negotiations and compromise are delayed means more people who could have enjoyed a stable peace are killed and thus removed from the list of being capable of enjoying life, then reason dictates that negotiations should begin immediately. But the passions of enmity and mutual hatred fuel the self-righteousness that blocks recognition of the humanity of the other side. In the pressure of that boiling cauldron, abstract philosophical argument is insufficient to lower the temperature.

Still, philosophy is not useless. As Marx said, philosophy is of use where it becomes the servant of history. Here the history of the the supremely patient struggles of Canada’s First Nations might be instructive. They were betrayed by the Europeans they initially welcomed, their lands were stolen by violence and fraud, their cultures were marked for destruction, and yet they have endured. While they have used violence on occasion (the Northwest Rebellion), they have, for the most part, struggled politically and philosophically: they have argued, blockaded, maintained their traditions and languages against overwhelming odds; they have fought in court and in the media, and they have slowly begun to turn the tide. While in the abstract it might have been better for their societies had Europeans never arrived, they understand that the clock cannot be turned back. As Mohawk philosopher and activist Taiaiake Alfred has argued in this regard, there is little to be gained by personalizing historical problems. For that reason he says that he “is not a big fan of guilt as as a political tool. I think what guilt does is it paralyzes people, and it alienates people”(119, All About the Land). Instead, Alfred argues in favour of the descendants of the initial European colonial project to take collective responsibility for the historical fact that the wealth of the current country of Canada was generated through the violent expropriation of First Nations peoples. Collective responsibility has concrete implications: the treaties that were broken must be honoured and lands that were illegally seized must be returned. Treaties are “a fundamental agreement that is solemnized and recognizes the fundamental equality of the two parties.” Treaties create “commitment[s] on the part of the two parties to the agreement. It creates a commitment on the two parties to recognize both the independence of each other and the interdependency of each other on the land. That is what we mean by treaty in the Canadian context.”(118) Restoring Indigenous sovereignty over lands seized by violation of treaties that were purportedly negotiated in good faith does not mean that Canada as it currently exists must disappear; it means that it must be reinvented in a spirit of nation to nation equality and constructive creation for the sake of building a better confederation that is “good for everyone.”(169) Despite the violence Indigenous people have and continue to suffer, they have for the most part eschewed militarized forms of struggle, have survived, and are slowly winning the fight to restore their sovereignty over their traditional lands. One could always argue in the abstract that colonization should never have happened or that it should not have taken 500 years for wrongs to be righted. But history is indifferent to abstract argument. Colonization is a fact and the effects it had on Indigenous lifeways are not easy to undo. But I think that the changing relationship between Canada and the peoples of the First Nations is evidence that violence and mutual hatred can be overcome, if there are real efforts to overcome the structural problems imposed on the historically oppressed groups.

But in the Middle East any sort of constructive dialogue is lacking. Leaders on all sides will shout: the enemy is incapable of reason. To which one must respond: since no one is really talking (by which I mean, really listening) how does one know? Those same leaders will perhaps rejoin: talk is cheap, history proves that real change demands action. Indeed it does, but reason responds that negotiations are actions, concessions and compromises are actions, as are mass protests, strikes, blockades, and boycotts. The most momentous change of the last 50 years, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact happened almost without violence, because the objective conditions were such that the societies could not be maintained. No one who witnessed German youth smashing down the Berlin wall could believe that the Stasi were not gunning them down. And seeing that the Stasi were not gunning them down, those same youth did not pelt them with stones. Instead, East and West Berliners rushed towards each other and embraced and danced.

Well, they were all Germans, one could respond, and that obviously played a role. But it is even more true that we are all humans. When senses are attuned to reality we all know when other people are suffering: anguish sounds the same in every language because it is expressed in shrieks and sobs, not words. We all know when people have been unjustly deprived of what they need, and we all know, in general, what must be done to overcome that injustice. What we have not solved– but it is the most important thing– is how to make the changes that everyone, deep down, knows must be made, before tens or hundreds of thousands of people are killed by people trying to hold back the tides.

.

.

Futurist, software engineer, and the head of the Google Mind project, Ray Kurzweil has been the leading champion of transhumanist technotopianism. Central to this movement is the belief that human biological sentient and cognitive capacities are too constraining to be ultimately satisfying. In order to realize its full value, the capacities that make life meaningful must be developed to their furthest imaginable range and depth. The fullest imaginable range and depth is limited only by the laws of physics (the ultimate entropic decay of the universe). These limits cannot be reached within the biological form of sentience and intelligence. Therefore, human destiny is to first merge with Artificial Intelligence (the subtitle of Kurzweil’s latest book) to form the “Singularity,” after which point human evolution by natural selection will end and the conscious transcendence of all biological limits on human life-capacities begins.

In 2005, Kurzweil predicted that the Singularity would occur around 2045. He maintains that prediction in the current book. The new work does not add anything fundamental to the arguments that he deployed in The Singularity is Near but seems to have been written (perhaps at his publisher’s prompting) by the spectacular success of Chat-GPT-4 in emulating human powers of argumentation and textual analysis. The title The Singularity is Nearer perhaps became too delicious to resist in the glow of warm media embrace of Chat-GPT’s apparent powers.

While the underlying transhumanist arguments are the same as in the 2005 work, Kurzweil’s tone is not quite so rhapsodic. In 2005 he prophesied (there is no other term for it) that the Singularity will evolve towards divine perfection: “Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater eloquence, … greater beauty, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation. … Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God.” (389) if I were to be picky– and I will be– I would point out that evolution (as Daniel Dennett explained in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), evolution does not move toward anything at all. Evolution was a revolutionary idea precisely because it provided mechanistic explanations for dynamics which, in earlier ages, were assumed to require the existence of a divine entity or Idea to steer them. It is a fact that more complex neural systems have evolved, but not because “evolution” (which is, in any case, a process, not a thing) was being guided to it as a goal. Moreover, it is at least debatable whether human beings have become more loving or politically or morally intelligent over time. We have a grasp on the problems of social life but we have as yet proven incapable of solving them.

Kurzweil’s tone is thus more sober in the new work, his time frame limited to the period between now and 2045 when he expects the Singularity to burst forth, and his technical arguments focused for the most part on the development of existing engineering achievements in mind-machine interface (Musk’s Neuralink, for example) into full-scale brain-cloud interconnection. The Singularity is nearer because we understand the physics and mechanics of connecting mind and computers through sensors that translate electrochemical energy to binary code; it will be achieved when we fully merge with Artificial Intelligence. The existing engineering needs only to be scaled up (or, rather, down, since nanobots will be the interface linking the cerebral mass of humanity to the cloud). (72)

As we gradually merge with AI through the 2030’s, Kurzweil foresees, first, an exhilarating increase in the speed of thinking and expansion of the range of information to which we have near-immediate access, and then the emergence of virtual analogues of ourselves which will represent a new form of self-conscious existence. Kurzweil addresses the problem of whether a computational system can really become conscious with a functionalist answer: if the behavior of the computational system is in every respect identical to, or at least indistinguishable from, a biological consciousness, it is conscious. “And if an AI is able to eloquently proclaim its own consciousness, what ethical grounds could we have for insisting that only our own biology can give rise to worthwhile sentience.”(65) He develops this account in dialogue with the philosopher David Chalmer’s idea of zombies: entities that are indistinguishable from living beings but have no inner life, no self-consciousness, at all. (79-81) Whether one finds philosophers’ thought-experiments compelling means of advancing scientific arguments or not, there are problems with Kurzweil’s argument. The biggest issue is that he conflates the problem of the evolution of sentience with the design of neural networks.

Already Chat-GPT can carry on conversations with people, but, if you ask it whether it understands what it is saying, even Kurzweil will admit that it will tell you it does not. A more sophisticated AI might indeed–and some day soon– be able to “proclaim itself” conscious and even provide a cogent explanation of what that means, but it will not thereby have crossed the main ethical threshold from non-life to life. The ethical difference between conscious and self-conscious creatures and AI systems that can verbally assert their consciousness is life. Conscious beings feel themselves alive and strive to create the conditions in which they can feel more alive. My cats cannot argue with me that they are conscious, but they do not have to, because they prove by the (limited repertoire) of their expressions that they are alive. As such they have preferences, desires, and goals of which they are aware (in a cat-like way) and, more importantly, they can undertake self-directed action to bring those goals about. Unless and until an AI crosses the line between non-life and life it will not cross the threshold towards making a claim on ethical consideration.

More technically, Kurzweil’s argument makes two mistakes. The first is to collapse all the powers of consciousness (feelings, emotions, ratiocination, evaluation, etc.) into information processing and the second is to overlook the possibility (as Terence Deacon has argued) that life-activity cannot be explained simply on the basis of what living system are and do, but what they are not and seek out. There is no doubt that brains operate by processing information from the environment, but it does not follow, I would argue, that feelings or logical inferences are nothing more than information. If life-activity were nothing more than information processing then Kurzweil’s hopes for digital apotheosis might be sound. But human beings are not their brains and neural architecture alone: we are integrally unified bio-social agents whose relationships with their world have a qualitative, felt dimension which cannot be cashed out in informational terms alone. We prefer, or desire, or need some states more than others, and we actively shape our environment in response to these felt needs. Deacon has argued in exquisite detail that the emergence of life must be explained by the emergence of “teleosearching” chemical systems which act so as to bring about a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. (See his Incomplete Nature and my review, here). In simpler terms, the behaviour of these systems cannot be understood without reference to what they are not, but strive (at first purely unconsciously, via basic physical principles) to bring about. Living systems are conscious of what they need, and, moreover, posit goals which are not physical or chemical but moral and political. But there are no goals properly speaking until there is life and intentionality. No matter how complex or fast an information processing system is, it is not alive until it seeks to maintain itself.

Living things are composed of non-living elements, so it is not impossible or inconceivable that new forms of artificial life might evolve. The crucial question will be not whether such an entity can generate cogent explanations of what it is, but whether it can become conscious of being the sort of entity it is and strive to maintain itself, At present, no matter how impressive Chat-GPT’s responses to prompts are, it cannot do anything until it is prompted. My cat, indeed, an amoeba or paramecium, can act on its own directions.

These criticisms are also relevant to the speculative engineering proposal that is central to his project for practical immortality: the “uploading” of consciousness to a digital platform. “Freeing” consciousness from biological limitations is essential to the emergence of the post-Singularity superintelligence. Kurzweil assumes (as he also assumed in the 2005 book) that consciousness is some sort of pattern which could be precisely modeled and emulated in an artificial neural network. Perhaps. But I think that it is more likely that consciousness is not a fixed pattern that could be captured in some sort of snap shot and then re-printed, so to speak, in a neural network. I think that it is much more likely that consciousness is a dynamic process that depends upon the the coordinated functioning of the whole of the body’s organic systems in integral connection with the natural and social environment. If that is the case then rather than the first step towards the Singularity Chat-GPT and its like might be the last step in the development of AI.

Kurzweil does not avoid criticisms but his responses tend to sidestep the most difficult issues. Thus, he does not seriously inquire into the bio-chemical dynamics of life or consciousness but assumes that they are reducible to information processing. Since computers are information processors par excellence, they will eventually figure out how to transpose consciousness from biological to a digital platform. The same sort of arguing around problems characterizes Kurzweil’s treatment of the economic dimension of technological development. Kurzweil is one of the few transhumanists to understand that scientific and technological development has social and economic dimensions. For Kurzweil, those economic dimensions involve a secure intellectual property rights regime on the one hand and an emergent quasi-evolutionary dynamic that he calls the “law of accelerating returns” on the other. “The law of accelerating returns describes a phenomenon wherein certain kinds of technologies create feedback loops that accelerate innovation. Broadly, these are technologies that give us greater mastery over information.”(112) Each increase in information processing capacity catalyses a new round of innovation that increases our processing power even further, generating an exponential growth dynamic which is theoretically without limit.

Theoretically, yes, but Kurzweil forgets that statistics express historical trends. A historical trend may continue into the future, but then again it might not. It is one thing to plot a curve on a graph that extends from the present to the future, it is another thing for the future to play out like that. There is no causal relationship between the mathematical model of the future and what will in fact happen. As I noted above, the law of accelerating returns is an economic principle because its operation depends upon social conditions that encourage investment. Protectionism, weak intellectual property rights, and high taxes could all slow investment and therefore the innovations that depend upon it. Even if we assume propitious investment conditions, mainstream economists have wondered for some time about why digital technologies have not increased productivity or catalyzed growth in the real economy. Kurzweil’s answer is that economists are looking in the wrong place, productivity tables, when they should be looking at price.(213) Kurzweil argues that the major economic impact of computing technologies lies in the constant reduction of the price of computation per unit. The increase here is truly mind-boggling: computer power that would have cost millions of dollars in the 1950s and been accessible only to governments or major corporations is now available to children for pennies. (see the Appendix, 293-312).

Be that as it may, Kurzweil does not address the problem of productivity but changes the subject. It may be true that consumer purchasing power has gone up exponentially, but productivity is a measure of output relative to input (especially labour time) and that has not gone up nearly as much as mainstream economists would expect. Robert Solow quipped in response to this puzzle: “we see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.” The practical implications of this debate are significant for Kurzweil’s project: if innovation is linked to investment and investment to profitability in the the real economy, growth might not be self-amplifying as he believes. Good old fashioned economic stagnation (such as the globe has been experiencing) can limit technological development. And even if any slow down proved temporary, there are serious scientific questions to be raised about Kurzweil’s speculative projections of what is technologically possible.

But let us assume the law of accelerating returns operates as Kurzweil argues and engineering problems like nanobots and mind uploading are solved and the Singularity does occur in 2045. Then the question becomes a philosophical one: should we let the new evolutionary course play out, or switch it off and go back to our slow-witted biological lives. In Embodiment and the Meaning of Life I argued that we should, precisely because the humanist values that Kurzweil believes that he is serving depend upon– if I am correct– the frames of finitude (aging, disease, the possibility of failure, and death) within which we struggle and work. Kurzweil treats struggle and work like he treats aging and death, as problems to be solved. But we are embodied beings and embodied beings must deal with a world and other people outside of themselves. Our successes are valuable not only because they express the achievement of a goal, they are valuable because they could have not worked out. No one is celebrated for climbing an imaginary mountain; imaginary friends cease to satisfy our emotional needs once we are no longer toddlers. Isn’t virtual reality just another word for imaginary?

Kurzweil and other transhumanists would argue vociferously that it is not. A mature cyberspace would be indistinguishable from material reality except that we– or the Superintelligence that supplants us– could imagine into being anything that is logically possible. But whatever such a creature might be it will not be a human being: human beings are individuals. Our identity is shaped by our differences; friendships and other forms of mutualistic relationship are valuable because they connect us to something we are not. Embodied humanism of the sort that I have defended works within these limitations to increase the value of human life by overcoming obstacles and socially created roadblocks to all round need-satisfaction and the unfolding of our living capabilities.

But old fashioned humanism and political struggle is too slow. Once we merge with AI we can download problems-solving to it and free ourselves to think “millions of time faster.” (265)

About what?

“

A paradox:

I float on the waves

that grind the mountains to stone,

the stone to sand,

the sand to sea.

Across the bay, the headlands

a dot-dash-dot

of rock-water-rock,

presence and absence.

Above, a Turner sky,

grey and silent and stern

hangs heavy

until the wind unravels its thickness

into tendrils and vaporous whisps.

The sun sets in clear skies.

Everything changes,

bit by bit,

stone to sand,

summer green to autumn red

to winter brown.

Harvest comes with a tinge of sadness

and the fly’s brief season

tempts your pity.

But the dying plant yields fruit

and the fly is born knowing its fate.

It buzzes happily

even as it feels the hint of frosts

in the night winds

that sing the close of its season.

There are no Platonic solids in nature;

beauty violates the Idea:

it is born malformed,

accidental,

material,

and oh so brief.

Eternity is no-thing

the Singularity

is not near,

or nearer,

but Now.

It is in the windblown shore grass,

the gull’s jarring screech and the plover’s skittish hop.

It is in the bright eyed kids’ first encounter with the surf

and their grandparent’s tired bones.

It is you and me and everything that lives,

ephemeral and never to come back.

There are no revenants,

no transcendence, no tunnels of light;

nothing is restored that has been lost.

Even the beat of the waves breaking on shore is not eternal.

Listen closer, it varies even now,

and by night will be as silent as the grave.

If I still had hair

it would have been bleached sun-kissed golden

by these sea-side walking meditations.

But everything changes

bit by bit,

one comes, another goes,

mountain, sand, stone and sea,

blossom, fruit, and desiccated stock,

birth and death,

everything changes,

bit by bit

and if I were more discerning

and honest

I would say what is easy to think:

there are no shoulds or oughts,

one comes, another goes,

flies and plants,

people and waves

stone and sea,

and that is how it is.

Walter Rodney’s classic 1974 text remains necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the political-economic background to on-going political instability in Africa. The corruption, coups, and poverty that critics often attribute to endemic failures of state formation across the content are, Rodney shows, actually functions of five centuries of exploitative relationships between African nations and Europe. While classical imperialism and colonialism have given way to national independence on the one hand and neo-imperialist forms of domination via indebtedness and export-dependent economies on the other, Rodney’s central thesis, that “political instability … is a chronic symptom of … underdevelopment” remains true. (27)

Most contemporary readers will be immediately struck by the humanist foundations of Rodney’s interpretation of the process of development and the (refreshing) absence of romantically essentialized, culture-centric identity politics. Rodney maintains a resolutely political-economic analysis of colonialism that situates African development and underdevelopment within the broader sweep of human history. He begins from the materialist principle that, as Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, all human societies are rooted in the production and reproduction of the real conditions of life. Every human society stands or falls with its capacity to produce the means of subsistence. The symbolic dimensions that make life meaningful are not mechanically reducible to basic material conditions of life-maintenance, but they do depend upon those conditions. African societies, like all societies, are thus rooted in the intelligent use of natural resources to produce and reproduce the conditions of life. “Every people have shown a capacity for independently increasing their ability to live a more satisfactory life through exploiting the resources of nature. Every continent independently participated in the early epochs of man’s control over his environment — which means that every continent can point to a period of economic development. Africa, being the original home of man, was obviously a major participant in the process in which human groups displayed an ever increasing capacity to extract a living from the natural environment.” (4) Contemporary readers may detect traces of what they might now regard as a Marxist “Promethenianism” emanating from phrases like “exploiting the resources of nature” and “extract a living from nature,” but Rodney here is doing no more than stating necessary conditions of all life. Every single living entity converts energy from one source and uses it to fuel its metabolic processes. There can be no life, much less human life, without the use– exploitation– of natural resources. The key for human beings is to use natural resources intelligently— a qualification that the specifically capitalist form of exploitation makes impossible.

Even in 1974 Rodney was aware that the terms “development” and “underdevelopment” might imply morally problematic ideas of civilizational hierarchy. Rodney’s materialist-humanist approach to the problem confronts and dispels this worry. Rodney understands “development” in political-economic terms as the increasingly intelligent use of natural resources to produce the goods, services, and relationships that satisfying, meaningful, valued and valuable lives require. Underdeveloped societies are not necessarily morally inferior to more developed societies but only lag behind the achieved level of material and technological development. Underdeveloped societies, he makes clear, can be morally more developed that economically richer and technologically more sophisticated societies. Indeed, such is the case between African and European society: “”In some quarters it may be thought wise to substitute the term “developing” for “underdeveloped.” One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in any other respect. Actually, if “underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most undeveloped country in the world would be the USA, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder.”(14) Rodney rejects Eurocentric interpretations of historical development without discarding the idea of progressive development as such, because a coherent critique of colonialism and imperialism presupposes it.

Rather than romanticize traditional African cultures and societies Rodney stresses the continuity between African social, economic, and political development and European societies at the time when extensive trading relationships were forged, beginning in the 15th century. African societies had attained comparable levels of material, technological, social, and political development to the European trading nations that began to establish commercial contact along the Western coast, and this fact was acknowledged by the European traders. “Africa in the fifteenth century was not just a jumble of different “tribes.” There was a pattern and there was historical movement. Societies such as feudal Ethiopia and Egypt were at the furthest point of the process of evolutionary development. Zimbabwe and the Bachwezi states were also clearly on the ascendant away from communalism.”(68) However, while the level of material and artistic culture was on par with European developments, African military and transport technology was not as advanced as in Europe. These two differences would prove decisive to Europe’s ability to subjugate African society to its own needs.

Europe’s (and before Europe, the Islamic invaders of North Africa) transportation and military advantages over African society would prove decisive to the development of the slave trade. Europe could establish a global trading regime because it had ships capable of traversing the oceans and the military power to conquer indigenous societies. As plantations began to spread in the newly colonized lands across the Atlantic the need for workers capable of enduring the brutal conditions on the plantations arose. Rodney acknowledges the moral depravity of the slave trade, but his argument remains focused on its political-economic causes. Africa, the Americas, and Europe became locked in the murderous embrace of the slave trade because European plantation owners found that the Indigenous people of the Caribbean and Brazil were not well-suited to plantation labour. African societies had long practiced settled agriculture in hot climates (40). “When Europeans reached the Americas, they recognized its enormous potential in gold and silver and tropical produce. But that potential could not be made a reality without adequate labor supplies … Africa, which … had a population accustomed to settled agriculture and disciplined labor in many spheres” was used to satisfy the demand. (68) Because of this capacity to work in environmentally challenging conditions, African bodies soon became the primary export of the continent.

The slave trade was the origin of the systematic underdevelopment of African societies. It disrupted in the most inhuman and violent way imaginable the endogenous developmental dynamics operative in African societies up to the fifteenth century. It added to the normal tensions and conflicts between neighbouring societies an extraneous cause of war; it diverted energy and intelligence from economic, political, and technological development to the rounding up and export of bodies; it brutalized everyone involved and robbed Africa of millions upon millions of youth. The slave trade harnessed Africa to European economic priorities in a way so damaging that its repercussions are still felt centuries later. “”Slaving prevented the the remaining population from effectively engaging in agriculture and industry, and it employed professional slave hunters and warriors to destroy rather than build. Quite apart from the moral aspect and the immense suffering that it caused, the European slave trade was economically totally irrational from the viewpoint of African development.” (100) When people today object to the idea of reparations for the damages of the slave trade they tend to focus on the individual level and argue that since, as individuals, no one alive today was involved with it, no one alive to day should have to pay for its consequences. Such an argument is not wholly without grounds, but it ignores the systemic implications of the slave trade as the origin of the economic underdevelopment which explains the relative poverty of African societies today.

The slave trade was also the matrix within which the contemporary form of racism took shape. As I noted, the first Europeans to establish trading relations with Africa noted the similarities rather than the differences between their own and African civilizations. It was only once those relationships became exploitative and focused on kidnapping and enslaving Africans that an ideological justification for what was manifestly inhuman treatment become necessary. Rodney eschews abstract, unhistorical, essential conceptions of “Whiteness” and “Blackness” that one often hears today invoked as explanations of racist ideology and sticks to his historical, materialist, and political economic explanation. Europeans, he argues enslaved Africans not because they were racists but because they needed their labour. The slave trade made racism, not racism the slave trade: “European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons.”(88) However, “the simple fact is that no people can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority, and when the color and other physical traits of those people were quite different, it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form.”(88) Racism is thus an ideological thought-formation whose function was to justify the exploitation and destruction of African lives in the developing global capitalist economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The historical development of the wide gaps between the material wealth of European and American societies on one hand and African societies on the other emerges only with the slave trade.

The end of the slave trade in the nineteenth century did not result in the re-emergence of endogenous developmental dynamics in Africa. Instead, new forms of economic and political dependence and subordination emerged. Economically, trade in slaves was replaced by trade in raw materials and export crops which were valued in Europe but useless for the satisfaction of local needs. African producers were paid a tiny fraction of the value of these goods would produce as inputs into manufacturing industries and as luxury consumables. Low prices ensured that there was little income to invest in African economic and social development and the unfinished state in which raw materials were exported impeded the development of manufacturing and the technical and scientific achievements that manufacturing promotes. Politically, independence was negated by the imposition of direct colonial rule. The borders of colonial administrations were drawn for the convenience of Europeans and ignored historical African boundaries between peoples. Economic and political dependence are the underlying historical conditions for the social instability one continues to observe in some African states today.

However, given the prevalence of democratic and liberal ideas in Europe in the nineteenth century Europeans could not admit to themselves that their “enlightened” societies could be responsible for the mass misery they observed in Africa. Instead, a racist construction of Africans as innately inferior had to be created.(89) It was against this backdrop that Europeans would marvel at the pyramids or the Benin bronzes as miracles that they could not explain because their sophistication and refinement were at odds with the racist construction of Africans as “primitives.” Rodney’s materialist humanism cuts through that sort or patronizing nonsense. “Even today there is still a tendency to consider the achievements of with a sense of wonder rather than with the calm acceptance that it was a perfectly logical outgrowth of human social development within Africa, as part of the universal process by which man’s labor opened up new horizons.” (66) Science, industry, and art take concrete shape in definite socio-cultural formations, but they are creations of human brains and hands, not cultural essences such as is implied by terms like “Western” science. There is no “Western” science any more than there is African or Indian science. There is the science that developed in Europe, Africa, India, etc. If it is science, then it contributes to demonstrable human understanding of the natural world. The science that developed in Europe was shaped by the social and historical conditions in which it developed (including the exploitative and unequal relationships between Europe and Africa), but it does not follow, Rodney rightly argues, that whatever was scientifically true in the system of thought that takes shape from Newton to contemporary physics is relative to parochial European standards.

While contemporary essentialists think that indexing science and technology to the particularities of culture serves anti-racist purposes, Rodney’s argument shows why that cannot be the case. Every time anyone anywhere one uses their smartphone, for example, they are drawing upon the combined insights of mathematical logic, electrical and computer engineering, and materials science. Unless one wants to concede that the phone works by magic, one must admit that there is genuine knowledge of how nature functions at the deepest levels (electromagnetism) embodied in the phone. If that knowledge is the product of “Western” science, rather than just science, one implies, even if one does not intend to, that the western mind is uniquely attuned to fundamental natural realities. That conclusion, and not the humanist alternative (that all scientific insight is a function of human intellectual inquiry and development) has racist implications.

Rodney is hardly soft on the destructive effects of racism and underdevelopment, but he did not argue that the way forward for Africa was to disengage from the world. “It would be extremely simple-minded to say that colonialism in Africa or anywhere else caused Europe the develop its science and technology. The tendency towards technological innovation and renovation was inherent in capitalism itself … However, it would be entirely accurate to say that the colonization of Africa and other parts of the world formed an indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological transformation of the base of European capitalism. Without that link, … our very yardsticks for measuring development and underdevelopment would have been very different.”(174) Had colonization not happened Africa would have continued along the developmental path it was traveling prior to the establishment of trading links with Europe.

However, history deals with what has come to be, not with what could have been. Rodney was convinced that the solution to Africa’s problems was to assert its legitimate place in the world, to prove the racists wrong by taking control of its political and economic future. The problem with colonialism was that it “was a system of exploitation … whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources.”(149) The solution to that problem was political independence and integration into the global economy on fair terms that prioritized African needs over the needs of European capitalists. The former process was completed when apartheid was dismantled in South Africa in the 1990s. The later process remains to be completed and Rodney’s book, even 50 years on, remains an essential element of the political economic explanation of why that goal remains to be achieved.

Leaders in crisis situations justify their actions by arguing that the ship of state must be guided by a strong hand on the wheel. Negotiating with the enemy is tantamount to surrender. The enemy must be exterminated, not accommodated. The revolutionary opponent of the status quo argues that compromise is tantamount to surrender. The people’s rights must be vindicated by a complete overthrow of the established reality or complete lost.

But are enemies ever exterminated, or rights completely vindicated? If not, is it politically rational to advance goals that cannot be realized?

The question could be applied to conflicts and struggles across history, but is particularly apt to pose to the main actors directing all sides in what has become a regional war between Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. Every side declares the sanctity and justice of their position with the chest-thumping brashness of a an adolescent boy. In pursuit of absolutely just claims, they assure the world, nothing is immoral: hostage taking, killing civilians, random rocket launches, assassinations, bulldozing of homes, bombing of schools, wholesale destruction of entire cities. That which is necessary is good, and against an implacable foe– as all sides paint their opponents as being– doing anything less than is necessary is a criminal abdication of political responsibility. Real leaders are those with the purported strength to to what is necessary, by any means necessary.

And what are the results thus far? Who is winning, and by what metric is victory to be decided? Thousands of people, mostly Palestinian non-combatants, are dead. Most of Hamas’ command hierarchy has been killed or captured and their political chief assassinated. Hamas has been decimated as an organized military force, as Netanyahu promised that it would be, but are Israelis safer? The struggle for a Palestinian state will continue as long as there are Palestinians. Hamas had 30 000 soldiers at the start of the phase of the long-standing conflict with Israel that began on October 7th. Much of its leadership has been killed, thousands of its best trained cadre are dead, wounded, or captured. Its ability to function as an organized, discipline, coherent military force has clearly been severely damaged. But there are as many millions of Palestinians as there are Israelis. They will not give up their fight for statehood just because one political expression of that struggle has been pounded into bits. Netanyahu and the Israeli racist far-right is not at war with Hamas and its supporters alone, but with the very idea of a Palestinian state. Have they succeeded in defeating that idea? Not even the commanders of the Israeli Defence Forces believe that a victory over an idea is possible.

And Hamas? Has their adventure of October 7th advanced the goal of achieving statehood? Ireland, Spain, and Norway have joined the list of nations that recognize the state of Palestine; the International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary decision that finds plausible evidence that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. The International Criminal Court is considering issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders (and Hamas’s too, although many of them are now dead). But is an actual, viable, geographically contiguous Palestinian state closer today, August 2nd, than it was on October 6th? If it is, I would like to see the evidence.

The people of Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen: are their interests best served by squandering resources on supporting an armed struggle against a militarily superior foe? Their interventions are justified on grounds of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, but the more they intervene (especially Iran), the more they push America to maintain its support for Israel (support which never wavered but which was attenuated in historically unprecedented ways before Iran’s missile launch against Israel). When Iran intervenes it links the Palestinian struggle in the American mind to Iran, and no American leader is ever going to change policy towards Israel if doing so would appear to appease Iran. Is the principle of solidarity best served by military operations that save face but in effect strengthen Israel?

By any coherent metric every side is failing to achieve its stated goals. Israel’s assault on Gaza continues unabated, it lashes out at its enemies across the region, but so long as there is a missile hidden in a farm house somewhere, its civilians will not be safe. And even if there isn’t a missile hidden somewhere, so long as Israel is enemy to every other country in the region its population will never feel secure, and not feeling secure is tantamount to not being secure.

Palestinians have the right to self-determination, of that there is no legal, political, or moral doubt, but persisting with a militarized strategy that has brought the complete destruction of Gaza is madness. One can talk about the nobility of resistance all one wants, what counts in politics is results that improve the lives of the people that political leaders claim to represent. Bad as life surely was on October 6th in Gaza, it is immeasurably worse now (and will be, long into the foreseeable future).

On all sides, maximalists who insist on “harsh punishments” and complete victory. On all sides, death, destruction, insecurity, the sacrifice of present life for quixotic goals that will never be achieved because they demand eradication or complete capitulation of the other side– results that simply will not ever be achieved.

And so the beat(ings) go on.

From on high and outside it is easy enough to say: everyone, just stop and and put your heads together. But the nature of maximalist demands is that they lock the leaders into strategies and tactics that cannot succeed but whose failure cannot be admitted because such an admission would expose the incompetence of the leaders who chose them.

The conclusion is that there will be no hope for any country and people in the region to achieve the peace and stability that are the conditions of everyone’s life-security, life-development, and life-enjoyment until different leaders– leaders who will lead by saying “No, I am not going to shoot up a rave and take hostages;” “No, I am not going to drop 2000 pound bombs on schools and neighborhoods;” “No, I am not going to invade hospitals, not going to do anything that leads to premature babies having to be wrapped in tinfoil to survive;” “No, I am not going to launch missiles on trajectories where they might land on soccer fields” -get their hands on the wheel and steer their ships away from the reefs.

On what rational grounds could anyone who genuinely has the real life-interests of their people at heart disagree with the political necessity of policy based on those sorts of refusals? Yet, such is the state of the region that it would also be contrary to rational expectations to believe that such leaders (who no doubt exist) will be able to assume command any time soon.

–

Last week archaeologists discovered the oldest yet cave painting in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Dating from more than 51 000 years ago, it pictures a pig surrounded by three figures.

While the article that discussed the discovery lamented the “poor condition” of the painting because much of the pigment had chipped away, that conclusion assumes that art works are fast frozen in time and not material objects which bear the traces of the forces of natural and social history. If we treat artworks as what they really are, material interventions into the natural order of things still subject to the forces that erode mountain ranges and carve canyons, there is no reason to lament its state. The erosion is part of the painting as it is right now. Just as the cracks in the varnish of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s paintings have ceased to be mistakes and become integral to their aesthetic power:

or the faded and chipped appearance of the frescoes in Tatlarin constitute rather than detract from their beauty

so too the effect of natural forces on our ancestor’s creation. Whatever the painting looked like when it was completed 51 000 years ago, today it looks precociously abstract: the art work continues to develop and evolve long after the artist(s) and their original intentions have died.

Something similar must be said about the content of the work. The anthropologists who have been studying it have been concerned to decode the story that the painting is telling. Perhaps it served some ritual function: did it celebrate a successful hunt? try to summon spirits that would ensure a successful hunt? Those are legitimate questions, but the answers to them are quite beside the point when it comes to appreciating the picture as a painting. I am sure that it tells a story and it probably had some ritual function, but paintings are not stories or religious rites: they are the visible irruption of the activity of human imagination into natural space.

What we think of as art today— the studied creation of pieces by a distinct class of producers whose products are intended for a consumable performance, sale, or display in a museum– had its origins in the Renaissance. But art work at the deepest level is the reconfiguration of the material content of the human sensorium by its imaginative organization. The surface of the cave is just rock…. until someone thinks of its as an empty space on which something which exists as yet no where in the universe save the imagination of the painter could be inscribed. As soon as that surface appeared to them as a possibility-space for a potential painting, it ceased to be limestone (or whatever) of such and such dimensions. Its being as a possibility-space for possible inscription confronts the painter with a new set of problems. Not: what is the chemistry of limestone, but: how will this pigment appear when it is applied to this substance? Not: what is the surface area of this stretch of cave, but: how can I distribute the figures that I imagine in the most pleasing way? Not: will anthropologists 51 000 years from now be able to see that I (we) am (are) painting a pig and three figures? but: how can I transcribe my idea into material markings that have effects on those who will see it?

The art work consists in imagining how that possibility-space can be filled. Where should the representation of the pig be placed relative to the figures? How should the activity of the figures be depicted? What colours should be used, and how much of the space should be painted and how much left blank? Whatever else the painter(s) thought about, the re-organization of the possibility-space of the painting surface had to be the fundamental problem. Maybe they were invoking spirits or giving thanks (or maybe they were just having fun at the expense of future anthropologists who will attribute all sorts of meanings to these marks which for them had none). Whatever else they thought that they were doing, they had to relate to material and space as it was given by geological forces and geometry as a set of constraints within which whatever they imagined in mind could be brought to life.

Art is not first and foremost story-telling or ritual, it is the doubling of physical reality in imagination. Art operates in the possibility-space that arises in and from natural space when artists relate to its giveness as an invitation to make something out of it. Even when paintings are made to look “just like” real objects, they are not the same (as Rene Magritte’s “ceci ce n’est pas une pipe,” painted beneath his panting of a pipe reminds everyone who sees it).

A flute played so as to sound like a bird call is not a bird call, and– as beautiful as some bird calls might be– they are not songs, properly speaking, because they were not conceived in imagination first by the bird. Although some birds may mimic other birds and there might be individuality in the expression of their songs, they cannot decide to break with tradition and invent a new mode of singing beyond their instinctual repertoire.

But I do not come to criticize birds, but to celebrate human creativity …

which goes all the way back to when we first became human beings. We carry music in our chests, in the rhythmic life-beat of our hearts. We carry painting and sculpture and poetry in our eyes, which are pleased by shape, texture, colour, and resemblance, and world-making power in our minds, which are free to re-arrange everything that can appear in a visual field or as a meaningful thought according to a formal order it alone can imagine.

When budgetary pushes come to shoves, as they inevitably do, art is usually classified as a luxury that can be cut without causing real damage to those who are deprived of the fruits of works that will not be created or shared. But this magnificent gift of our ancestors should remind us that art-making is as human a need and practice as hunting or growing food. Who knows how the painter(s) fellow cave-dwellers thought about the piece, but its existence tells us that they did not stop them from painting it. They did not say “get off your arse and go out and hunt pigs rather than waste your time painting them.” Even if some of them thought that, the thought was not translated into practice. Happily, “Pig with Circling Figures” now speaks to us beyond the grave of the creator(s).

Art and science should not be counterposed and set in competition with each other. Both have the same root: the human capacity to experience the world as patterned and meaningful. However, we humans suffer from a peculiar affliction of valuing ourselves too lowly. We have projected our own powers first onto the gods (as Feuerbach diagnosed) and now to our own creations. No doubt word and image assembly machines like Chat-GPT are extraordinary confirmations of the creative intelligence of human beings. But they themselves are not creative. They have never seen anything in their mind’s eye that was so compelling that they felt forced to rub pigment into a cave wall. To create is first of all to initiate action in response to an imagined possibility of such power that one feels — is moved by–the need to risk the judgements of those with whom one shares it. Chat-GPT has never felt anything, and if people ceased to prompt it, it would have nothing to say.