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.

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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.

One of the things that I missed most when I was confined to quarters and teaching from home during the pandemic were chance encounters with colleagues. One of the best things about working as an academic are the brilliant people from other disciplines with whom one works. What other job let’s you talk to a chemist on one pathway, an artist around the corner, and a historian in the quad? The university concentrates the historical and systematic development of the human intellect in a few city blocks.

Learning is not confined to classrooms on campus: the entire space is an opportunity for pedagogical path-crossings. A conversation with a student as we walk together after class is just as philosophically important as what I said during the lecture. The university, indoors and out, is a learning commons.

Learning happens in lectures, seminars, labs, and chance encounters, but it also occurs at demonstrations and protests. The university has long been a space for political education, too. There have been dozens of rallies during my time at Windsor, including quite loud demonstrations earlier this year during the early days of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Those demonstrations included the “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” chant that has become notorious, but I do not recall anyone lodging a formal complaint with the administration or the media even bothering to cover the campus marches.

But the student encampment movement was not so ephemeral as a march and attracted mainstream and social media attention across North America. Unlike other universities, Windsor’s administration decided to negotiate in good faith with the small band of student occupiers and recently reached an agreement to end the occupation. The language of the agreement is mostly promissory and platitudinous, but it does contain commitments to expand its Scholars at Risk program to Palestinian colleagues and students, to review the University’s investment policy, and to ensure that its academic relationships conform to its own existing ethical guidelines.

The condemnation was as swift as it was predictable. Jewish students, the B’nai Brith, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and local Jewish leaders have claimed that the University gave in to intimidation, an illegal occupation, indulged in one-sided and unfounded condemnation of Israel, and capitulated to a distorted understanding of that history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Critics are free to criticize and the University will have to answer for its commitments, but I had not heard any complaints until the agreement was signed that the encampment was viewed as intimidating to Jewish students or anyone else. I do not know what law the protestors were violating. I would argue that the encampment was a form of political argument and therefore a legitimate action if we view– as we should– the whole campus as a learning commons. Even if one does not adopt that view and argues, like other universities have, that the campus is private property, the law of trespass only applies if the property owner files a complaint. It is a dubious application of the law to claim that the administration is like a private property owner vis-a-vis campus space, but in Windsor’s case the administration never made that move, so the encampment violated no law.

Moreover, the existence of the encampment in no way impeded critics from organizing counter-protests, criticizing the protestor’s claims, or even setting up their own encampments. Classes continued as usual, people came and went to their offices and the library, no buildings were occupied, campus life continued without interruption. The students behaved as students should behave: engaged, putting their learning to work in the “real world” that everyone loves to say university students ignore, trying to make a difference by demanding an end to a horrific conflict.

The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protests against the actions that “shocked the conscience of mankind” during the Second World War. The suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust was the centrepiece of a six year slaughter that killed 60 million people. The agreement that the University signed with the students includes a commitment to add a clause to their ethical investment policy that ensures that companies whose stock the University buys are not human rights violators. Is it contrary to the interests of the Jewish community, here, in Israel, or anywhere, to demand that corporations comply with human rights? The University also agreed not to enter into any partnerships with Israeli universities, unless the partnership was agreed to by the Senate. All major inter-university agreements have always been voted on at Senate, so there is really no departure from past practice here. Moreover, Senate has turned down partnerships before– most recently, with an Egyptian school, about 10 years ago, because there were concerns about the human rights situation and academic freedom. Viewed in light of the historical practice of the University, Israel is not being singled out. Finally, the agreement notes that individual academics remain free (as they must) to work with Israeli colleagues.

People who are committed to peaceful resolution of conflicts should celebrate the peaceful resolution of this conflict. Other universities have disgraced themselves by letting the police loose against peaceful protestors. The Windsor encampment was far less militant than the anti-Netanyahu protests organized by the families of hostages in Israel have been. Opposition to the policies of a particular government is not a racist attack on a whole people; defending the internationally recognized rights of Palestinians to national self-determination– the same right Jewish people acted on in 1948 to establish Israel– is not to support Hamas’s murderous methods. Political arguments are always polarizing. One cannot win an argument by deciding that the other side’s position is illegitimate from the get go. Educators must listen and respond to the reasons and evidence presented. The agreement that the University reached is in keeping with the vocation of members of an institution of “higher education.”

Instead of condemning the University and trying to mobilize the power of the federal and provincial governments to undermine it (would that not be a gross violation of the academic freedom critics claim to be upholding?) critics should demonstrate, carefully, and with evidence, not with sweeping dismissal, exactly what institutional principles the university has violated in the agreement. If there has been actual, illegal intimidation, there is a legal system to deal with such complaints. But mere feelings of discomfort cannot be grounds to silence campus movements. If discomfort were grounds for silencing, all universities would have to close, since where there is learning there is growth and where there is growth there are growing pains.

Sadly, this agreement will not solve the real problem, the war in Gaza. However, it should serve as a source of minor inspiration that argument and negotiation can produce agreements. The key is to talk, not fight.

When asked by a British journalist what he thought about Western Civilization, Gandhi responded “I think it would be a good idea.” Might we not say something analogous about the rule of law? It would be a good idea if societies really were governed by a set of universally agreed to, impersonal rules that defined a framework that “kept fair play” (William Blake, “Blindman’s Bluff”).

But that is just an idea: in reality law does not “keep fair play” but is a partisan tool to advance the interests of the groups with the power to write and enforce it. Ruling classes change as social systems change, different factions of the same ruling class assume power, through democratic or violent means, but the one constant, as Glaucon, developing Thrasymachus’ cynical conception of justice in The Republic, tells Socrates, is that justice (law) is just “the right of the stronger” dressed up in universal language.

The recent decision of the US Supreme Court that Presidents enjoy absolute legal immunity for actions undertaken as part of the official duties of the office seems to confirm the cynical view. Liberals have responded that the decision in effect makes the President an absolute monarch. The concern expressed by the dissent of the liberal judges and the commentocracy is understandable, but I think a better analogy would be with the Pope. Absolute monarchy was an attempt to identify the state with the body of the monarch (“L’etat, c’est moi,” said Louis XIV ). But the Supreme Court did not decide that Presidents have personal immunity for any act whatsoever, but only those undertaken as part of their official duties. The Pope is infallible in matters of theological dispute, but not absolutely infallible. The question that the decision poses is thus: what is the scope of the official duties of the President?

That is the problem posed in a rhetorically arresting way by Sonya Sotomayor’s argument that the decision opens the door for Presidents to order the assassination of their opponents by the military in their role as commander in chief of the armed forces. I am assuming that she intended the argument as a reductio ad absurdum to expose the problem that the scope of “official duties” is unclear. The President really is the commander in chief of the US armed forces, and thus, in principle, could issue commands which, while illegal in other respects, fall within the scope of official duties. I will leave it to experts in US constitutional law to parse the details of the decision. My interest lies in assessing its implications of for the interpretation of the value of the idea of the rule of law.

The nakedly partisan division in the current US supreme court supports the Marxist argument that behind the appearance of legal neutrality lies the reality of class power. Almost every decision that this court has made has split along conservative-liberal lines. But that division is only the surface expression of a deeper structural problem. Liberals and conservatives in the US and elsewhere represent two factions of the same ruling class: no matter which one exercises political power, they are both representatives of the class that owns and controls the resources and wealth that everyone needs to access in order to survive and live full, meaningful, valued and valuable lives. Law is thus– as Glaucon warned– class interest expressed in abstractly universal form.

Fair enough. It would be difficult to dispute that the ultimate power protected by law is private property. Think back a few summers to the Wet’suwet’en blockade against the passage of the Transmountain pipeline through their territory. Despite the fact that the Canadian Constitution recognizes the validity of Indigenous law, when push came to shove, and the exercise of Indigenous law was going to impede a project deemed of paramount economic significance, the courts sided with the Liberal government and helped force the pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory. But it was not “the law” that enforced itself, but the RCMP armed with military grade weapons. One could multiply examples but the point should be clear: historically, the idea of the rule of law was a progressive check against the ambitions of absolute monarchs, but in reality it only expressed in abstractly universal form the partial, private interest of the rising bourgeoisie.

As with so much of Marxism, one must grant that its criticisms expose real contradictions in capitalist society. The problem arises when one then asks: but what will you put in its place? Anarchists argue that human beings are capable of spontaneous self-organization and do not require the state form and its legal structures to govern their affairs. Marxists have been more ambivalent. Marx himself was brutal in his criticisms of Bakunin, but also taught that, under a fully developed capitalist society, that the state would “wither away.” Does that mean that law would wither away too? Marxists have been divided. In the early days of the Soviet Union the majority argued that bourgeois law would give way to proletarian law. Evgeny Pashukanis, the most important Soviet legal theorist, disagreed. He argued that law was by its nature capitalist and that it would eventually disappear once communism matured. There would be pragmatic regulations (like traffic conventions that enforce driving on the right or left side of the road) but no principles that claim the right to govern human affairs because they are abstractly rational and in everyone’s interests.

History was not kind to Pashukanis’ positive argument. Communism did not mature in the Soviet Union but rapidly degenerated into a totalitarian state. The abject failure to build a democratic socialist society has served liberal defences of the rule of law as the rule of abstract principles over private and partial interests well ever since. As E.P. Thompson noted wryly, the experience of Stalinist totalitarianism ought to make even the most committed Marxist wary of “cutting down the hedgerows” (Hobbes’ metaphor for the function of law) on the naive assumption that after the revolution we will all be equal as comrades. Historically speaking– and historical materialists should only ever speak historically– some animals have made themselves more equal than others.

True true. But but ….

it is clear that the actual function of law is to enforce the rule of capital over human life. We thus seem to be caught between two abstractions: the rule of law as the rule of abstractly rational principle over human partiality to their own case, a bulwark against totalitarianism and the guarantor of civic equality, and a promise of a future classless society in which laws will no longer be necessary because social institutions explicitly serve everyone’s material interests, ensure need-satisfaction, enable all-round capacity development, and provide fora for the democratic resolution of disputes. Were such a society to be constructed then of course we would no longer have to worry about the rule of law. But an idea for a perfect society is not a program to create one. The idea of fully developed communism undermines the idea of the rule of law by abstracting from the social conditions that make law necessary. But Marxism is not supposed to be abstract criticism but, as the young Marx said, practical criticism, criticism which immediately translates itself into practice.

Practically speaking, there are no revolutionary movements of any consequence. So the question is: what does one do right now: abstractly condemn the rule of law as a bourgeois subterfuge? Or criticise the reality of the exercise of law on the basis of a defence of the value of the idea of the rule of law and work to realise that idea as far as possible in a given moment, and then work to push it further the next?

If one rejects the value of the idea of the rule of law it seems to me that one cuts oneself off from being a participant in the actual political arguments of the day. It cannot be a matter of political indifference to democrats of any persuasion, liberal or socialist, whether officers of the government of a society of legal equals are granted immunity from the very laws they are supposed to serve. Whatever the constitutional realities of the United States, the idea of the rule of law surely counts against any immunity of government officers for the acts they commit in office. Political office in a liberal-capitalist society is not supposed to be a sinecure but a position conferred by consent of the governed. The historically progressive value of the rule of law was that it undermined the claims to natural superiority that feudal aristocracies and monarchs claimed. Henceforth the law, not the body of the monarch, would rule. Power could be criticised and controlled by objective standards that frame the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate behavior. Legal equals can look each other in the eye; no one is owed deferential treatment.

In this vision the law is not oppressive but the objective form that the human capacity for self-determination takes. To be autonomous is to be capable, literally, of giving oneself (auto) the law (nomos) that one willingly obeys. In the liberal tradition law is therefore freedom preserving– a principle that socialists should themselves preserve. The problem with the liberal rule of law is that it is not yet the law that rules, but ultimately the class interests of the owners and controllers of capital. But few could be so historically naive as to trust that a post-revolutionary society could rely on the commitments of its leaders to recognise and respect boundaries to their power. The idea of the rule of law cannot on its own constrain power, but the fact that it imposes regulatory principles whose validity does not depend upon their being recognized by governments of the day was a vital step towards democratic society.

The Conservative justices may not have transformed Donald Trump into Louis the XIV, but it is impossible to read their decision as anything but a step backward away from democracy and towards autocracy. But if we criticise the judgment because it re-introduces an aristocratic distinction between those subject to the law and those superior to it, it must be on the basis of accepting the value of the idea of the rule of law itself. How far the affairs of human beings can be determined by spontaneous deliberations is an open question. But as we work towards a more democratic future we must not trust anyone’s good political intentions. Anyone- business person or politician, state functionary or revolutionary– who argues that the law is superfluous because they can be trusted to govern themselves– absolutely should not be trusted.

I was not surprised, exactly, when a communique from the University of Windsor’s PR department arrived in my inbox informing the ‘community” that the administration had decided– without prior, public discussion or deliberation– that University Players (the student theatre group associated with the School of Dramatic Art) was closing and the EPICentre (a small business incubator) will “be reimagined to integrate and enhance our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.” The Dean of my faculty telegraphed that cuts were coming, but she phrased it somewhat more eloquently than the biz-speak spoken by the Office of Public Affairs and Communication [emphasis added]. Communication involves a back and forth, an exchange of ideas and arguments that moves dialogue partners towards mutual understanding and agreement. There was no communication, no debate, no opportunity for the units and the staff affected by the decision (10 staff positions will be lost), to make their case and propose alternatives. Instead, a communique was issued, informing everyone of this latest fait accompli.

The more that faculty unions and their provincial and national organizations insist on collegial self-governance, the more university administrations become autocratic. At Windsor, the Bookstore has been privatised, unionised housekeeping and food services staff gradually being phased out in favour of private sector contractors, and our off-campus access to some campus computing services made contingent upon allowing the university to install corporate spyware on our home computers, all without even the pretext of democratic debate.

The tactic of making decisions behind closed doors has a certain tactical brilliance. Reversing decisions is much more difficult than pro-active organization to prevent a bad decision from being taken. One cannot oppose that which one does not know is coming. Once the decision has been made, reactive opposition is difficult to build. A certain number of people who could potentially be enlisted in a constructive project centred around finding creative alternatives to cuts will conclude that the die has been cast and nothing can be done to change the new reality. That already limits the pool from which an opposition could be recruited. A certain number of others will support the changes, and another subset– always the largest– will not care. Only a minority of a minority will publicly oppose the moves but– being on the back foot right from the beginning– anything that they might organize will be small and ineffective.

This weakness is a function of the very low level of political engagement on Canadian campuses. I read colleagues for whom I have immense respect (having worked with them more closely in an earlier era where I was more actively involved in political struggle) and cannot understand why they think that the student encampments against the Gaza War portend the re-birth of a vital student movement to rival the 1960’s youth rebellion. While the students are right to mobilise and the encampments should be defended on grounds of academic freedom, the actual numbers of students involved are vanishingly small. In Windsor, the numbers actively camped out in the quad number in the dozens, out of a student population of about 16 000. Even the biggest encampments have attracted no more than a couple of hundred protestors. The only resemblance to the 1960’s is a revolutionary rhetoric vastly at odds with the students’ power to effectively counter the political economic structures of contemporary capitalism.

Calls to divest from arms industries are all well and good, but the university has been integrated with the capitalist economy since the birth of its modern form in mid-nineteenth century Germany. Demands for more Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion that are banal components of every campus movement just echo the lingua franca of corporate leadership. The bosses are as committed to “diversity” as they are to the doublespeak that portrays cuts that weakening of the academic mission of the university as “ensuring continuity and innovating new approaches to enrich the student experience and strengthen community partnerships.” If Laurentian University could be gutted by a bankruptcy court with virtually no provincial mobilisation in support of our Sudbury colleagues, one can be certain that this round of cuts– and they will not be the last– will be implemented with no more resistance than tree leaves pose to a howling thunderstorm wind. That is not the fault of individuals grown indifferent and inured to cuts; individual indifference is a function of the low level of political mobilisation on campuses and in the wider society, which is in turn a function of decades of mostly defeat for the labour movement and other progressive forces. Corrosive and backward identity politics dominates the left, making the construction of the solidarity that would be required to rebuild effective political movements more difficult.

But there is another side to the particular issue of budget cuts that needs to be addressed. The political economic dimension of the problem is well-understood. The administration pointed to the need to solve a 5.6 million dollar budget deficit as the cause of the elimination of University Players and the EPICentre. They argued, correctly, that provincial funding policies are the root cause of that deficit. However, that is also a feint to distract attention from matters that they do control: how they allocate revenues. Across the last two administrations those priorities have been new building construction, expanding the size of the administration and support bureaucracy, and paying outside service providers. My own Faculty, (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) has been under a virtual hiring freeze for years because the budget model that the university has adopted puts FAHSS in a structural deficit impossible to cut our way out from under. This model makes absurd assumptions (for example, it ‘charges’ the faculty 10 000 dollars per office, as if we were renting space from a commercial landlord) and forces faculties and departments to compete for resources. While FAHSS departments in particular have been constrained by lack of hiring, the administration has continued to hire more administrators and ship money out the door by contracting out campus services. Only a few weeks ago, I received another email informing me that the university was spending something like 9 million dollars on new photocopiers and their accompanying software suite.

Photocopiers! Nine million dollars! What happened to the paperless office?

I hope whomever occupies the Philosophy Department’s offices after we are amalgamated with another department (as I fear is almost inevitable in the near future) enjoys it. Having lost 5 colleagues to retirements, resignations, and death over the past few years my department seems destined, in a best case scenario, to be forced into some sort federal arrangement with a larger unit.

Is this now the purpose of the university in the twenty-first century, to provide a home for photocopiers but not philosophers? Perhaps. But if philosophers want to prevail, we must ask ourselves some hard questions which– despite our vocation as gadflies– we are often loath to ask.

That question, the other side of the problem of cuts that philosophers and humanists are less inclined to want to consider is: if we are so important, why do our numbers continue to decline relative to the sciences and professional schools? Philosophers (and other humanists) know, or think they know, why philosophy and the humanities are important. But do students know or care? The numbers suggest that more and more that they do not.

The typical explanation of the decline of humanities and arts enrollments focuses on parents’ and students’ perceptions about post-graduation job prospects and the typical solution involves pointing out that statistics do not support the prevailing pessimistic assumption. But that solution has not arrested the decline. Could there not be, in addition to these practical concerns, a deeper crisis affecting humanities education, one that forces us to re-think what the purpose of a university in 2024 ought to be?

Academic departments are organized by academics who have devoted their working life to their chosen field of inquiry. Humanists love texts, we love to read, we love to write, argue, and reflect; we have organized our departments to impart that love of texts to new generations of students, and we tend to focus our attention on those who remind us of younger versions of ourselves, whom we nurture by mentoring them through their undergraduate degree and then sending them off– like proud parents– to graduate study elsewhere, hopefully to see them once again on the conference circuit as a newly minted PhDs. The problem is obvious: the vast majority of students will not become PhDs, not because they lack the intellectual chops, but because they are not interested in the life of the mind.

As I noted above, today’s university took on its contemporary structure in the 19th century, but its division into faculties and departments is literally medieval. Why do academics– especially academics who fancy themselves radical social critics– rise in defence of a 1000 year-old institutional structure? Relative to what pressing social problem: war, environmental crisis, poverty, the re-birth of the far-right– is growing the faculty complement of an academic department important? If–as all of us are quick to maintain– we play some sort of vital role in helping people understand those problems- what is it about any particular discipline that cultivates that understanding? What if what helps people understand problems is not anything specific about the historical content of different disciplines, but practices of thinking that would be better cultivated outside of existing departmental structures?

When we look out at half empty classrooms four weeks into the year we tend to blame students. They are lazy, distracted, immature. But we rarely ask if there is a problem with the way in which our programs and classes are organized. Maybe sitting in a classroom listening to someone talk at them from the front of the room about an historical era or a set of disembodied theories no longer speaks to them in the world that they inhabit, relative to the problems that they face.

The problems that the world faces are practical, but they cannot be solved unless they are understood in their complete reality. The university has always been a contradictory institution, devoted, on the one hand, to the production of people who will occupy positions of authority, but, on the other hand, to educating those same people. Thus, the university is part of the process by which societies reproduce themselves but also, in so far as it must educate, also a space in which critical perspectives on social institutions and value systems necessarily emerge. Even the medieval university in which faculty members always ran the risk of being charged with heresy, allowed a wider latitude than is sometimes thought for debate. Education demands a turning of the mind against the givenness of reality; a questioning attitude vis-a-vis the world as it present itself. Education begins when one asks how the world came to be the way the world is.

No discipline can answer this question on its own and recognizing that fact is perhaps the starting point for much needed thinking about how the educational purpose of the university can guide what I think is an increasingly urgent need to reform its structure and pedagogy. Let us reflect on that most basic question for a moment: how did the world come to be the way it is? What discipline does not make a contribution to the answer to that question? Cosmologists, chemists, evolutionary biologists explain how the universe has developed from a superhot plasma after the Big Bang to human societies in which intelligent people continue to work on refining those explanations. But people do not only work out empirical explanations, they also wonder. And so philosophers, theologians, and artists, those who, in different ways focus on the meaning of life in properly human experience, have as central a role to play in answering the question of how the world became the world that it is, because it has not simply evolved according to natural laws, it has been shaped by human wonder and creative activity. But it has not simply been shaped by wonder and activity: the existence of human beings presupposes their ability to satisfy their life-needs. People satisfy those needs through different forms of social organization. Hence historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists all have something essential to say about how societies have been organized to satisfy those needs, but so too health care professionals and psychologists about the scope and content of those needs. Moreover, since any historical inquiry into the institutions of any society will reveal inequalities in access to the resources, critical perspectives that look into the ways in which inequalities have been justified and how people have organized to overcome them are required.

The throughline connecting this way of seeing disciplinary diversity is the contribution each makes to understanding human society as it is at present. Each of those disciplines has its own history and everyone will situate themselves differently within that discipline, but that is of lesser importance when it comes to organizing the teaching mission of the university. What matters for the student– the person who is becoming educated (as opposed to becoming a philosopher, a psychologist, etc.,) — is what the way of thinking that distinguishes these different approaches contributes to the answer to the question as a whole. Instead of organizing education under the implicit assumption that its function is to produce philosophers, psychologists etc., the guiding principle might become the education of people capable of understanding, in a unified way, the different perspectives necessary to comprehend the full scope of pressing problems. Classes could then be organized around problems, not disciplinary histories, and taught by teams organizing students into active working groups, not individuals talking at them from the front of a classroom.

Let me take just one example: climate change. In order to understand climate change one must understand atmospheric chemistry, mathematical modelling, and probabilistic reasoning. But one must also understand the origins of the crisis, which means that one must understand economics. In order to understand economics, own must understand the forces that operate in a capitalist society, but also the value system that legitimates those forces. One must be able to trace the cumulative effects of those economic forces over time, and thus also the political institutions and events that have allowed those forces to grow (and get them under control). That is a very rough sketch, but one can see how it might inform course design. Students would work with atmospheric chemists, mathematicians, historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers to grasp the different dimensions of the problem. The focus would be on developing the cognitive and practical skills. Students and professors alike would have to learn to work collaboratively in teams and master and apply forms of thinking, not assimilate abstract discipline-specific content, in order to succeed. Professors would continue to pursue their own interests as researchers, but as educators they would have to invent new ways of working together to teach what their discipline can contribute to the synthetic understanding of the complex problems that life in 2024 poses.

This sketch is far from a plan and any attempt to institutionalise this approach would face significant hurdles. Inertial forces are very powerful in institutions, and the daunting problems of how workload would be calculated, how many teams a professors would expect to be part of , etc., are probably sufficient to prevent concrete steps towards making these sorts of changes being taken– until there is a system-wide crisis. At least in the humanities, I fear that the system-wide crisis is at the door. Will we solve it by being bold and creative or continue to lament program closures after the fact?