A: What it is Like to be a Philosopher

Driving down 2nd Concession, Amherstburg,

Snow-dusted fields.

and whispy clouds

frame silos,

tractors and trucks,

and fading red barns.

August’s 12 foot corn stocks

have been cut down to stubble

that will not grow again

’till May.

If I could I would

drive down long County roads

looking for places to bring my telescope

when January night falls early,

or walk along the river,

or follow the plot of a novel,

or watch a movie,

or read the paper,

or listen to someone speak,

or see kids playing,

or buy a shirt,

or have a tea,

or look at a painting,

without my mind’s gravity

pulling in questions

about why people do as they do

and did as they did

and will be as they will be,

and what does this mean,

and what that;

could things be otherwise than they are

and if so, why, and if not,

why not

and how do I make my case

and unmake yours

one way or the other?

I have made my point enough

for one life.

But thoughts come when they want to come.

Driving down 2nd Concession, Amherstburg I think:

“Who conceded what to whom?”

Were all parties satisfied,

or were there recalcitrants

who– faces reddening and fists pounding–

shouted:

‘If we concede so much at the 2nd

how much more will be taken at the 3rd, 4th and 5th?!”‘

The door once opened, more thoughts rush in:

“”Concession” can’t mean ‘concession.’

Somewhere in a dusty

County museum

that not even school kids get dragged to anymore

there must be an archivist,

in a grey sweater, Andy Capp cap,

and maybe a pipe

who knows the difference between

a Side Road and a Concession,

who it was that numbered the drain ditches

and the names of the parties to the dispute over Disputed Road.”

But I won’t stop and ask him today.

If I must be cursed by Socrates’ daemon

to think before I feel

I can at least amuse myself with equivocation

and keep some questions open

for my own delectation.

B: Mill and Pigs

It takes energy

to refract every light wave of an idea

and subject it to the test

of evidence or reason,

coherence or correspondence,

and to ask how context

shapes the seeing and the seen

and to worry about how charitable I should be

when something stupid comes my way.

If I could I would

just let the ideas play in mind

and not worry which one wants to be a paper

and which one a book.

Every particle of the world

does not need to be doubled

in writing.

I am getting tired;

all I want to do is drive

down lonely roads

and look at Andromeda,

2 million light years away

not looking back.

I want to walk in the silence

of flat straight space,

breath in the lilacs of spring,

watch the ships in the river,

take a drink on the patio,

and close my eyes at night

without pondering, posing,

or wondering how to prove.

It takes energy to refract every light wave

of an idea;

I am tired;

I don’t want to argue any more.

Mill said: it is better to be Socrates unsatisfied

than to be a pig satisfied.

But did he ask the pig?

Maybe it has been this search for something

Higher

something absolutely True

that we believe in but pigs don’t

that has been the problem all along.

Socrates,

our patron saint,

taught tyrants

who knew what they knew

and were not afraid

to prove it,

not with elenchus and syllogism

but exile and death.

The truck and the abbatoir await us all:

Mill and pigs

Socrates and Critias

me and you.

(But who is “I”

and who “you”

not to mention

“We” and “they).”

There really is only this moment,

or rather, not:

when you think about it,

it has already slipped away

and gone forever.

But no worries:

there is another,

and another

and another

until there is not.

To be and let be,

that is the answer.

To be neither selfless nor selfish

but a self

appropriating the wealth

of the magnificent surfaces of the world

without removing them from the commons.

_____________

“Thoughts come when they want to come” is borrowed from Nietzsche, somewhere in Beyond Good and Evil.

“Better to be Socrates unsatisfied …” is asserted by J.S. Mill in Utilitarianism.

“Socrates taught tyrants…” alludes to Critias, one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants who overthrew the Athenian democracy after Athen’s defeat by Sparta in 405 BCE. He had been a student of Socrates.

Where is Christopher Rufo now when the university needs saving, not from left-wing professors with zero real social power but overt assaults from the American State? Or is Donald Trump really invested in the academic integrity of American universities? That must be the explanation behind his 400 million dollar cut to Columbia University imposed because of its purported failure to combat “anti-semitism.” One might be forgiven for worrying that the demand that the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department be subjected to “academic receivership for a minimum of five years” is an overtly totalitarian attack on the independence of academic institutions from the state. But I guess I am one of those left-wing professors who control everything, so what do I know?

So in order to alleviate my ignorance I ask again: where are the right-wing zealots who decry attacks on free speech on campus? Free speech is the genus, academic freedom is the species: who amongst the conservative crowd that brays regularly about how DEI and wokeness are destroying independence of mind is going to step up and denounce the naked use of state power to suppress critical thought? Or is the use of state power only wrong when it affects one’s own side? In which case, there are no longer political principles but only raw power. If there is only raw power then there is no problem with the suffocation of dissent say, by arresting and imprisoning Mahmoud Khalil, one of the organizers of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia. Rufo and his gang portray themselves as radicals bravely swimming against the stream, but their silence now shows them for what they really are: hypocritical worshippers at the altar of state power.

That is all we will hear from them: hypocritical cheerleading for the state whose power they supposedly want to keep out of the minds of people. The arrest of Khalil is alarming for a number of reasons– he did not engage in any criminal acts nor is he charged with any; he did not incite others to violence and he is not a member of any proscribed terrorist organization. What he did do was protest the overtly genocidal threats made by the Israeli government to kill or expel the entire population of Gaza, the actual killing of over 45 000 people, and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of life-support. In short, what he did was to use the First Amendment to the purposes for which it was written: to articulate political arguments, to voice objections, to lodge protest against grave injustice, to testify that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, and to mobilise opposition to them by using his voice, not weapons. For these political acts he was arrested in front of his pregnant wife, threatened with the cancellation of his green card and deportation, and imprisoned.

Freedom of speech, just watch what you say, as Chuck D once rapped.

Time and again we are subjected to right-wing stunts like Qu’ran burning or wildly offensive jokes designed to enrage the wokies as object-lessons in the importance of free speech. Book burning in any form is anathema to free minds, and as for jokes, they need to be taken as jokes and laughed at or tolerated, as per one’s tastes. Chacun a son gout: if you don’t find them funny, don’t listen to the comic. Free speech gives people wide but not unlimited latitude to offend, but it is not fundamentally concerned with protecting a space for profane humour. Freedom of speech is not first and foremost an aesthetic principle, although it is that too (and sections of the left needs to heed the universal implications of the principle). Freedom of speech is first and foremost a political principle that protects public space for the free, i.e., not-state controlled- dissemination of political arguments, including arguments about the need to mobilise political movements, criticise existing governments and policies, and organize against them and in favour of alternative parties and priorities.

As Hannah Arendt might say, the right to free speech is an eminently political value. Politics is the use of the power of mind and argument to organise and direct collective energies towards the end of protecting and extending the space for democratic power. Where politics ends, coercion and violence begin. Lacking convincing arguments to refute the critique of Israeli tactics and strategy in the struggle against Palestinian self-determination, the Netanyahu government is on a global crusade to convince the governments of purported constitutional democracies to criminalise argument. They have found a willing executioner in the Trump administration.

Such attacks are not only attacks on a particular constitutional principle, they are direct attacks on democracy itself. Democracy is much more than parliamentary chatter. It involves at the deepest level collective control over the resources, goods, institutions, and relationships upon which need-satisfaction and the free-development of our affective, intellectual, creative, and relational capacities depend. As I have put the point in other works, genuine political democracy is possible only in democratic societies in which all major social institutions, including economic institutions, are collectively controlled and governed by majority decision following free deliberation amongst all parties affected by the decision. But parliamentary chatter– deliberation, in its highest form– is very much central to the practice of democracy. Consider any democratic institution, from the Athenian agora, to the Great Law of Peace, to early soviets, and even the American Senate– the world’s greatest deliberative body, purportedly– and you will find at its core open-ended talk. In principle, parties to political deliberations argue for as long as it takes to arrive at a mutually agreeable compromise. In practice material necessity imposes time limits. But time limits and decision by majority vote are distinct from ideological constraints on the content of allowable speech. Trump and his Heritage Foundation handlers are openly and explicitly threatening to destroy opponents rather than convince them through superior reasons. Trump goes so far as the argue that criticism of his policy in the media is illegal.

Funny conservative sense of heritage. Aren’t conservative the ones who regularly warn of liberal experiments with ‘social engineering?” If Khalil’s arguments are as egregiously bad as his captors think, or Trump’s policies so much better than his critics argue, they should be easy to refute in the one case and support in the other, no? And if America was once great, why was that? Slavery? Jim Crow? The Trail of Tears? No country worships its constitution like America. The hermeneutic effort expended, especially by conservatives, to discern the intentions of the “Founding Fathers” makes Talmudic scholars look lazy and superficial. Where is the Maimonides who can explain this to me, a perplexed philosopher who wants to know how respect for the Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” can be squared with the arrest– without criminal charge– of a protester exercising exactly the powers granted him by that amendment or to threaten the “free press” with criminal sanction for criticising the government of the day?

The student encampments were dramatic efforts to get the American government to listen to the voices of the dying people of Gaza. To claim that they are anti-Semitic is nonsense. Is opposition to Trump anti-Scottish American? Was opposition to Jim Crow anti-white? Here again we see the pernicious effects of the identity politics to which conservatives claim to be dead set opposed. The attack of the right to employ the freedom of speech to protect criticism of Israel or Trump is based upon the conflation of the state of Israel with Jewish identity and Trump’s policies with being American. If that is not identity politics, what is?

Of course, many, many stupid and naive things were said about “the resistance” and Hamas’s tactics in some of the demonstrations and encampments. Freedom of speech is the right to make good and bad arguments equally. The antidote to bad argument is better argument, not prison and deportation. Despite right-wing hyper-ventilation, the encampments were not violent: these were not Weather Underground fools who thought that burning ROTC buildings was going to hasten the anti-imperialist revolution. Keffiyehs are not Kalashnakovs. They were simply gatherings of engaged young people– many Jewish– exercising their right to freely express their opposition to the catastrophe unfolding before the eyes of the world. Again, some failed to properly understand Hamas’s cynical complicity in provoking the invasion, but youthful naivete is not criminal, and voicing abstract support for a liberation struggle is not equivalent to membership in a terrorist organization.

How quickly history unravels. In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama claimed that political history was over; liberal-democratic institutions represented the high point of the evolution of political rationality. They would inevitably sweep the world in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism. He appeared to be correct: the world was swept by liberal-democratic revolutions, but today those institutions have largely betrayed those who struggled for them. The betrayal was not caused by the ideas behind liberal democracy: rule of law, separation of powers, formal equality of all institutionalized in constitutional rights of citizenship, peaceful transfer of power. Those are all elements of any practically workable democratic society of any significant size. They are frames to be built upon, not rubbish to be cleared away. No, the ideas did not betray those who fought to build liberal-democratic societies, it was capitalism and the substantive powerlessness it imposes on the majority of people, a powerlessness manifest as monstrous and growing material inequality and the impotence of social democratic and liberal forces to protect people’s lives and livelihoods. That material damage has undermined the liberal-democratic state from within and created a legitimacy vacuum being filled in state after state by right-wing populist nationalists. Contrary to Hegel and Fukuyama, the Spirit does not move inexorably forward and the future, at least in the near term, looks a whole lot worse, politically, than the period that stirred Fukuyama’s hopes.

The Department of Government Efficiency, (DOGE) led by Elon the DOGE (Dangerous Oligarch Gutting Everything), is driven in part by the libertarian belief that there is no genuine public interest or public good, partly by capitalists’ interests in freeing business activity from any sort of oversight and regulation in the public interest, and partly by Trump and the MAGA movement’s antediluvian, anti-science worldview. Cuts to USAID that affect antiAIDS programs in South Africa, the threat to withdraw from the World Health Organization, forcing the CDC to cut back on global monitoring of disease threats, impeding the ability of American government scientists to freely communicate with other scientists around the world– arguably the most important intellectual condition for the advancement of human scientific knowledge– firing hundreds of climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), forbidding the public use of references to ‘climate change” in official government documents, and putting kooks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and — even worse, former Professional Wrestling impressario Linda McMahon– in charge of the Departments of Health and Education respectively–can only be understood as attempts to construct a fantasy-reality in deep conflict with the material reality whose basic elements and forces and their connection to human life natural science studies. Since material reality never loses a conflict with human wishful thinking, I believe that the rest of the world should let the Trumpites try to return to the 18th century of mercantile economics, a world before the germ theory of disease, vaccinations, public health and education, knowledge of the mathematics of probability and the power of computer modelling. Let them have their red hats and delusions: we in the rest of the world should throw open our doors to American scientists and progressives and drain the MAGA swamp of people who do not want to be swamped by Category Five hurricanes or roasted in out of control wildfires.

I am not being facetious. Canada has to be proactive in transforming its economy in the face of American tariffs and one crucial place to start is with a massive investment in our universities. Canadian universities have been underfunded for decades (especially in Ontario). The unprecedented assault on scientific research currently underway in the United States is an opportunity to poach some of the best talent from American universities and create new synergies with on-going research in Canada. And not only in the natural sciences: technological development is going to cut into manufacturing employment over the medium to long term, Trump tariffs or not. The world is going to need artists and writers and commentators and critics and policy analysts: all contributions that the arts, social sciences, and humanities can make to the future. Culturally and geographically a move to Canada is far easier for American academics than a move to Europe. Crisis is a moment of opportunity: Canadian workers must absolutely be protected against job losses, but we also have to seize the moment and turn our economy in a different direction– not only away from integration with the American, but towards the future. A generational investment in our universities to attract top American talent is one key step in that direction.

There are precedents in our shared history for large scale movements of American’s north. Canada of course welcomed tens of thousands of American young people in the 60’s fleeing the risk of being sent to Viet Nam. Less well-known but perhaps more directly relevant to my proposal is the influx of American academics to fill positions as the higher education system here expanded rapidly in the 1960s to accommodate the Baby Boomers. Canadians are quick to point out to how so many of the world’s favourite American celebrities and singers are actually Canadian, but Americans who have moved here have enriched our cultural and intellectual life as well. Now is absolutely not the time to turn inward and wrap ourselves in Hudson’s Bay blankets of chauvinism; it is a time to both reach out and transform from within.

Investing in Universities alone is not going to solve the problem. Canadians are also going to have to contend with massive unemployment. If the tariffs persist, and the new tariffs promised and threatened on steel and aluminum and softwood lumber added, 1.5 million jobs could be lost, according to the Canadian Labour Congress. Trudeau and Ford and the other premiers might talk tough, but the economic facts of the matter suggest that Canada is not going to win an all out trade war with the United States. Retaliatory tariffs will bite in local regions of US economy, but overall the effect will be small, given that exports to Canada are a small fraction of overall US economy (about 1.3 % of GDP) whereas the value of Canadian exports to US (77 per cent of all Canadian exports) compromise around 25 % of Canadian GDP: an astounding level of vulnerability.

No Canadian government– no government, as a matter of fact– can simply accept an ally effectively ripping up a treaty (one demanded and signed by Donald Trump himself, in the case of the Canada-USA-Mexico trade agreement. I wonder if Trudeau pointed out to Trump that if the agreement is bad it is his fault, as it was negotiated under his watch)? That said, now is not the time for tough talk but creative transformation of the Canadian economy. Structural and qualitative transformations take time, but one short term policy that could be implemented right now is the long-debated but never implemented Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI). Versions of this policy have floated around for at least forty years but no government has implemented it in any systematic way. Now is the time! A GBI would allow for a planned reduction in average working hours per week which would, in turn, allow for the possibility of job sharing as a way of mitigating higher levels of unemployment and increasing the quality of life by making available more free time.

For example, a reduction of 25%, from a 40 to a 30 hour week, would allow more workers to be employed for less time while the GBI would make up for the wages lost in proportion to the reduced hours. If a firm employed 50 workers at 40 hrs/week that would amount to 2000 person hours of employment. If every worker worked only 30 hours a week the same firm could employ 66 workers for a total of 1980 person hours. The math is crude and the implementation would be more complicated, but the example, rough as it is, shows how jobs can be created by re-dividing labour time without expanding production.

Systematic investment in this sort of scheme could catalyze deeper social changes. The experienced value of more free time might break the cycle of addiction to ever higher levels of consumption of things whose rush wears off as soon as they have been taken out of the box. Breaking our understanding of what is enjoyable and worthwhile free from mindless concumerism would furthermore reduce the need for higher money wages (which are one dimension of inflationary spirals). Working less, demanding less, living and experiencing more we would all reduce our dependence, not just on American markets, but capitalism. In any case, something like this policy is going to be required; the Labour Congress warned that 1.5 million jobs could be lost because of the Trump tariffs, but another study warned that between 1.5 and 7.5 million Canadian jobs could be lost to automation.

We need to be clear that capitalism is the problem. Capitalism sets workers at odds with each other in a cut throat competition for scarce jobs. On one level it is lamentable to hear the United Auto Workers come out in support of Trump’s tariffs. On the other hand, what real choice do they have so long as workforces are divided along national lines while capital roams free? Free trade has damaged Canadian and American industrial bases, of that there can be no doubt. The primary functions of unions today is to protect their members’ jobs and secure job-creating investment. But the fact of the matter is that Mexican, American, Canadian, and, let’s be clear, Chinese workers all need their jobs. Remember what a worker is: someone who must sell their labour power to a capitalist because they have no other means of life. That shared material reality is the objective basis of shared interest across borders. But solidarity cannot be built overnight and the threat of mass job losses is real. While still working to build new bridges between workers across borders and against the capitalist class, immediate steps must be taken that both ward off disaster and slowly begin to transform capitalism from within in a democratic, life-valuable, cooperative and socialist direction.

______

And now, I need to take a break from Trump commentary. In an older post long ago I said that I am not a journalist and I do not want the blog to chase the news. I am worried that Trump is forcing me to break my vow. He has a unique ability to attract attention to himself. He is like a magpie, shrieking with excitement about every new shiny object he sees and making everyone around him stop and look. I need my attention span back. Henceforth, until he causes a genuine catastrophe or achieves something worth philosophical reflection, I will do my best to ignore him.