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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ever-intensifying political polarization between “liberals” and “conservatives” (in the American senses of those terms) have occluded a clear understanding both of the nature and the importance of academic freedom. While some egregious and indefensible mobbing attacks on academics like Kathleen Stock (who had the audacity to argue that sex is biological reality that has important health and political implications for women’s lives- quelle horreur!) or the firing of Frances Widdowson by Mount Royal University in Calgary (because she questioned the dominant narrative around residential schools and the influence of Indigenous traditions on Canadian university campuses) provide grist for the conservative mill that universities have been captured by woke cry babies incapable of argument, the reality is that conservatives are a far bigger threat to academic freedom.

If anyone doubts this claim then they are not paying attention to news out of Florida. Governor de Santis has launched a full scale attack on the intellectual autonomy of Florida universities. His warm up exercise was to fire the entire board of the small liberal arts focused New College of Florida and replace it with Christopher Rufo as Chair and hand picked Republican supporters. The new Board, under the guise, of course, of political neutrality and academic rigour, threatened to fire professors and eliminate programs that adopted a critical perspective on contemporary American reality. This move came after he forced the closure of an accelerated program on racial history on grounds that it teaches (generally undefined, by its opponents) Critical Race Theory. The new Bill before the Florida legislature threatens to go much further:

“The legislation, filed this week, would also require that general education courses at state colleges and universities “promote the values necessary to preserve the constitutional republic” and cannot define American history “as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It would prohibit general courses “with a curriculum based on unproven, theoretical or exploratory content.”

The American Association of University Professors is right to warn that if passed, the very existence of Florida universities as centres for free inquiry and argument would be threatened. If taken at its word, the last set of provisions would lead to a ban on string theory and other scientific theories “based on unproven, theoretical or exploratory content.” It would also rule out courses in art and creative writing that demand students go beyond established canons of practice, because by definition, going beyond established canons of practice is “exploratory.” Indeed, what living tradition of thought, scientific, humanistic, artistic, or social scientific is not exploratory at its leading edges? And if universities are not exploratory at their leading edges, they serve little purpose.

In any discipline, one studies its past in order to go beyond it. History does not simply transmit facts about the past. Historical research uncovers new documents, gives voice to excluded perspectives, and re-interprets settled interpretations in light of the continued effects past events and ideas have on the present. De Santis’s bill, aimed as it obviously is at what he takes to be left-wing biased research, would quite literally destroy Florida universities. They would become mere transmission belts of hackneyed republican interpretations of American history that no serious student of that country of whatever political persuasion could accept. One might argue that the constitutional norms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution establish a sufficient political foundation for solving the problem of racism, but how could anyone who impartially examined the evidence disagree with the basic argument of Critical Race Theory: America was shaped by the slave economy and its effects are felt in the structure and operation of every American institution and the daily reality of African Americans still today?

Perhaps someone would disagree with that reading of the evidence. Excellent. If they have a better interpretation, they should be encouraged to share it. And then defenders of Critical Race Theory can respond. What cannot happen without destroying the university system is for state power to rule one side of the debate illegal and ban it. No one on the left that I know of is proposing that left-wing state legislatures ban the teaching of classical liberal doctrines of formal equality or making courses that argue that America gave the purest expression of those principles illegal.

There have indeed been overzealous demonstrations by students and faculty that have prevented right-wing speakers from speaking. Demonstrations and counter-argument are one thing, preventing speakers from speaking is another. The Stock and Mount Royal cases are more serious because they resulted in the two academics losing their positions. These are egregious violations of collegiality and academic freedom that not only threaten the intellectual integrity of the university but provide ammunition for the right wing. We can be certain that de Santis’s frontal assault on the independence of universities will be replicated elsewhere. And if the Republicans are elected in 2024, perhaps with de Santis as leader, maybe with trump. watch out.

But does my argument not depend on a naive belief in the political neutrality of knowledge and universities? No, it does not. I have a sound understanding of the history of Western universities in general and the role that ideological justification of the status quo (first the hegemony of the Catholic Church in medieval society, then various imperialist projects and capitalist modernization) have played in their development. Major American universities would not have the wealth that they enjoy if they were not the recipients of massive amounts of military funding. Universities are integral parts of the knowledge economy, which is an integral part of capitalist society, which remains contradictory in all the ways past generations of critics have noted.

Universities are also contradictory institutions. Since the nineteenth century they have been an essential component of national development strategies, but they have also provided space for the critique, from a variety of perspectives, of those development strategies. In the 1960’s the (now mostly anachronistic) image of the campus radical professor emerged in a context where students were leading the movements against imperialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the soullessness of a future dominated by stratified corporations and the ‘company men’ who ran them.

That critical function of universities is as essential to their history as their function in preparing the next generation of national leaders. Without academic freedom, universities would not have been able to play that role. However, like every right, it cuts both ways: it protects the rights of radical critics to freely articulate their criticisms, but it also protects the right of critics of radicals to criticize in turn.

Academic freedom is thus not essentially a principle of radical criticism or a conservative tool to “repressively tolerate” critique within polite limits. It is a principle that has developed to allow the contemporary university to exist as a space for free intellectual inquiry into anything that can become the object of intellectual inquiry, including the past histories of the various disciplines, the exclusions that have shaped them, and the limited range of voices formerly allowed to speak. Universities are not indoctrination zones for any political perspective. At their best, universities enable students to learn to think critically and independently, to compile and assess evidence, to test principles for coherence and consistency, and to reason, analytically and critically, about the operation of major social institutions and the value systems that guide them (as well as imagine alternative value systems that might guide them in a different future).

Education is not about learning how to mindlessly chant slogans, whether from the left or right. As Marx argued, the question of objective truth independently of human action is a scholastic question: in practice, human beings must prove the truth. But if they are going to prove the truth (whether in physics or philosophy) they have to be able to think: gather evidence, draw inferences, expose contradictions, propose novel syntheses. Learning to think also involves– and this point proves painful for dogmatist of the right and left– to accept that other people think differently. The university provides a space in which those disagreements can be solved rationally, through open debate and comparison of arguments pro and contra. Peoples feelings simply cannot get in the way of this exchange. Education is a not a safe space: it is a conflictual space in which different positions confront one another and accepted truths of any sort contested.

Argument is hard. Listening to counter-arguments that cut against values that define your commitments is painful. De Santis’s bill shows us how not to deal with the problem. Making a theoretical position illegal does not make it go away, as he would hope, but it does destroy the integrity of institutions that are vital for any contemporary society, however one believes that it should be run. But shouting down a person with whom you disagree does not make their position go away either. More likely, it strengthens it because it allows conservative politicians to argue that there is nothing backing up critical perspectives other than shrill, irrational moralism. Since the right tends to be far more ruthless when it wins state power than the left (compare Margaret Thatcher to Jeremy Corbin, Trump to Biden) the left has a pragmatic reason to protect academic freedom. But beneath that pragmatic, must lie a deeper commitment to the belief that the truth will out. If our theories are ultimately the more truthful, then we need to develop them through through open inquiry alongside competing theories and “prove their truth in practice” through and sharp but peaceful argument with our opponents.

My favourite argument in Plato’s Republic concerns the nature of freedom. In Book 3 of The Republic he argues that free people govern themselves by applying the appropriate standard to their conduct in any given situation. Hence, where people rely upon external authorities to make their decisions or get them out of trouble, (his example is doctors and lawyers) the society and the character of its citizens is corrupt. By that metric we live in corrupt times indeed.

I was put in mind of this argument by the news that Erika Lopez Prater, the adjunct professor whose contract was not renewed by Hamline University in Minnesota because she was accused of “Islamophobia” has commenced legal action against the institution. Its not the health of her soul that I worry about– what choice does she have to correct the maligning of her character and competence?– but the soul of her accusers and, more generally, the soul of academic institutions as they drift ever further from a clear understanding of their raison d’etre.

The case stems from a class in art history in which the professor showed a medieval painting of the angel Gabriel in conversation with the Prophet Mohamed. A Muslim student in the class was offended and trotted out the usual cliche’s about not feeling included just because something they were studying made her feel uncomfortable. Instead of acting like a student and challenging the professor in class, i.e., engaging in an argument about whether or not the painting should have been shown, she ran complaining to the boss.

Remember when students thought they were a revolutionary vanguard!

What makes this case all the more disturbing is that the painting was made by a Muslim artist and was shown during a section of the class devoted to Islamic art. How expanding the content of the class beyond the Western canon constitutes Islamophobia is beyond me. A true Islamophobe would either ignore or disparage the histories of Islamic art. In this case, a good faith effort to explore non-Western traditions– are we not constantly enjoined to “diversify” the curriculum?– ended up costing the professor future contracts.

Numerous American Muslim organizations and Islamic professors have weighed in to the controversy to note that there is no absolute prohibition on depicting the prophet Mohamed. As one would expect, the complex philosophical, scientific, theological, and artistic histories of Islam contain different positions on the permissibility of depicting Mohamed. The class could have become an occasion for challenging myths about the intellectual uniformity of the Islamic tradition and its domination by dour fundamentalists, i.e., the caricatured view constructed by real Islamophobes. Instead it became yet another sorry instance of well-meaning people falling victim to cliches. The professor, academic freedom, and the integrity of academic institutions suffered the consequences.

Justifying the egregiously stupid decision to not renew the professor’s contract, the president of Hamline University argued that ” “Prioritizing the well-being of our students does not in any way negate or minimize the rights and privileges assured by academic freedom,” Miller wrote. “But the concepts do intersect.”

They absolutely do not intersect and anyone who thinks that they do should resign their position as a leader of an academic institution. Universities are nor care homes for students’ psychological well-being. They are places of study in which no topic or work can be taboo. If the investigative context calls for it, then The 120 Days of Sodom or Mein Kampf must be on the reading list. If the context calls for it, then medieval paintings of the Prophet Mohamed must be on the syllabus. Universities do not exist to protect or preserve the integrity of religious or other traditions: they exist to question them. No external authority no matter what their beliefs or politics can determine the content of courses or the direction of research. Course content can only be determined by the problem under investigation; the direction of research can only be determined by professors’ interests and the conclusions that they can coherently defend when challenged.

Administrators who do not understand these fundamental, defining principles of the institution need to step down from their roles.

What about student well-being? No student who is at university for the right reasons– to grow intellectually– should ever be offended by any subject explored in good faith in the classroom, on the reading list, or in a public lecture. Academic freedom is based on respect for differences, but it cannot be limited by the worry that some subjects might cause offense. In the classroom context respect entails explaining clearly to students the reasons why certain problems or texts have to be investigated. To avoid topics because some students might take offense is the very opposite of respect: it is demeaning to the student as learner.

Everyone at a university: students, professors, administrators, is a learner. Learners learn by being challenged. Being challenged means being confronted with that which we do not know, with that which we might disagree, with events from history that might disturb, even horrify. When I was an undergraduate at York University (a school with a high proportion of Jewish students) I took a class on the ways in which totalitarian ideologies spread. (It was called, if I remember, Morality and Ideology, and taught by a Professor Katz, I believe). We had to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. How do you think the Jewish students felt watching Hitler rant and rave at Nuremberg? How many recalled their own relatives killed in the Holocaust when they heard a Polish villager tell Lanzmann that they did notice that all of a sudden the Jewish villagers disappeared, but they didn’t care?

I would guess that they felt pretty damn uncomfortable. But no one complained. Prof. Katz was not fired. Everyone understood that the Holocaust and Nazism were historical realities that we must understand if we are to prevent their recurrence. (Perhaps they are still spreading because too many people are afraid to do the hard work of historical understanding and think that “comforting” slogans will protect us from real social dangers). Ignorance, intellectual cowardice, and averting one’s eyes from complex realities do not solve real problems. Nor do cliches and bathetic platitudes about compassion and inclusion solve the problems of hatred and exclusion. Social change does, but real social change depends upon an understanding of history and causes.

The same argument holds in this case. Islamophobia is not stopped by ignoring the complex, rich, and contradictory history of Islam, but by freeing people who are not aware of its richness and complexity (as the student at the heart of this case clearly was not) from their caricatured and cliched misunderstandings. If one-sided views are not challenged, then real Islamophobes will continue to conflate Islam with fundamentalist violence and oppression. Where better than the university to explore these problems?

Nowhere, provided that those who assume leadership roles in the university accept that their role is to serve the primary purpose of university: to challenge ourselves to know better. Smart people behave stupidly when they fail to govern their decision by the appropriate principle. The President of Hamline believed that she had some personal duty of care towards an individual student when her primary duty is towards the institution as a centre of learning. Academic freedom, as I have argued before, is not a personal right held by academics as individuals that allows them to say anything they feel like saying. Academic freedom is a collective right that ensures that that which needs to be studied can be studied without interference from external forces with an interest in suppressing critical thought and argument.

Academic freedom not only will produce discomfort, it ought to produce discomfort. The moment of discomfort is the moment of learning. They have chosen to come to university and must expect that they will be confronted with issues and arguments that challenge their beliefs. Universities bring together the growing totality of human thought and expression. They cannot be transmission belts for any particular culture nor can they erect firewalls around some subjects or positions just because they may offend someone’s religious sensibilities. It would be profoundly wrong to try to hang a painting of Mohamed in a mosque, but, by the same reasoning, it is profoundly wrong to try to prevent critical and historical inquiry into historical depictions of Mohamed.

Administrators must have the strength of character to defend the principle of academic freedom or they must resign.

When it comes to any artwork, the only questions that the artist should ask before they release it to the world are: do the parts fit together in the context of the aesthetic logic of the whole; and do they contribute to the unified effect they are striving towards? The question can never be: will they offend? Once artists start censoring themselves for fear of public opprobrium, art is dead.

Art is killed by the desire to please or conform to public political sensibilities not because its function is to offend, but because its function is to push. Art does not push a particular political line but rather the limits of experience. Art expands the human sensorium; it changes the way we see, hear, feel, touch, and smell the world. It enters into conflict with the commonplace and cliche because it is the result of our creative power. Art that simply repeats what everyone already accepts, or conforms to the limits of polite sensibility is not art because it is not creative. “Creative” does not mean “shocking” or “scandalous.” It means that existing elements of meaning and expression (words, brush strokes, musical notes, etc.) are combined in such a way that something unprecedented is produced.

In order to exist as art, all such creative works must be submitted to public judgment, evaluation, and criticism. However, being open to judgment, evaluation, and criticism, they must also withstand it. If a work cannot withstand criticism it was not yet ready to enter into the world. If it was ready to enter the world, it must hold its own regardless of what critics and people at large think.

To withdraw a work from circulation and instrumentally revise it to accommodate complaints is quite literally the death of art– the extinguishing of the power of creation by the fear of censure and the need to conform.

The liberal left pretends that “cancel culture” is a figment of the right’s imagination. If only that were true. Every week brings new whinging demands for artists to withdraw works that for whatever reason offend sensibilities. These demands are not only politically reactionary, they stem from a deep misunderstanding of the language of art.

Let us consider a few recent examples.

Last week, Beyonce agreed to remove the word “spaz” from a recent release because it was deemed “ableist.” That she would do so is perhaps explicable by the fact that she is a pop artist and does not want to incur the commercial costs of alienating her fans. Such an explanation does not work, for two reasons. First, and most importantly, pop artists are artists. Second, all art has a commercial dimension. Any artist who makes concessions, either for the sake of sales or to appease critics ceases to be an artist.

The problem runs deeper than any particular artist’s reactions to criticism. When critics seize upon a word like “spaz” and argue that it should be removed because it is offensive, they completely misunderstand the language of art. The language of art is not literal: a word, an image, a sound are not chosen by an artist to covey a literal meaning; they are chosen because they help solve a problem specific to the art work. Hence the words do not convey the same force of commentary on the real as they would if they were used in everyday speech. A racist character is a novel is not a racist, because they are not real people but characters whose ‘life’ serves a literary function. The literary function is neither to celebrate nor condemn racism: any work of art which is that literal fails as art. The literary function of characters, as with the elements of any form of art, is to contribute to the realization of the work as a whole. They are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ not according to whether they express ‘good’ or ‘bad’ character traits, but according to whether they contribute to the successful realization of an aesthetic whole. This distinction, upon which the existence of art depends, is continually ignored by the chorus of the perpetually offended. Any artist who withdraws or revises a work simply because a group of the public is incapable of distinguishing the referents of artistic and ordinary language ceases to function as an artist. If “spaz” was the right word then it was the right word and Beyonce should have stuck by her decision. If it was not the right word then the song should not have been released until the right word was found.

The stakes are higher than the lyrics of pop songs. Documenta 15 was disrupted by a complaint a large work by the Indonesian art collective Taring Padi contained caricatured portrayals of Jewish people and was antisemitic. The piece in no way advocated violence towards Jewish people or any other group. The collective apologized and explained that the work was meant to criticize the violence of the Suharto regime. The content deemed antisemitic resulted from their exploration of the connections between Suharto and Mossad. The Artistic Directors– another Indonesian art collective, ruangrupa– agreed to first cover the mural and then remove it. Documenta is no pop song but one of the most important international art festivals. That the organizers gave in to pressure and that the artists themselves felt compelled to apologize is sad but not shocking testimony to the failure to understand the dangers of censorship.

A with the racist character, the artistic use of caricature has to be judged in the context of its contribution to the art work as a whole. Jewish comedy abounds in caricatures of Jewish characters, but these are not normally denounced as antisemitic. They are not antisemitic not because they are typically written by Jewish comics, but because they are not commentaries on Jewish people but characters written for humorous effect. They same reasoning must be applied in the Documenta case. The goal here was not humour but political criticism. One might object that the criticism was rather too obvious and literal, but regardless of how one assesses the work, the only relevant question is: did the figures work coherently within the art work as a whole? If so, they are valid in the context of the piece, and the organizers of the show should have defended it.

The validity or otherwise of art works does not mean that they are above criticism. But criticism is the opposite of censorship. Criticism– at least good criticism– engages with the work, perhaps exposes weaknesses that artists can then push beyond in subsequent efforts. The danger of the Documenta case is not that the removal of this particular work is another successful attempt to link political criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism– although it is that– but that it reveals that aesthetic illiteracy has penetrated the highest echelons of the art world. If they do not understand that censorship does not solve political problems like ableism or anti-Semitism but just kills art, who will stand up for the integrity of art work?

The public has a right to criticize, not to remove or question the right of art works to exist. Another recent controversy involving a new work by one of England’s most important sculptors, Antony Gormley saw students at Imperial College London complaining that they were not “consulted” about the installation of the new work. No wonder, and than god they were not. Some complained that the work was too “phallic,” reading a large square protuberance from the lower middle of the structure as a penis. Gormley contested that reading. That he bothered to engage with this puerile philistinism speaks positively to his character, but the debate is beside the point. One must read the sculpture first of all as a sculpture, as an arrangement of material parts to produce a certain formal coherence which can be interpreted in different ways. No one interpretation– including Gormley’s– is correct. Any art work worth erecting– (no, not in that sense!) in public should generate discussion and debate. The problem with the student objections (aside from its crass, unthinking literalism, thin-skinned over-sensitivity, and platitudinous, prudish moralism) is that they assume that they should carry the day. Their position is thus as dogmatic as it is mindless. Fortunately, the school has refused their request to remove it.

Remember when student’s led the struggle for free speech and the free exercise of the artistic imagination? It is a sad day for campus politics when we have to rely on the administration to defend artistic creation.

But let’s not get too excited about sensible administrators. They can still behave like tyrants. On the same day that the Gormley controversy was being reported the Royal College of Music suspended pianist Alexander Romanovsky. Romanovsky performed with a Russian musician at the theatre in Mariupol that was the site of alleged Russian atrocities. The venue was sure to stir controversy, but art cannot push in the ways I discussed above if it is afraid of controversy. If administrators are afraid of risk, they should move to the City and work for insurance firms rather than run art schools. Since when do school authorities decide where musicians can perform or suspect their motives for performing? If the job of musicians is to play music, we have here a case of someone being suspended for doing his job. Or was it because he had the temerity to perform with a Russian?

When Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem premiered in 1962 to consecrate the new Coventry Cathedral (the original was destroyed in World War Two), he included included a German soloist. The fact that its first performance occurred 16 years after the end of the war is besides the point. There would still have been many veterans and civilian victims in the audience, but Britten understood that music, perhaps more than any art, envelopes listeners in a shared experience that breaks down barriers. Peace requires difficult encounters. If music helps cross divides it has to go to the frontiers to work its magic. Writing to his sister about the Requiem, Britten said that he hoped it would make people “think a bit.” The piece is powerful, but not powerful enough to force people to think.

Underlying each of these attacks on creativity and art work is the naive belief that if everyone were just nice and “inclusive” the problems of the world would go away. Aside from the irony that those who preach inclusivity are typically the first to loudly demand the exclusion of anything that they do not understand or enjoy, the belief is based on a profound misunderstanding of social change. Slogans and platitudes do not change the world. Nor does art, for that matter. Art changes sensibilities, hopefully in the direction of deepening desires for as yet unexperienced forms. As senses and mind open towards the new and difficult, then might emerge the formation of people who demand a better world, one devoted to free expression, interaction, peace, and creative expression.

My friend and collaborator Douglas MacLellan have just completed our 4th chap book: Peace Quatrains. The book is composed of verses by me and photographs by MacLellan. Our collaborations began years ago as parts of the Mayworks Windsor Festival. The Festival has run its course, but MacLellan and I were motivated to continue on by the war in Ukraine. The book is not a protest, much less a solution, but perhaps bets thought of as a lament for the persistence of the human capacity to choose the wrong road when the right one (peace) stretches out clear as day before us.

From my Introduction:

My approach to social philosophy is to get beneath surface explanations of events to tease out the historical causes of conflict.  I have always resisted arguments, whether expressed in moralistic or religious language, that violence is baked into the human condition.  Instead, I have built my work on the conviction, adopted from Marx, that the depth cause of all forms of social violence is the private ownership of and control over the resources and institutions that everyone must access if they are to survive and flourish.  If we can get the social institutions right, I have always argued, we can create the conditions for social peace.  Once the conditions of social peace have been secured, everyone will be free to develop themselves according to their own interests and talents.  Life will be—so far as possible for a dependent and mortal creature—free and self-directed.  

But there has also always been another side to my work, darker in spirit, subterranean, exposed to the sunlight only rarely– which worries that necessary as it may be to believe that there are social solutions to every problem, the truth might be that the source of conflict and violence lies deeper, in some ultimate perversity of human nature that drives us to consciously destroy whatever we have built up.  This thought is not original:  Schopenhauer argued that were we to create an idyllic state boredom would drive us to attack each other, and Freud, of course, famously argued that we were pulled in opposite directions by Life and Death instincts.  But perhaps the John Spencer Blues Explosion expresses the thought most eloquently: for whatever reason, people are driven to “fuck shit up.”

Is there a better description for the war between Russia and Ukraine (with the US and NATO hiding in plain sight)? 

One can comprehend Putin’s raisons d’etat for invasion:  he does not want to be encircled by NATO, NATO gave Russia assurances in 1991 about not expanding beyond the German-Polish border, the need to protect Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine.  But what does understanding those historical and political causes achieve?  Perhaps only further evidence that rulers regularly make colossal mistakes when they do not compare what makes political sense from a particular perspective with what makes sense, not only from an overall strategic perspective (is a given policy likely to achieve its aims?), but from a human perspective (what is necessary, nationally and internationally, to secure the conditions for social peace?) 

What is necessary is an instituted commitment to sharing the world’s resources and using them only to satisfy our natural and social needs.  Instead, the world has war again.  The philosophical verses contained in this book won’t solve anything, and I hope they are a little more than naively hopeful.  I see them as honest:  the causes of war lie deeper than political-economic conditions, in the thousands of years old desire for conquest.  If we are ever to be free of war, we have to free ourselves from this desire to constantly impose partial perspectives and interests on the whole.  We must learn, as Kierkegaard argued in Either/Or, to value possession (savouring, contentment) over conquest.   The verses can be read (but of course you are free to follow your own thoughts as you read them), as counterposing different deep sources of conflict with suggestions as to how we might cultivate an ethic of contentment.  

The form of the book was inspired by Brecht’s War Primer.   

You can purchase a copy by following this link:

https://douglas-maclellan-photographer.square.site/product/peace-quatrains/32

New Year’s Day dawned dreary. Covid cases continued to spike. I knew that the winter term would begin once again on-line. I worried that I would not be able to hide my absolute lack of enthusiasm for another 12 weeks of sitting in front of my computer pretending to teach from my students.

And then things go worse.

At about one o’clock, as I was working on a lecture, an email notification popped up. John McMurtry, path-breaking Canadian philosopher, my doctoral dissertation supervisor, and critical interlocutor and friend for 25 years had died.

The news was deflating but not unexpected. In one of those strange coincidences that seem to surround death I had reached out to him on the day of the solstice to wish him season’s greetings and to send him a paper I had just finished. The strange thing is that I did not want to write the paper, but felt some push to do so. I wrote it very quickly, at the behest of Chinese organizers who invited me to submit a proposal for a conference on political economy. The time frame was very short and I initially thought about ignoring the invitation. But something gnawed at me. I wrote the proposal and then the full paper in only 2 weeks. The paper put McMurtry’s idea of “life-capital” to work in a re-reading of the core principles of Marxist political economy. I sent him the paper on the solstice. In his response, he told me that the bladder cancer from which he had been suffering off and on for a few years had returned, and that he knew that his time on the planet was drawing to a close. Philosophical to the end, he did not lament his fate but told me that he was at peace with death, knowing that he had given everything he had to life.

There could be no clearer illustration of what Socrates meant when he said that philosophy is a preparation for death. He did not mean that adopting this or that set of principles dispels the fear of death; he meant that a properly cultivated philosophical disposition enables one to live the right way, so that when the end comes, one can face it knowing that one has lived every moment as fully as possible and struggled to do the right thing as much as beings of limited intellect and contradictory passions can do.

John instilled that philosophical disposition in me. It was his greatest strength as a supervisor. Never be lazy, he would urge, spell out the argument, don’t skip steps, be rigorous, and above all, don’t simply repeat things that have already been said. “Say it fresh or don’t say it,” he once told me. I have tried to follow that advice in every sentence I have written since.

John was, as the name of the column he used to write for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives newsletter The Monitor stated), an iconoclast. He was not always easy to work with and he could be a trenchant (but not dogmatic) critic of others’ work (including my own). But he did not cultivate disagreement for its own sake: if someone thought that his arguments were inadequate or failed, he wanted to know what, in particular, the problems were. He also wanted to see a more comprehensive alternative articulated. His commitment to the “unforced force of the better argument” (Habermas) led to many broken chains of communication with other philosophers. Ideally, one would hope that all philosophers would be committed to debate until an agreement acceptable to both sides was reached. That was often not the case. I was included on many an email chain where the opposite would happen: under persistent questioning from John people would, like Socrates’ dialogue partners, just walk away rather than continue the discussion.

For the past 25 years the cause of the aporia was always the same: the inability or unwillingness of philosophers from other traditions to demonstrate how their positions answered the key problems of philosophy in ways that were as comprehensive and practically efficacious as the “life-value-onto-axiology” John spent the last quarter of his career developing. From my sometimes observer and sometimes participant perspective, I felt that sometimes John might have interpreted acceptable conditions of agreement in too-fine-grained terms. Consequently, opportunities for overlapping consensus, to borrow a term from Rawls, were missed. However, in the main I would see people hunker down in their traditional position rather than open themselves to the possibility that McMutry had found a genuinely new set of concepts– implicit in, but not systematically developed by, Eastern and Western philosophical traditions.

John often attributed this reticence to careerism and gate-keeping, but I think the answer lies deeper, in the path-dependencies that emerge after years and decades of work. Few and far between are Saul on the road to Damascus epiphanies: people tend to stick with the ideas they have worked on over the course of their career, not because it provides a pay cheque, but because their whole self has been invested in them. Philosophers thus regularly miss opportunities for real philosophical growth, but perhaps that tells us that philosophers are human beings too and cannot always follow the ideas where they lead.

McMurtry’s ideas led from analytic Marxism towards what G.A. Cohen, his supervisor at the University of London (before Cohen moved to Oxford) “some of the most exhilarating philosophy I have ever read.” Though exhilarating, the orienting idea of his new departure is in fact as old as recorded human thought and as easy as breathing to understand: all value in the universe depends upon the existence of sentient life. All coherent scientific, philosophical and political thought must begin from the principle that life-support is the foundation of every other good. Every other good, in turn, is an instrumental condition of healthy living or an expressed and enjoyed capacity of living things. Unlike the dominant trends in analytic and continental philosophy at the time he began to chart this course, McMurtry maintained that values were not subjective dispositions or cultural constructs but fundamental elements of the lived world (hence the ten cent term “onto-axiology”– values grounded in being). Subjective dispositions and cultural systems had to be judged in terms of the degree to which they enable the health and development of living beings (and not just humans– life-value philosophy is resolutely anti-anthropocentric). Life-value thinking thus opened the way to a coherent synthesis of scientific, philosophical, and political understanding, if people would drop their one-sided commitments and re-think their arguments in life-value terms.

Few were willing to do so explicitly (although, if one looks at work from the last twenty years, it is remarkable the extent to which the problems of need-satisfaction, global health, environmentally coherent public policy, and life as a foundational value appear). McMurtry claimed no credit for this global turn, and I think that positions like Sen’s or Nussbaum’s were cases of reaching similar places by different roads). What McMurtry did that no one else did was to articulate a systematic, universal foundation for positions like Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to social justice or Doyal’s and Gough’s theory of human needs. His achievement was not nearly as overtly influential as it should have been in academic philosophy.

I think this lack of explicit influence bothered John, but I also believed him when he said, repeatedly, that what matters is that the ideas circulate, not personal recognition. One has the right to the work, not to the fruits, he would say, paraphrasing Krishna’s advice to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. I learned that passage from John, and I have meditated on it many nights when petty professional jealousies stir in my mind and heart.

Just do the work as well as you can do. Then do it better again the next day. Nothing else matters.

Central to John’s later philosophy was the idea that each person is part of a greater whole of life. He derived this position from Indian philosophy on the one hand (the ultimate identity of consciousness and being in a boundless oneness beyond ego and its attachments) and Marx’s idea that the “individual is the social being” on the other. We both emerge from and depend upon social connections to each other and to the earth. If we meditate on that fact it becomes clear that the value of our lives is not exhausted in our ego-centric attachment to our own existence, but is in truth realized in the contributions that we make to the universal social subject. This universal subject has no natural life and death and is not bounded by the finitude of individual consciousness. When we identify our good with the good of that boundless social subject we can die secure in the knowledge that our ego dissipates but we live on in the future of the life-whole that our contributions helped sustain.

Having satisfied himself that there was nothing more for him to give, he passed peacefully into the ego-less universality of earth and memory.

When I learned of John’s death I did not feel so much sad as philosophically alone; the possibility of further conversation about life-value philosophy seemed over. But the dialogue can continue because the ideas still exist, and that is just how John would want it to be.

Once again I feel the need to intervene on recent controversies in which the repressive and regressive tactics of self-styled progressive activists are placing them on the wrong side of history and in the service of a constricted, suffocating vision of an emancipated future. The (strangely, perhaps) intertwined controversies engulfing Sussex University Philosophy Professor Kathleen Stock and superstar comedian Dave Chappelle emphasise the need for progressive activists to re-learn the political history of censorship and to re-embrace a spirit of comdradely critique, and eschew once for all reactionary-totalitarian cancel culture.

Historically, totalitarian movements have been the ones to demand complete unity of opinion and expression. They know full well that such a goal is impossible to achieve, so they have exiled, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered dissidents. That is the primary reason why freedom of thought and speech is a non-negotiable left-wing demand. The left has had its flirtations with maniacal group-think- The Cultural Revolution in China perhaps being the most extreme example. And while the treatment of Stock has not yet reached those levels, the walls do seem to be closing in on her.

This morning I was forced to read a shockingly backward intervention from her own Union local which calls upon the University to uphold its commitments to create safe spaces for trans people, while failing utterly to defend their own member from organized anonymous threats from the self-identified trans activists demanding her dismissal. This letter is the most shameful abdication of responsibility to protect a member’s academic freedom that I have ever read. It explicitly criticizes the Vice-Chancellor’s defence of Stock’s academic freedom. The letter argues that there should be no contradiction between trans rights and academic freedom– and there should not be. But there very definitely is a contradiction between academic freedom and the way Stock is being treating by the anonymous mob of trans activists threatening her, and the union is doing nothing to protect her.

The letter tepidly adds that they do not think Stock should be fired, but its whole thrust is to re-iterate the false accusations that she is some sort of dangerous transphobe upon which the demands for her dismissal are being based. The letter is the most shameful pandering imaginable to an anonymous mob which refuses to argue and instead begs the established powers to fire a worker– and then presents themselves as an alternative to established power!

Alisdair MacIntyre joked, in his book on Marcuse, that the 1960s student rebellions in the United States were the world’s first parent-financed revolution. Today we have the even more absurd spectacle of self-styled radicals asking the bosses to advance the cause of social freedom. And the Union is on board!

The members should remove this leadership immediately. They have shown themselves unwilling and incapable of fulfilling the basic duty of officers of a union to defend the members If Stock is unsafe then no one is safe. Those who have read her book will understand that she is not transphobic and does not demand that anyone be erased from history. She disagrees with some political demands made by some sectors of the trans movement because she argues– as is obvious– that females have faced unique forms of oppression as females (hello Texas attacks on abortion). Since there are female specific problems there is still a need still a need for organization and mobilization as females. None of these argument have any negative bearing on the rights and interests of trans people.

If some sectors of the trans movement nevertheless believe that Stock’s argument is wrong and harmful, then they should by all means make that case loudly, but through counter-argument, not reactionary demands for the bosses to fire her. Academic freedom is not the right of academics to say anything they want. It is a collective right to conjointly search for the truth through the process of dialogue and constructive disagreement. There can be no prior constraint (much less politically correct pre-determination) on what is true or false, but only a commitment to advance the search through reason and evidence. Where good faith arguments are offered- and Stock’s is obviously a good faith argument- good faith criticisisms must be offered in return.

Stock’s accusers have failed in their duty as students and academics to constructively engage the issues that she raises in favour of childish name calling and threats. If she is wrong, prove her wrong: she is a philosopher, and an English one at that, so she will be well used to people having an hard argumentative go at her. But to align one’s self with the bosses power to dismiss is as backward a move for the left as can be imagined. If you don’t like disagreement join a cult or a fundamentalist religious movement. Otherwise, make a better case than your opponent or concede the point.

The Chappelle controversy is less serious in so far as he is in no danger of losing his livelihood. But the same political problem and the same political solution is at its heart. I am a fan of Chappelle and I laughed long and hard at The Closer. I was certainly made uncomfortable by some of the jokes (especially the jokes that cut to the heart of white racism– I don’t think I am a racist, but I am part of a white world that is, and none expose that tension better than Chappelle). Chappelle’s shtick is to telegraph that something outrageous is coming, pause a moment, just long enough for the audience to think that he is going to back off, and then hit a punch line is even more outrageous than the audience expected.

Not everyone finds it funny. Some find it hurtful. But we cannot ban artistic expression just because some find it hurtful. There would be no art left. Do we ban the Bible because some Jews see in it divine sanction to expel Palestinians? Do we burn the Gospels because some Christians have misinterpreted its message to justify violence against non-Christians? Do we put the Dharmapadda on the Index because some Sinhalese interpret Buddhism in a way that justifies their war against Tamils? Do we knock down the pyramids of Teotihuacan because virgins were thrown off of them in acts of ritual sacrifice. On and on and on we could go.

Humour does not cause violence, just as heavy metal music did not cause America’s teenagers to become suicidal or murderous satanists, as Tipper Gore and other backward church ladies argued in the 1980s.

Enough!

If you do not like Chappelle’s humour, criticize it, as those who disagree with Stock should criticize her. The trans comedian Dahlia Belle did just that in a recent piece in The Guardian. It is a model for how people– academics, artists, people on the street– should deal with disagreement: expose the problems with the other person’s position and demand (and provide) better. Belle understands that the progress of any art depends upon criticism. She takes Chappelle to task for telling weak jokes. Whether one agrees with her or not, the point is, that coherent agreement and disagreement is possible, because she makes an argument, which is more– shamefully- that can be said for the executive committee of the University and Colleges Union at Sussex University.

The struggle against oppression is complex and people will disagree about strategy and tactics. But the struggle against it is for the sake of a free world, a world where differences proliferate and people get along. But getting along does not mean that we all agree, or even like each other. It means that we do not kill each other because we are different. Philosophy and comedy challenge and provoke, but killing begins where they end. Leave the re-education camps to the fascists, please.

The history of liberalism is, from one perspective, the history of struggles to extend the scope of human and citizenship rights. From the generic demands of the “rights of man and citizen” declared on behalf of the whole world by the French Third Estate, different groups that make up the whole world and have consistently mobilized in their own name to demand that rights be concretized to meet their unmet needs. Women, workers, and enslaved people in the French colonies were the first to argue that the Declaration was too abstract. Since it failed to include their perspectives, its abstract rights could not satisfy their needs. In the twentieth century, African Americans were forced to struggle again for their civil rights; radical feminists deepened the fight against new forms of patriarchy, and gays and lesbians began a struggle for their own liberation. Disabled people have organized in pursuit of their rights; environmentalists have argued in favour of animal rights and the extension of rights-protections to natural spaces. Indigenous people have articulated specific sets of rights and struggled to have them recognized by settler-colonialist societies. All these movements continue in one form or another and still novel avenues open. In the last twenty years trans persons have become more organized and vocal in defence of their rights.

Like the struggles that preceded them, trans activists have highlighted the ways in which existing interpretations of equal rights have failed to address their particular concerns. Like other groups that have stood up for their interests, trans activists too have faced strong opposition, and not always from right wing defenders of a conservative sexual morality. Indeed, some of the most heated arguments have erupted between some groups of feminists and lesbians and trans activists.

Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters to Feminism, attempts to lower the political and rhetorical temperature between the two camps through calm and careful argument. The positions that she adopts on the underlying scientific and philosophical issues will not produce universal assent, but they ought to encourage reasoned argument oriented by the goal of building solidarity between feminism and trans activists. Even though she has been a target of vituperative condemnation by some trans activists, Stock makes it clear throughout her book that she fully supports their general demands demands for legal protection against discrimination. “Trans people are trans people. We should get over it. They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and to have exactly the same life opportunities non-trans people do.’ (p. 241) She does not believe that the law can be a vehicle that compels others to believe what she regards as scientific untruths about the non-reality of biological sex, but on the more important issue of building a world in which trans people can live secure, full, and free lives her agreement is unequivocal.

Where Stock differs most sharply from some trans activists is on the complex question of the relationship between biological sex and gender identity. Stock maintains that biological sex is real, defined by the male-female dichotomy, and unchangeable. She recognizes the difficulty of providing a universal definition of biological sex that covers the array of morphologies and chromosomal arrangements that are found in human beings. These complexities not withstanding, she does arrive at a complex definition of sex that adequately covers the actual range of male and female bodies that we find in nature. While she insists that evolutionary dynamics and human social life both prove the reality and importance of biological sex, she does not deny that trans people’s gender identities do not align with their biological sex. She does deny that feelings about gender identity should always override the material reality of biological sex. That is the claim that so angers many trans activists, especially in the UK.

The debate between so-called TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and trans activists in the UK has tended to degenerate into name calling, de-platforming, and threats of violence. Stock herself has been on the receiving end of accusations of transphobia and has been subjected to de-platforming. However, any charitable reading of her book reveals her to be a sober minded, witty, calm, careful thinker. She is sharply critical about some claims that some trans activists make, but when people make claims which other people can reasonably question, the appropriate response is counter-argument, not shouting at them to shut up. Matters that involve the public invite public debate, and trans issues, since they involve changes to laws and traditions, involve the public, making them matters of general concern around which open, non-dogmatic, debate is important.

Stock never claims to have every answer and is honest where she thinks her arguments need further work. All she demands is that argument be met with argument, not vituperative ad hominem.(pp.40-43) She is a philosopher by profession, but also in the best normative sense of the word: she has the courage to expose some absurd implications of incautious claims, but is also open to being proven wrong. Her book is analytic philosophy at its best, marshalling a close attention to the implications of her opponents’ principles for the sake of creating shared understandings and better policy.

The book flows smoothly over some very difficult philosophical, political, and scientific issues. I want to concentrate on the three that I found most important. 1) the complex relationships between the biological and socio-cultural dimensions of human being; 2) the reality of sex and the demands of trans activists; and 3) the problem of solidarity and separatism in the construction of political movements.

The relationship between the biological and socio-cultural dimensions of human being is a long standing and very difficult philosophical and scientific problem. Trans persons’ struggles have– like feminists before them– revealed the sharp political stakes behind what, on first blush, seems a rather simple matter. Human beings are, after all, animals. We are undoubtedly shaped by bio-physical forces. Our lives and health depend upon a few key physical parameters: hydration and nutrition levels, the ability of our immune system to recognize pathogenic threats, the structural integrity of our skin and skeletal structure. At the biological level, human beings are a complex organic system defined by intricately evolved relationships between organs. Organs are functional arrangements of tissues which must operate within fairly narrowly defined parameters. We cannot live if our hearts are removed, or our lungs, or both kidneys. If we flood our bodies with toxins we will die; if pathogens like Covid for which we lack antibodies invade, we can become seriously ill or die.

No matter how committed one might be rhetorically to the position that scientific facts are “socially constructed,” no one is going to eat plutonium for lunch, because they know that whatever word we use to refer to atomic element 94, the element itself is highly radioactive and will kill anyone near it. Even if a language lacks a word for the element, the element itself exists, and will kill everyone exposed to it, whether they know of it or believe in it. Stock rejects the arguments of social constructvists like Judith Butler along analogous lines: “It follows from the logic of Butler’s worldview not only that there are not two pre-given, stable biological sexes, but also that there are no pre-given facts about natural selection. There is no sexual reproduction. There are no pre-given chemical elements or biological species.”(63) In its hard form, social constructivism carries on a lamentable confusion on the left between the mind-and-language-independent elements and dynamics of the physical universe and the changing, fallible, susceptible to ideological and life-destructive use of human science. The hypothetical deductive method has unarguably produced (fallible and corrigible) insights in to physical nature. The computer on which I am typing does not work by magic. A fricassee of plutonium will kill you.

There can be no room for reasonable debate (a debate between two positions each of which is plausibly true) on matters of the basic biological foundations of human life. However, most social constructivists are not concerned with scientific facts about biological life. They are rightly concerned with the way in which claims about purported biological facts have been used to justify oppressive systems. For example, the exclusion of women from public life from ancient Athens to the French Revolution was justified by appeal to spurious claims about women’s nature. But the problem here is not “biological determinism,” but a bad, sexist argument rooted in scientific ignorance on one hand (women are not less intelligent than men) and ideological use of that misinformation facts on the other. Stock urges critics not to throw the baby of objective investigation of natural processes out with the bath water of ideological misuse of scientific findings. (pp.70-71)

Once we shift focus, from physical dynamics to human interpretations, we arrive at the live centre of the debate that most concerns Stock. If it is obvious that human beings have a biological nature, and no one can coherently deny this nature when it comes to objective facts like “humans will die if they eat plutonium,” why have the facts about our sexual nature become so politicized? After all, a penis or vagina is an organ just like a heart or kidney, and no one says that their functions are socially constructed. The answer is that facts about our circulatory system do not determine our identity but function as frames within which we live our lives. But having a penis or vagina, or XX or XY chromosomes does not always determine how we feel about ourselves, how we express ourselves in private, or present ourselves in public (or how we would do so if it were safe), or how we feel about other people of the same or opposite sex. One fundamental dimension of feminist and later gay and lesbian struggle was to free people’s self-understanding of their life-horizons and sexuality from their biological sex characteristics. Trans activism radicalizes this struggle further.

So why would a feminist and lesbian activist like Stock oppose their argument that what matters to people’s well-being is not sex characteristics but gender identity? If she insists that biological sexes are real, but admits that trans people do not feel aligned with their biological sex, must she argue that being trans is “unnatural,” in the pernicious way that sexists thought that women politicians were “unnatural” or homophobes that that gay and lesbian desires were “unnatural?” One can see why critics would draw this conclusion, but it is not in fact the argument that Stock makes.

Stock provides an excellent overview of the history of the development of different meanings of gender, from its early use to indicate socially constructed dispositions that arose form social pressures imposed on members of the biological sexes to its current use, “gender identity” which links gender with inner feelings unconnected to one’s biological sex. (pp.109-141). She rejects that interpretation of gender identity because she thinks it implies that how one feels can literally change what one (biologically) is (p.148). Some trans activists may disagree, in which case they need to respond to the substance of her argument. The substance of her argument is not that trans people do not exist; she is not– as she is sometimes accused of doing, trying to “erase” trans people. Instead, she is arguing that trans people should be understood to be trans people: trans men, trans women, or non-binary, but not identical to men or women just because they claim to feel “like” a woman or a man. Stock therefore does not believe that a (biologically born) male who identifies as a woman (a trans woman) is a woman. She rejects the slogan “trans women are women,” but she does not reject the (to my mind, more politically important claim) that trans women, trans men, and non-binary people have every right to social and legal protection where and as appropriate.

That last point leads to the second major point of contention between Stock and some trans activists and the second part of the book upon which I want to focus– whether or not trans women should have full, free, and unfettered access to those spaces that have normally been sex-segregated: change rooms, high-level sporting competitions, and, especially, women’s shelters and rape crisis centres. Since Stock argues that one cannot literally change one’s sex, she believes that sex still matters in a number of domains. It matters in medicine, both in terms of treatment and the allocation of research dollars to diseases that typically affect females, and statistics (if biologically male trans women are counted as females, statistical incidence of female-typical diseases will be distorted). It matters for similar reasons in crime statistics: if rapes committed by biological males identifying as women are counted as female crimes, important statistical distortions could be introduced. It matters in sport, where recently transitioned trans women could have an unfair advantage over biological women. It matters for the personal and sexual integrity and autonomy of lesbians, who are sometimes told that they need to “get over’ their lack of attraction to trans women (i.e., biological males). And it matters to women who, for a number of sounds reasons, want some spaces preserved as female only (pp.76-108).

On all of these issues Stock presents cogent arguments. They all follow from her principle that since biological sex is a reality, wherever recognition of biological sex makes a political, economic, or emotional difference to women’s and girl’s lives, the gains they have made by forcing society to recognize and valorize their concerns must be preserved and female exclusivity maintained. Where such differences do not matter, then trans women should be welcomed fully and freely. A spirit of mutual recognition of distinct interests should prevail, and where possible, practical compromises worked out (Men’s, Women’s, and Unisex bathrooms, for example).

The third aspect of her book that I want to discuss is the issue of the continued salience of feminism as a women’s movement. Why, Stock asks, should the emergence of new and legitimate trans demands be accepted at the expense of the historic gains of women to build some spaces free of males?(pp. 252-261) Stock’s arguments here are once again reasonable and recognize the legitimacy of trans struggles. She also insists that political struggles, in order to be coherent, have to have a specific focus determined by the well-defined interests of the people in whose name the movement was built. The women’s movement was built to address patriarchal domination (rooted historically in the sexual division of labour) of girls and adult women. Introducing trans demands into feminism as a women’s movement simply muddies the waters, according to Stock, sidetracks the struggle into abstract debates about whether trans women are women, and thus weakens the political power of feminism and trans activism.

My own work has long argued in favour of the need for unified mass movements that connect human beings across differences. The fundamental problem, in my view, is the way in which the resources that all need are controlled by a minority and exploited for their own enrichment. However, I have also acknowledged the need for distinct groups to voice their distinct demands in separate political organizations. Stock adopts a separatist position when it comes to trans demands. She does not believe that either the women’s or the gay and lesbian movement can do an adequate job defending trans people’s interests, because the interests of women, gays, and lesbians are different from the interests of trans people. The attempt to incorporate trans demands into the heart of feminism and gay and lesbian movements has dulled their ability to fight specifically for women and gays and lesbians. The language of women’s and gay and lesbian liberation has been replaced by a vacuous ideal of inclusivity.(p.244) Again, her argument is not with the legitimacy of trans demands but with the fit between their content and the interests of women, gays and lesbians. If every movement tries to be everything, it must empty itself of coherent demands. The practical result will be infighting on the one hand (as the reality of different interests makes itself felt) and failure to solve the substantive problems on the other.

I agree that different problems sometimes require different movements, but on almost all the problems so cogently discussed in the book I also think that the general way forward requires everyone receiving a healthy dose of an older feminist ideal: androgyny. Stock herself makes this recommendation (p.249) If neither sex nor gender identity mattered as much as they still do, many, many problems of women, gays, lesbians, trans and non-binary people, and heterosexual males too would be on the way to being solved. That is not the world we inhabit, but it is the world I think we should build towards.

The irrepressible Mayworks Windsor impressario, Susan Gold Smith, decided that she needed to take a break from organizing a proper Mayworks Windsor festival this year. Hats off to Susan for more than a decade of tireless work on the project (and more before that, when Mayworks Windsor was the Windsor Labour Arts festival). Although she did not organize a full festival, she continued to work on her own project, a mail art intervention in support of the nomination of Cuba’s international medical brigades for the Noble Peace Prize. The 20 postcards from around the world are on display in the window of her studio at 110 Park Street. Readers who are in Windsor are encouraged to stop by to see it.

Also on the informal Mayworks agenda is a 6th collaboration between me and my friend and Windsor photographer Douglas MacLellan. We began working together on a poster project for Mayworks Windsor in 2016 and have continued to find fun ways to amuse ourselves (and contribute to your aesthetic edification) ever since. This year’s project is a chapbook printed on handmade paper by Collette Broeders, featuring words by me and photos by Douglas. Douglas will produce a limited number for sale. The book is available for purchase at:

https://checkout.square.site/buy/TNOCTIXTU7WDGCTJOQKNRL3Y

More information can be found at:

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https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10165209482725524&id=885855523

or contacting Douglas at: douglasmaclellan59@gmail.com

Between 2012 and 2017 I wrote a series of essays for the website Philosophers for Change. I wrote the essays at the invitation of the Singapore-based website editor, Sanjay Perrera. I would like to thank Sanjay for his original invitation and on-going support for my work. The website still exists, but currently only as an archive of the essays that he commissioned. He has not posted original content since 2017.

Last year, I approached a publisher with the idea of re-packaging a selection of those essays as a book. They understandably quieried me as to why they would publish and try to sell material that was already available on line for free. When they passed on the project, I realised that I was being driven more by vanity then good philosophical sense. Books have an allure that websites do not (at least for academics of my generation), but the abiding goal of intellectuals should be to disseminate their ideas, not stroke their ego by adding a line to their CV.

I thus wisely abandoned the book project and decided instead to gather them together and re-post them here. Sanjay has moved on to his own publishing projects and I do not know how long he will want to keep paying to keep the website going. I think that the pieces that I wrote for Philosophers for Change are some of the best political philosophy that I have written. Their tone settles somewhere between the conversational informality I try to achieve with my blog posts and the formality of academic essays. Most address problems of political and economic organization through the lens of events current at the time of their writing, but I do not think that the arguments are stale.

The structural problems that the world faces continue to re-appear in different concrete forms. Philosophy should focus on the underlying forms, not the changing day to day events through which they manifest themselves. There is a need for top quality critical journalism of the mundane, but there is also a need– I would say a preponderant need- for more patient reflective analysis and critique. I tried to satisfy the later need with these essays, but without floating off into complete abstraction from the world.

Looking back, I am surprised at the volume of work that I produced. There are 15 essays– enough for two or three printed volumes. As my interest turn (or return) to the deepest underlying problems of human being– producing meaning in a meaningless universe, finding universal value underlying distinctive cultural practices, finding common goods in the ephemeral experiences of human life– I decided that I would collect and repost the essays here as something of my final word on these problems.

My final word is not the final word, clearly, but I have reached– or am reaching– a point in my career where I want to continue the path I set for myself in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life and leave debates over the practical problems of institutional change to others. In truth, I do not think the problems of the world are so obscure that they require much more philosophical decoding. The basic problems people face all reduce to lack of access to basic natural and social need-satisfiers. What more does philosophy have to say? It is time to mobilise to take back control of natural resources, social wealth, and our own life-times. If we collectively controlled those resources and that wealth, we could satisfy our needs and free ourselves materially to create lives that are individually meaningful and socially valuable and valued.

Moving from here to there is a practical, not a philosophical problem. My philosophical interests now lie in discovering whether there is anything of universal significance to say about the meaning, value, and goodness of life. My new project pursues those questions by tracing the role that sensuous pleasure has played in the justification of mortal, finite life across historical time and cultural space. While I would love nothing more that to sit on my couch and read, walk by the river and reflect, and hunch over my computer in my study and write about those issues, I am sure that the world will pull my attention back to the day to day struggle. The blog will never be indifferent to pressing practical concerns, but I do not foresee me paying sustained philosophical attention to practical-political issues again, at least not in the systematic way that I do in these essays.

I thus offer them to anyone who is interested.

Philosophers for Change 1

Philosophers for Change 2

Philosophers for Change 3

Philosophers for Change 4

Philosophers for Change 5

Feel free to download and put the arguments to new work. If you do put them to work, please refer to the Philosophers for Change website as well as this one. Without Sanjay’s encouragement, the essays would not exist.