North of Wyandotte/Poem of Despair and Great Longing is the fifth collaboration for Mayworks Windsor between Windsor photographer Douglas MacLellan and I. Originally, the plan was to produce a series of 3×5 handbills with MacLellan’s photographs and a five part poem by Noonan and distribute them at random in different bars around Windsor and Detroit. However, since it may be some time before there are any bars open in Windsor and Detroit, we present the work first in virtual form. The tenor of the times forced me to change the structure and tone of the poem.

Doug has now created these attractive portfolios for sale. They contain a printed version of the poem and 8 limited edition prints of his photographs. Please contact me in the comments if you are interested in purchasing a copy.

Poem of Despair and Great Longing

Last night you said: “It’s so quiet, 

and we can finally see the stars!”

I replied: “But look how dark, behind them.

And listen how uncaring,

its monstrous eternity.

The next night,

incautious,

you stepped into

the void.

You stuck

to its circumference

as it expanded.

It neither laughed nor smiled,

but just increased  

the distance between us.

I was fixed in place,

but could see

your beautiful face

drifting off.

I cried out:

“Take my hand!

It’s not too late!

Reach out!

We can pull each other back!”

But we could not.

The more I needed

you,

the faster it pulled

you away.

[And I thought: “It is my fault

for thinking,

that cold January day

walking down 16^th St.

in Philadelphia

that travel is too much bother

just to:

Eat the same different food,

see the same different people,

drink the same different drinks.

and look at the same different buildings.”

And thinking that, I tightened my scarf

against a dry-ice cold wind

blowing up the Delaware River

kept walking,

and wished I were home].

The dark expanded,

But then, from its centre

a faint light,

like an LED glow.

I could see you,

but it did not lessen

my loneliness,

but burnished it with melancholy.

You were already becoming

just a memory.

You looked the same,

even from a distance.

I would be happy

just to see you,

maybe,

if I were an electron cloud,

or a wave function,

or an image, an avatar, an algorithm.

But I am substance:

mass, bone, tissue, blood;

flesh and soft curves.

A knowing glance

is not enough

for me.

I say: silence is better

than weak wit

and saccharine sentiment.

I do not want your

thoughts and prayers

or hopes

or home recipes

for profound positive change.

I want to touch.

I want to kiss

and be kissed.

I want the sun on my face

as I walk along the river,

free.

And if I cannot have that,

I want to weep, suffer,

and mourn my loss,

while I make onion gravy,

and play loud music

and drink strong drink.

North of Wyandotte

John Brown, b. Sarnia ON, July 4th, 1953, d. Toronto, ON, March 21st, 2020

Worse than cruelty is indifference. Cruelty is intentional: we can comprehend it and combat it. But you cannot fight that which is indifferent to your existence or make it care that you are suffering. I was working in the garden two days ago. Ina temperate climate, winter snow and cold are redeemed by the joy of seeing and hearing the world come back to life in spring: perennials push through the soggy ground, birds call out to mates, your cheeks feel the first flash of warmth in the sun’s rays.

But I had to stop. Because as my senses bore witness to the natural world springing back to life, my mind kept reminding me of the threat the Coronavirus was posing to our human world. And I could feel that nothing cared. Nature might be a womb that nurtures us, but it is not a mother who loves us. We are special only in our own eyes. The crocuses will blossom and the trees will bud with or without us.

Today– my birthday– the sun is the brightest it has been all year. There is a chill, yes, but the city is sunlit gold. And I cannot bear to look, because yesterday John Brown died.

Jack was my uncle, but he was really my brother and best friend and teacher in one person. He died and nature did not stop being beautiful and indifferent. It leaves me alone to mourn– and it keeps turning and being beautiful. And I cannot bear its silence. It should call out in sympathy, but it has nothing to say that can speak to our grief. Death is our tragedy, but nature’s means of renewal.

I have known Jack my whole life, but he became of supreme importance to me as a teenager. Once or twice a year I would leave the little mining town where I grew up to visit him in Toronto. The excitement would build as the bus sped down highway 69, intensify as it became the 400, wide with cars and trucks moving at southern Ontario speed, and reach a pitch as we turned onto Avenue Road for the final stretch to the bus station on Elizabeth Street. I still love Avenue Road- that is where I felt I had reached The City!

In retrospect, Toronto was much more provincial when I first visited, but it was the biggest city I had ever been to and its ranking in the league tables was irrelevant. Jack unlocked a secret world of art, punk rock, super cool clothes, new cuisines … but most of all, freedom.

Freedom from the conformity of my small town, but more importantly freedom to live as a creative subject. I am sure that the lives of he and his fellow artists had stresses and strains that I could not understand as a 13, 14, 15 year old boy, but I could understand that they did not get up for work at 5 am in the freezing winter to work at the nickle smelter like my dad. They would be going to bed at 5 am, after a day of painting, or film making, or video editing, or installation installing, and a night of German beer, music, talk, and new ideas.

I had only one thought at the time: “I have to live here!” In 1986 I moved to Toronto to start school York University. I lived with Jack and Howard Lonn in their studio on Richmond Street. Our lives were books and paintings and talk about art and culture and philosophy. Whether you are Milton or me, words cannot express how I felt that first year in Toronto. I felt as though my body had to grow larger, to become more capacious to contain the new ideas and experiences to which Jack introduced me. Life was total open-eyed childhood excitement, except that I was an adult (sort of) and could spend my nights in clubs listening to local bands that played their own songs– loudly. I felt a part of something that connected me to New York and London, but cutoff from my roots, (which is what I wanted at the time).

Queen West then was not just a shopping destination: it was artist studios, the coolest bars, greasy spoons, and bookstores. A few blocks away was Kensington Market and its vintage clothing shops, reggae, punk, and the House of Spice, where we would get supplies for the curries on which we lived.

Jack painted and I went to school. If I could have picked my life I would have been an artist, but I lacked the talent. I was a fellow traveler in that world and not a participant. I learned from watching Jack paint and talking, incessantly talking with him, about art and art history. I learned two truths: One: that a painting should make us see something new. And two: real creativity is about inventing the rules the work obeys through the process of making it. Creativity is “working out” an idea: it is not just “expression.” If it were, everyone would be an artist. Most people are not artists precisely because they cannot give themselves over to the work, to let the idea work itself out through their eye and hand.

This process is what makes art art. Art is neither illustration, nor adornment, nor decoration; it is not story telling, edification, or moral instruction. It is the working out process through which something absolutely singular, something which expands the human sensorium in an unpredictable way, comes to be. Art educates or instructs only in a derivative sense.

Jack created a superb body of work over his more than thirty year career. He was an artist that was appreciated more by other artists than critics. I think this was because Jack’s work was very much about the process of painting and less about an obvious, politically resonant message. For me, it is a long meditation on mortality, embodiment, and what human being is at its very core. The layering-scraping process by which he fashioned his works were a metaphorical question: what can we take away from the representation of a human being and still see a human being? (Had critics more philosophical depth, they could have seen this in his work). I know it bothered him a great deal that his work was not more widely collected by the major Canadian museums.

From the standpoint of the quality of his work, he is without argument one of the giants of Canadian painting of the past forty years. I do not think there are many Toronto painters who would disagree. The critics (with the exception of the late John Bentley Mays, a long time champion of Jack’s work) disagreed. I could understand his frustration: people should pay more attention to my work too! But I would console us both with Krishna’s admonishment to Arjuna’s complaints in the Bhagavad Gita: You have the right to the work, not to the fruits: no one can predict how the work will be received, in other words, but we must perform it nonetheless.

Last year we were riding the Queen Street Car, heading to Parkdale to see a show. I remarked as we traveled west of Bathurst how much had changed since we lived together on Richmond Street. “We could wax nostalgic about every block,” he replied, resigned to the truth that things change. Why should our city of thirty years ago be today’s city?

The worst thing is not to die, but to have one’s life reduced to a set of dimly remembered facts and anecdotes. Life is the feeling, needing, self-realizing whole, not the particular things one did or experienced. And yet, I hope memory is not just nostalgia, and that honest reflection is the final completion of the whole which is a life: a last raising up of the person as this irreplaceable being that they have been, a celebration of their unrepeatable intervention into the indifferent order of things.

In my previous post I examined the politics of treating individual character as a fixed and unalterable abstraction. If we do not examine the complex processes by which individual character and dispositions are formed, we cannot engage intelligently with each other but simply look for agreement and disagreement. Politics then becomes a matter of bonding with like against unlike, instead of a process of arguing towards a more comprehensively inclusive social movement against underlying structures of deprivation, domination, and destruction. Rather than assuming that conservative and bigoted attitudes are fixed and final, political engagement starts from where the other is and tries to convince them that it is in their own deepest interests to change. It argues; it does not name call, shame, hector, or ally with existing power structures to exclude and punish.

In Part Two I want to look at the other side, the cultures within which these dispositions and attitudes are forged, and make a similar argument. Culture, like character, is not a fixed abstraction, not self-contained and univocal but develops historically, contains contradictory elements, and can be changed. There is value to the preservation of certain cultural forms, but this defensible desire for preservation can become conservative and dangerous. On the other hand, demands that conservative cultures simply transform themselves by shedding what is objectionable and offensive, while correct in the abstract, can fail in the concrete if they are pronounced moralistically from on high and the outside. When that happens, just as in the case of individual character, reactive hardening and not progressive opening results. I want to explore these difficult problems through the example of the recent British election.

Labour Catastrophe 2019

However one understands the causes of Labour’s defeat, their loss is a spectacular failure of political argument. Labour’s Manifesto challenged the legitimacy and necessity of the capitalist status quo, arguing that it was failing to satisfy fundamental human needs while also producing the social wealth necessary to do so. The problem was not scarcity of resources but their use: instead of being used to free people’s time from alienated labour and better satisfy their fundamental natural and social needs, social wealth is appropriated by a ruling class growing so wealthy it lives in a different social universe. Labour promised to nationalise key industries, re-invest in public services, and address climate change in a systematic way.

The Manifesto thus did everything that I have long argued the Left needs to do. It criticised capitalism on the grounds that it systematically fails to satisfy fundamental human needs, destroys the biosphere, depends on organized violence to perpetuate itself. And it articulated a realizable vision whose implementation can begin today, through the forceful use of existing democratic power. And it failed spectacularly.

Across Northern England, in the traditional heartlands of the Labour party, a program that ought to have appealed to a population suffering most from austerity and de-industrialization was rejected in historically unprecedented numbers. Two general explanations have been advanced for the failure. Both touch on the culture of the Northern English working class. On the one hand, the explanation favoured by the Left is that Labour’s vacillations around Brexit turned off Northern working class voters who had supported Leave. Analysis of the voting numbers bears this conclusion out (in constituencies which voted Leave, Labour’s vote declined by more than 10%).

On the right (of the Labour Party), the explanation focused on Corbyn (and, to a lesser extent, the Manifesto). The evidence for this view is more anecdotal, and perhaps selectively chosen to demonise Corbyn in order to expedite his removal as leader. These arguments confine their definition of working class to older, white, industrial working men and women: a rather nineteenth century conception of the proletariat which cannot explain to which class precariously or unemployed young, ethnically diverse people belong. Let us set aside the sociological issues this caricature of the working class raises in order to focus on the culture to which Corbyn was purportedly alien. The same argument is used to produce two opposed conclusions.

On the one hand, the strongest critics of Corbyn focused on the most conservative elements of Northern working class culture. Corbyn, the pacifist from North London could not communicate his message within the strong regional identity of working class towns and the purported traditional hearth, home, and soil values that caused them to vote Leave. Thus, the most vociferous criticisms of Corbyn asserted that he could never win the vote of Northern workers because he is out of touch with their values. These critics report that voters continually denounced Corbyn as disloyal, anti-military, and unpatriotic. He was viewed as an out-of-touch Londoner captured by a Southern urban constituency with lots of bright and unrealizable ideas as befits academic dreamers. The argument is thus that there was an unbridgeable cultural chasm between Corbyn and the Northern working class as the standard bearers of ancient virtues which London elites ignore at their peril.

On the other side, some older left-wing supporters of Corbyn equally dismayed by the result but not wanting to lose the hard won left turn in the party that Corbyn supported looked in the other direction for an explanation. They claimed that the problem was not that the Northern working class did not understand its own interests, but that the London-centric leadership, and especially its younger cadres, did not understand how Northern working people understand their own interests. They remained incredulous that working people could vote Leave, and chalked it up to reactionary nationalistic values when in fact it had more to do with the failure of European elites to address any of their local concerns.

Ursula Huws, with her characteristic eye for both detail and underlying structural conflicts, provides an excellent account of this dimension of the problem:

Wherever they came from, ideas of tolerance and equality of opportunity serve as common taken-for-granted values for a high proportion of the British population, especially the young, many of whom, in the current jargon, regard themselves as ‘woke’.The difficulty is that the very creation of the category ‘woke’ sets up the counter-category of the ‘unwoke’. People who do not share the ‘woke’ values are likely to be characterised as racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. Not only are they considered stupid and unenlightened; they may even be demonised as proto-fascist ground troops, vulnerable to any siren call from the far right that is directed toward them.And therein lies the problem. Nobody likes to be labelled stupid or ignorant. Or to see their culture demonised.

As I did in Part One, I think that Huws is painting an ideal-type picture in order to exemplify one-side of a practical problem that she knows is more complex. The problem is that so long as people glare at each other across a cultural divide that they take to be fixed and unalterable, political argument will degenerate towards mutual moralistic recrimination. When the older white working class are sneered at as backward xenophobes and racists, they shout back between sips of ale about out of touch kids.

Huws continues:

What these people emphatically do not want is to be sneered at, patronised, preached to or told what to think by people who (they suspect) see themselves as morally and socially superior: people who, for all their sentimentalisation of working class life, are essential voyeuristic. Rightly or wrongly, they regard the ‘woke’ as superficial and manipulative: survivors who have managed to be nimble enough to negotiate the shifting terrain of the neoliberal labour market to gain themselves a foothold in it, whether in the media or in politics; shifty manipulators of public opinion; or, at best, naïve kids who do not understand their own privilege.

Fair enough. However, the problem, whichever way we look, is that both explanations, although containing some truth, fall victim to the moralistic illusion that cultures are singular, uniform entities that mechanically determine their members outlook on life.

Culture, Values, and Universal Interests

The moralistic approach to politics revives the deeply problematic arguments of Richard Rorty from the 1990’s. He maintained that every truth is a function of a particular ethnocentric way of life. A is good in your culture, not-A in mine; I am ok, you are ok (or not), but that is only from my (or your) perspective. We are all locked into those perspectives; there can be no progress towards more comprehensive shared truths. Truth does not touch the objective world but only describes the way things are done around here. There is little point, therefore, to arguing, because that which counts as evidence in one culture does not count in another.

When Rorty made these arguments in the 1990’s they were part of the initial post-modernist “deconstruction” of the purportedly oppressive, Eurocentric, racist, sexist, etc., heritage of the Enlightenment. Today, they are more likely to be the stock in trade of right-wing populists like Donald Trump and his allies: the partisans of alternative facts and truths that are not true. But they also underlie the arguments of left-wing moralists.

The left-wing moralist rejects the content of the truths that right-wing populists affirm, but accepts the more general point that all truths are functions of cultural identity and political position. The beliefs that define my group are right and the beliefs that define opposed groups are wrong. There is no tension within value sets and no room to move. One is either on the side of the good or one is evil. Evil cannot be changed, only destroyed. If Johnston is for Brexit, then Brexit is wrong.

Let us take a look at what the discussion in England looks like if we treat cultures as uniform wholes. If white working class people voted for Brexit, they are xenophobes and racists, because Brexit is a ruling class strategy rooted in nostalgia for the Empire and white supremacy. The same is true from the other side. When older white workers who have seen their way of life collapse look at today’s activists and sneer at their platitudes they are acting no less moralistically. So long as neither opens their intelligence towards the other and thinks the matter through from the other perspective,there is no way for arguments to access deeper, objective truths. Such ideas and assumptions ensure that mutual incomprehension and conflict are permanent.

But are cultures really uniform wholes, and are people really mechanically programmed by the culture into who they are born and grow up? They can be treated this way, and people have dominant influences in their lives. But do we really only belong to one culture? More basically, what is like and what is unlike in our own identity? As Norman Geras demonstrated in a brilliant critique of Rorty, (Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind), the latter’s ethnocentrism presupposes the very capacity for universal identification he denies. If 350 million very different people can identify as “Americans” or over one billion very different people identify as “Christians,” or the same number as “Muslims,” then this proves that cultures are not reified wholes that program values, but functions of how people evaluate sameness and difference. From one perspective, I am a Windsorite, from another, an Ontarian, from another a Canadian, from still others a philosopher or hockey fan. So why not also, Geras argues, “human being?” When I identify with any group, I recognise some common element. But what that common element is does not exclude me from broadening or narrowing my identity in other respects. What I am and believe and take myself to be is not therefore a function of the group programming and determining my identity, but what I regard as important in this or that context. My identity is complex, probably contradictory; it overlaps with some others in one way and in different ways with others.

Underlying all these different ways of identifying and producing symbolic value in life, I would argue, are the needs which our on-going existence as living and world and self-interpreting beings demands be regularly satisfied. Mutual understanding across differences depends upon working down to the universality of these needs, and seeing how different political responses are functions of people’s judgements about how they can best be satisfied. These judgements can be wrong, but if we see them as responses to unmet needs, then we can understand why people make the decisions they make, and argue that there may be a better way of securing that which they require but are deprived by social structures and dynamics driven by profit, not need satisfaction. My focus on needs does not deny or abstract from species or cultural differences, but explains them. Species life-activity and cultural systems grow up out of the soil of needs: the way a bear lives is largely a function of the needs that it experiences, the environment that it lives in, and the organic tools its body provides for their satisfaction. Different species of bears are similar in regards to their physiology. The differences are functions of adaptations to different environments.

Human cultures are analogous. No society and no culture that does not enable people to satisfy their basic needs can survive. All self-creative human activity therefore, no matter how far it soars into realms traditionally called spiritual, can ever cut itself off completely from the earth. That is not to say that spiritual needs (which I would define as meaningful relationships with each other, the world of living and non-living things, and the universe or Being as a whole) are illusory. On the contrary, they are important elements of a good life. My point, rather, is that they are not free-floating realities but are felt because of the sorts of being that we are: embodied, social self-conscious intelligences that depend on nature, are inter-dependent with each other, are language-users not tied down to the immediate local context but can think and wonder about ultimate questions, and provide answers through art, spirituality, and philosophy.

If this argument is true, then while it is certain that we all belong to different cultures, we might belong to some in virtue of one set of identifications and others through others. Some of the people from whom we are distinguished by one identity we are the same as from another perspective. Identities crisscross and overlap. Moreover, they are subject to change. They can be narrowed, they can be broadened, but they are only fixed and ultimate if we close ourselves off to paying attention to counter-evidence, different perspectives, social complexity, history, our multiform experiences and complex interconnections with others.

Back to the Concrete

What does this abstract argument have to do with political debates across differences?

Let us return to the particular example of England. From either side of the divide a picture was painted of an unbridgeable chasm between north and south, old and young, industrial and post-industrial working classes. But the working class (as Huws goes on to argue, and as she has detailed in her academic work) includes woke young people barely eking out a living in London as well as unemployed lads drinking beer outside the Ladbrokes in Preston. If it were true that Corbyn was universally offensive to every older worker in the North, then none would have voted for him. But some did, so not everyone was repulsed by his politics. The key to changing political positions is to find the right argument, not to conclude that everyone was mechanically turned off by his past and principles. Likewise, not every young volunteer who flooded into the party to propel Corbyn to the leadership could possibly have denigrated Labour’s traditional constituencies as dinosaurs. Corbyn’s campaign– and the Manifesto on which this election was fought– were in large part returns to classical social democratic demands and policies, not precious, politically correct contortions to include all and give offence to none.

Is there no real problem then? No, there is a problem, but it lies at least as much in the assumptions of commentators and critics as it does in people’s consciousness. Uniformity of outlook and complete mutual misunderstanding are as much products of commentators and critics with a definite political agenda as they are definitive of how concrete individuals view the world. If one looks for stereotypes, one can find them, because they are rooted in real but one-sided experiences of some set of actual people. One could certainly find xenophobic white working class Brexit supporters, and one could certainly find tiresomely trendy woke students twisting themselves in knots trying to list every marginalised group to ensure that everyone’s unique perspective is reflected in every general policy.

The left wing moralist stops there and has nothing more to do with the caricature with whom they disagree. Now, caricatures also start from one’s real face, but they exaggerate it. One is supposed to laugh, not think: “Oh my God, I am hideous.” So too when we encounter an almost pure type of someone with whom we politically disagree. We have to refuse to say: “Oh my God, I knew that they were all…” and instead talk to them and argue. Human nature, as Hegel said, only fully exists in an achieved community of minds.

The most important word there is “achieved.” Hegel does not deny that there are vast differences in the way people live; what he believes is that if we really examine those ways of living we can see that they are all different ways of expressing certain human values and satisfying human needs. They are not human or inhuman, but one-sided: human in different ways. Hence the achieved community of minds is one that exists in a future society which has understood the differences as different expressions of different sides of a comprehensive humanity. We can disagree with the way in which Hegel excludes non-Europeans from history, but his dialectical understanding of history as the working through and overcoming of one-sided contradictions remains essential even if his own reconstructions of the pathway must be rejected.

To bring it back to the concrete example: when one encounters someone with whom one disagrees, the questions one should ask oneself are: “what problems are they facing that might have encouraged them to adopt this view as a way of solving them?” What is the context in which this view was formed? How does that context frame their experiences of other groups who are different from them in some important way? The young gay man might look suspiciously at men from an older generation because he grew up in a small town where homophobia was impossible to escape and he had to hide his desires for fear of violence. To him, the city offers liberation not because there is no homophobia but because there is a community with whom he can be himself. Instead of mocking the values of inclusiveness he supports older, more conservative people have to be brought around to understanding the problem that inclusion tries to solve, and to understand that his way of living and loving, though different, are no threat to theirs.

Likewise, the young Labour campaigner who hears a retired miner cursing the Polish bar tender has to stop and ask whether this view is the result of deep-seated racism, or worries about the lack of employment opportunities in town. If that is the root cause, then there is an opening for a conversation about what creates and what destroys jobs. The answer will turn out to be that it is not Polish bar tenders who destroy jobs, but market forces (which also explain why the bartender left Poland for the UK). Now there is common ground and a re-focusing on problems that unite across differences. When we ask and inquire, we learn where other people are coming from. Understanding has to be the goal of every political encounter across differences.

Huws, commenting again on the means of resolving the divides in Labour that were so glaringly exposed by the election concludes in a similar vein.

…perhaps, lurking under the surface, at least for some of the older people, [was] the demand that they know in their hearts cannot be met, “take me back to the safety of the world I grew up in. Please.” Of course we know that this is wishful thinking. But we ignore at our peril the emotional place it is coming from. In the longer term we will have to start the patient work of building a new movement, based not on simplistic notions like ‘the many’ but on a recognition of the specificities of the positions that different groups of workers occupy in the global division of labour, their cultures and the real conflicts of interest that exist between them. This is heavy work, requiring a lot of careful listening and building from the bottom up.

Nothing is easily resolved, of course, but unless some such strategy is adopted, the Left will, I fear, continue to retreat into self-enclosed identity silos which, like Leibniz’s monads, have no windows in or out. In every encounter, in every experience, the aim should not be to find what is wrong with the other, but to learn where they are coming from and why they believe that which they believe. People are not tokens of pure type cultures, and cultural creations are not pure type functions of political outlooks or principles. People and their creations are messy, ambivalent, complex, and contradictory. There can be no political progress without fraught encounters across differences. And beyond the political, life needs irony, humour, and free explorations of our darker drives and motivations. Art, like interesting people, pulls us in different directions at once (or sometimes it disorients us).

Condemning people and works outright narrows and cheapens life; expanding our horizons demands that we accept the risk of confrontation with the unknown and the different and even the apparently offensive. We cannot ban and silence and cancel our way to power, firing instead of educating people is the worst sort of reactionary vindictiveness that only elevates the power of the bosses. Intelligent engagement and argument is the only way to change people’s minds and produce more comprehensive understanding. It is not only that bad ideas do not go away because people who disagree shout and stomp their feet rather than patiently prove the opponent wrong, it is that, in all but the most overt cases of oppressive thinking, one cannot tell what is good and bad, true and untrue, in an idea until one hears it explained and thinks it through. We cannot know whether what we are disagreeing with is worth disagreeing with if we do not hear the other side. Purity and self-righteousness will not build the size of the movement we need to change society.

Lenin, reflecting on the lessons of the Russian Revolution for Western Communists, warned them of the danger of ultra-leftism. He defined ultra-leftists as people who elevated purity of principle over effective political practice. They refused all compromise with reformist workers or reformist workers’ associations like trade unions.

Lenin was scathing in his criticisms:

“The conclusion is clear: to reject compromises “on principle” … no matter of what kind, is childishness.”(21)

“We cannot but regard as equally ridiculous and childish nonsense the pompous, very learned, and frightfully revolutionary dispositions of the German Lefts to the effect that Communists cannot and should not work in reactionary trade unions … that it is necessary to … create a brand new and immaculate “workers’ Union” invented by very pleasant (and probably, for the most part, very youthful) Communists.” (33)

Lenin thus distinguishes between sounding revolutionary and being able to build a movement that can actually overcome the existing state of affairs. While typically dismissed as a blood-thirsty autocrat, Lenin actually understood as clearly as any deliberative democratic that politics is about argument with people who might not only disagree, but might start from positions that are diametrically opposed to revolutionary demands. What mattered for Lenin was not what individuals workers believed, but the underlying interests that they shared with all workers. The goal of political argument was to uncover this common ground. Political argument proceeds by accepting what is the case; ultra-leftists from what they think workers ought to believe. “We can (and must) build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, it is no easy matter, but no other approach to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion.” (34)

We do not inhabit the same political universe as Lenin. The political problem of our time is not the construction of a vanguard party out of raw working class material. That way has been tried, and failed. At the same time, Lenin’s arguments against ultra-leftism can help us understand the political problems caused by what I call “left-wing moralism.” Left-wing moralism is found in the pages of liberal newspapers like the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Toronto Star, across the twitter-verse, and in the more earnest sections of student activists and the academic left. The main problem with left-wing moralism, as I see it, is that it fails to adopt a properly social-philosophical, historical, and dialectical understanding of the development and internalisation of human values. Instead of examining how the values that circulate in society are produced, and whose interest they serve, and how groups whose interests they do not serve nevertheless internalise them and act as if those values do serve their interests, left-wing moralists tend to condemn in one breath and proclaim their own political purity with the next. They see polar opposition instead of contradiction. Since contradictions– in social institutions and individual consciousness– are the space that makes change possible, ignoring them in favour of self-righteous condemnation of the politically incorrect impedes the solution of the problems to which the moralist rightly objects.

Left moralists treat both individual moral character and cultures as fixed wholes divided by a Manichean opposition of good and bad. I will examine the dimension of individual character here, and the cultural dimension in Part Two.

I realise that I am constructing an ideal-typical definition, but by abstracting from the details of specific examples the core practical problem can be isolated for analysis. The actual nuances and complexities of particular expressions of left-wing moralism can only be properly addressed in real political arguments. I also want to add right at the outset that I am not claiming that political argument can be a substitute for political struggle. If far-right racists are mobilising and marching, we must mobilise, march, and deny them access to public space. I am also not so naive to believe that the leadership of these movements of mainstream political parties are ever likely to yield simply to political and philosophical criticism. Nevertheless, no political victory of any sort can be achieved without building numbers through argument, and political argument will inevitably bring critics into contact with people who espouse views that are ill-informed, ignorant, and offensive. Not everyone lives their lives in a universe of intense political engagement. Many people unreflectively internalise the easy-answers that the right-wing demagogues spread. The question is: how do we understand that problem? Is it a problem of the ideas that the person espouses, to be addressed by argument, or is it the person themself, to be addressed by shaming and shunning?

The left-wing moralist tends to adopt the latter strategy., demonizing as the enemy anyone who in anyway expresses less than perfectly politically correct attitudes, dispositions, and values. They think that the secret to change is to make people feel guilty about the values they identify with and the choices they make. However, by focusing on guilt, values, and choices in abstraction from the way in which established structures of power influence and shape peoples’ values and choices, they ignore the decisive issue: how people come to be the people that they are, believing in these values and not those, and make choices that they find reasonable. Simply condemning people who, in a given moment, identify with conservative social values or make individual choices which contribute to patterns of destructive behaviour does nothing to help build the social movements the solution of those problems will require. Instead of abstract critiques of character, left-wing activists have to engage people on their own turf and work towards the discovery of common ground.

How can one discover common ground with climate deniers, or racists, or sexists? Perhaps one cannot. Some people deeply committed to a violent, oppressive value-system sometimes will not give it up no matter how much evidence of the wrongness of their view one marshals. However, even in those cases, there really is common ground there to be found. Everyone alive must breath, appropriate resources from nature, have accesses to potable water, shelter from the elements, and find care when sick. There is thus a basis to argue with climate deniers and supporters of private health care systems about the self-undermining and unjust implications of their commitments. The collapse of natural life-support systems will kill climate deniers and supporters of private health care that cannot pay the bills deprive themselves of what they might one day need. From a social perspective, the plasticity of the human brain and the creativity of the whole being mean that everyone requires education and opportunities to creatively contribute to the world. Racists and sexists who insist on deep natural differences that make white men superior to everyone else simply ignore the histories of achievement of people who have freed themselves from different forms of oppression. The manifest capacities of the purportedly inferior thus offer an objective basis for argument against racism, sexism, and all oppressive value systems. Every argument is a risk, but the common ground really is there. Effective argument uncovers it and thus produces a deep normative change in the former opponent.

The moralist does not see the false value system and the ruling class which uses it to perpetuate its rule as the key problem, but rather the assumed values that mechanically attach to being white, or male, or heterosexual. But people are not white, or male, or heterosexual by arbitrary free choice, but by birth and history. One cannot just wish away one’s genome, family, upbringing, culture, or the relative statuses that attach to them. No one chooses the world into which one is born or the values with which one is raised. To be sure, these markers of identity are not absolutely fixed, as in the case of gender, which some people do decide to change, or in terms of their social effects, which can be altered by political and social struggles to attenuate privilege on the one hand, and increase the scope for free activity of the historically subaltern on the other. Nevertheless, we are shaped before we learn to shape, and this fact has important political implications.

When people hear arguments that sound as though they are asserting that everything a person is and identifies with is morally wrong, they will not typically be moved to change, but to dig in their heels. A white working class Trump voter in Arkansas or an ex-Newfoundlander working in the oil sands have reasons for choosing what they have chosen. Effective political argument has to start with inquiring about those reasons, not with a lecture about why they are wrong. The Trump voter might well have racist beliefs, but maybe they are mixed with a sense of betrayal by past Democratic governments and motivated by real concern for the future of his family and community. The Newfoundlander might not like working in the oil sands, and he might well understand the environmental damage caused by their exploitation. But he might be there because the cod fishery collapsed thirty years ago, and now he has built a life, and sees no other options. One cannot job shame him and expect him to change, just as one cannot attribute the Arkansas voter’s racism to some unchanging essence of racism deep in the heart of Southern US whites. We have to do better than ad hominem Twitter wars between left-wing moralists and right-wing bigots. Instead, conflict has to become an opportunity to provoke critical reflection on problematic expressions of dominant identities.

On the other side, self-righteous posturing about one’s own purity can almost be guaranteed to produce backlash effects. No matter how loudly educated, well-paid white men acknowledge their privilege, the historical forces that created the institutions and structures that produced that privilege are completely unaffected– and therefore privilege remains through all declamations about how guilty one feels at enjoying its benefits. The right-wing will always happily point this fact out. The solution is not to reject the benefits, which is impossible, in practice, for the most part, but to build movements to changes the institutions that confer unequal and unjust benefits on some. The goal is a future state in which everyone’s natural and social needs are comprehensively satisfied so that they can become the people that they want to become. That which is past cannot now be changed.

Does this argument let individual bigots off the hook? After all, racism, sexism, and other invidious forms of domination are not simply structures that exist apart from peoples’ beliefs but live on in and through them. I do not think that it does. Individuals must be challenged for their beliefs and actions, but they must be challenged in ways that do not make the individual persons, or abstractions like “white culture,” the enemy. There is nothing intrinsically racist about white people, any more than there is anything intrinsically misogynist about gay men. There is no more a uniform “white culture” than there is a uniform “black culture.” Being a woman does not preclude one from being a violent imperialist; being straight does nor preclude one from accepting all manner of alternative sexualities and gender identities. Making sure every imaginable difference is represented in proportion to their average distribution in the population will not solve the major structural problems of the world. Changing the identity of the rulers without changing the structure of control over resources or the drivers of the global economy will not solve any fundamental problems. Left wing moralism takes the enemy to be individual character and not the structures of power that allow the ruling class to rule.

The power of the ruling class grows up out of their control over natural resources, territory, and labouring bodies. Therefore, effective change requires that these structures be changed. Control over territory was established through the enclosure of common lands and colonial expropriation of indigenous territory. Control over bodies was direct, as in the case of the slave trade and the patriarchal domination of women, and indirect, as in the case of legally free labourers who had no real choice but to accept paid work in emerging capitalist industries. The modern histories of capitalism, racism, and sexism are thus inextricably intertwined (but the experiential contours of the experience of racial or sexist domination are unique and irreducible to objective structural economic forces).

Politically, therefore, progressive social change requires everyone to identify with the properly human good that anti-racist– indeed, all struggles against all forms of oppression– serve. That good is general and not the property of any particular group. All forms of oppression are systematic ways of depriving demonized groups of the full set of natural and social resources that they require in order to develop their creative, sentient, cognitive, and relational capacities. All ways of realizing these capacities are good if they are: individually meaningful, socially valuable and valued, and consistent with the carrying capacity of the natural world. When we think of the human good in this general way, and different concrete historical groups of people as struggling to realize it in their own chosen forms, then political argument is an attempt to bring out the shared humanity at the root of different identities and ways of living.

Arguments that are effective in helping people change their value commitments must start from accepting the humanity of the people who hold positions that might sound or be offensive. Everyone alive wants in some way to survive and flourish. Along the way, anyone can be seduced by false arguments about the best way to ensure that common goal. Instead of shaming people who hold false beliefs, anyone genuinely concerned with social change (rather than their own beautiful soul) has to work with people to and trace the internalization of false beliefs back to their social and political causes. That work involves helping people to see that what they want for themselves does not depend upon taking it from others who have the same shared goals in life. Achieving their goals depends upon changing the rapacious social system and ruling class that despoils the earth, exploits the labour of people of all cultures, races, sexes, genders, and ranges of ability (or wrongly excludes them from the labour market and renders their life precarious), and then blames the victim. Once shared needs have been identifies, the process of shedding the old and exclusionary value system can begin.

Like everything important in life there is no guarantee that political argument will work. However, to not argue with individuals (as opposed to organized far-right movements) whose positions one finds offensive assumes that no one can ever change their values or politics. If that is the case, then (to focus on the American example) the working class members of the set of 59 million Americans who voted for Trump seem to be a lost cause. If they are, then the future of America seems to be political stasis (where neither side can attract such overwhelming numbers to push forward decisive change). However, we are in the midst of intensifying social and environmental crisis. Standing still in the midst of unfolding catastrophe ensures that it will only get worse. Unless the left learns how to argue with the “deplorables,” it is hard to see how a movement of the “immense majority” (as Marxists like to say) can be built. Unless that movement is built, not only will the right-wing forces that support Trump not be defeated (even if he is), but the left will also fail to start realising the anti-capitalist agenda gaining currency in the Democratic party.

Human beings share a life-interest in living in societies that utilise natural and social wealth to satisfy real needs. I take this lesson to be taught by all struggles of subaltern groups over across millenia of struggle against domination, deprivation, and oppression. When societies are organized so that our needs are satisfied because they are human needs, then our capacities to create, relate, feel, and act in individually meaningful and socially valuable ways are enabled. When these capacities are enabled, groups and individuals can freely create themselves through sharing their stories, imagining new ones, cooking, singing, dancing, and loving as they choose. They can invite others in, ask to keep some space for themselves, or anything in between. New forms of expression can be invented and new ways of making collectively binding decisions enacted. Differences then become the free product of a capacity for self-creative activity shared by all human beings.

Left-wing politics in the most general sense aims to overcome the commodification of nature and labour, the life-threatening damage to the natural life-support system, and gross material inequalities the exploitation of labour causes. It must reject all the invidious ideologies that have exacerbated, reinforced, and justified capitalist society. Still, if society can be changed, it is only because the people decide to change themselves (individuals are social beings, as Marx argued). There is little evidence to support the belief that people can be changed by shaming or shunning them. The only alternative is to engage their practical intelligence through sharp political arguments aimed at locating the common ground from which solidarity can be built.

Thanks, Giving

On October 3rd, I was honoured to have been invited to speak at a conference celebrating the career of Dr. Ato Sekyi-Otu. In 1990 (if memory serves) I was a precocious fourth year undergraduate at York University. In those days (which I guess are old), students had to get permission from the professor live and in person to take a non-prescribed course for credit. Ato was warm and gracious in hearing my case and agreed to let me enroll in his famous “Marxism and Political Discourse” seminar. It was a must-take class for all the grad-student radicals in the Social and Political Thought Program. It was daunting and demanding: the students were sharp, committed, and engaged. They were not competitive and welcomed me, but it was intimidating to be in a class with MA and PhD students.

And Ato.

He was and is a rare intellect, equally at home in the world of German Idealism, Marxism, literary criticism, and African literature. The range of texts that we covered was extraordinary– from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks; from Laclau and Mouffe’s then-infamous Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to early work by Charles Mills, from Aime Cesaire and Paulin Hountondji to the great Ghanian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah.

Ato was the through-line that held it together. His erudition was breathtaking, matched only by his expansive humour and obvious love of teaching. What made him a great teacher was that he risked letting us learn.

When you first start life as a professor, your primary worry is filling the hour and half of class time. Soon, you realise that the easiest way to prevent dead air is to talk incessantly at the students. If you never stop talking, no one can contradict you or expose a gap in your knowledge! But that does not teach anyone anything. The learning happens when the professor stops talking. They might guide, shepherd, re-orient, and question, but the best professor risks letting the students learn. They know– because they have learned– that the learning happens in the moments of quiet reflection and intense interaction between the students.

Ato has retired from teaching, but not from the work of thinking. His latest book: Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays was published this year by Routledge.

Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays

The book consists of five essays: “Is She Not Also a Human Being?,” “Difference and Left Universalism,” “Ethical Communism in African Thought,” “Individualism in Fanon and After,” and “Enigmas and Proverbs.” Together, they are the latest iterations of the major themes of Sekyi-Otu’s thought: the critique of the politics of difference, freeing Fanon from both Marxist and post-colonialist misinterpretation, and the meaning and global significance of African philosophy and literature. The essays have deep roots in Sekyi-Otu’s intellectual history, but assume a new poignancy in contemporary conditions. As a rapacious capitalism continues to consume life-sustaining resources at unsustainable rates, right-wing nationalist atavisms have take control of governments in the Global North and South alike. Sekyi-Otu’s “left universalism” supplies the ethical foundation for a renewed socialist politics, a politics contoured to local conditions, but guided everywhere by universal, humanist values.

What, then, is a specifically “left universalism?” The short answer is that left universalism develops out of an understanding of the histories of resistance of oppressed peoples. That which is of universal value emerges through the particular struggles of different groups. Of most importance is the capacity for self-determination: oppressors deny that the oppressed can determine their own lives; the oppressed prove their humanity by proving their oppressors wrong.

Self determination has a collective and an individual side. Left universalism affirms the capacity of all peoples to collectively shape their societies and govern themselves. It is thus resolutely anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Eurocentric. However, by the same principle, it also affirms the right and capacity of all individuals to grow beyond whatever traditions they are born into, even those traditions given the imprimatur “authentic” by communitarian celebrants of ethnocentric difference. “The left universalist has a problem with a politics of difference allied with communitarian particularism … although the question of the human is indeed the latter’s silent and unavoidable presupposition, it formally evades that question … In so doing, communitarian particularism dispossesses itself of critical resources for reasoned condemnation … of practices and conditions of existence at home and abroad.”(Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 80) There are either universal standards of criticism, which apply anywhere human needs are deprived and life-capacites suppressed, or every culture is just in its own terms, in which case internal structures of oppression with deep roots in any particular history cannot be understood or criticised.

The philosophical key to unlocking the power of Sekyi-Otu’s argument is the distinction between abstract and concrete universals. The Eurocentric versions of humanist values which Sekyi-Otu (following Fanon, and in agreement with post-colonial critics) condemns, are rooted in abstract universal conceptions of humanity. An abstract universal is a concept that is abstracted from particular instances and expressed as a definition or criterion for membership in a set. This process is necessary for all thinking (true particulars are things which cannot be referred to but only pointed out), but becomes politically problematic when applied in an exclusionary way. They are applied in an exclusionary way when practices and one way of realizing general human capacities specific to a given time and place are abstracted from that time and place and asserted as the essence of human being. The definition becomes pernicious and destructive when it allies with political and military power to justify the domination of groups and cultures that do not “measure up” to the definition. In those cases (think of the way in which residential schools were justified as necessary to “civilize” indigenous people in Canada) humanist values really are tools of the agents of oppression.

Sekyi-Otu’s ‘left universalism’ accepts this criticism, but warns that the problem with Eurocentric forms of humanism is not that they are universal, but that they are abstract. His response is that we need to build a version of humanism– Fanon’s “new humanism”– which understands the concrete ways in which universal values speak through the particularities of cultures, and in particular, indigenous cultures. (As the title states, Sekyi-Otu’s focus is Africa, but his arguments apply to any indigenous culture and, indeed, to historically subaltern groups like women and demonized sexualities and gender identities). Universal values are not Western exports, as both critics and defenders of Eurocentrism maintain, but implicit in, at the root, and grow from the soil of, every human culture. As concrete universals (a Hegelian term that explains universals as the processes whereby abstractions like “freedom” become historically and socially real) humanist values are the variety of ways in which people everywhere recognize and respond to harm and struggle to alleviate its social causes.

The roots of this argument lie in Fanon’s critique of colonialism. Sekyi-Otu builds on his earlier, epochal reinterpretation of Fanon in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. There Sekyi-Otu argued that Fanon was neither the high priest of revolutionary violence, not the glorifier of pristine ancient cultures to be restored to their pre-conquest purity, but a resolute defender of “partisan universal values.” Fanon disected the hypocrisy of Western humanists with rare but unforgettable vehemence. “This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil of and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world.”(Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 96) This vehemence has led many interpreters in post-colonial studies to read Fanon as anti-universalist. That is not in fact the case, according to Sekyi-Otu: Fanon is against abstract Eurocentric versions of humanism, precisely because they are neither humanist not universal. There are, however, universal human values, central amongst which is the foundational value of anti-colonial revolution: self-determination. “All the elements of a solution to the great problems of mankind have, at different times, existed in European philosophy.  But the action of European men has not carried out the mission which fell to the… let is reconsider the question of mankind … of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be rehumanized.”(Fanon, 1968, 314) His new humanism– to which Sekyi-Otu’s essays should be understood as a signal contribution– will be created when all the world’s peoples and subaltern groups are free to articulate their human needs in their own voice.

The new humanism will not be a return to a romanticised past. Commenting on the complex role that recovery of traditions despoiled by Arab and European colonialism play in the literary works of Ayi Kwei Armah, Sekyi Oyu insists that looking to the past for redemption does not necessarily invoke “irredentist romanticism.” (Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 271) The desire to return to an unsullied past can be, paradoxically, a demand for a future of as yet unrealized possibilities. Sekyi-Otu calls this misunderstood aspect of Armagh’s peotic-poltiical work “Visionary foundationalism.” (Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 272) Remebrance of the past can recover the value of reciprocity in relationships between humans, the earth, and each other.( Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 271) The return, however, is not going back, but going forward in a collective act of “telepoeisis”: creation of the goals the will redeem a damaged community.(Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 273)

Free recovery of the past is thus an essential moment of the articulation of human values as concrete universals. The roots of this position are found in Fanon, in whom we can hear, Sekyi-Otu argues, “an ideal of individuality more liberating … than the forms mandated by racist culture’s mandatory collectivism. … The idea of individuality is twin with Fanon’s vision of ‘a new humanism.’… Such a humanism would testify to a concrete and truly shareable universal.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 166)  This new, concretely universal humanism will be created as peoples who have been reduced to the status of objects assert their essential subjecthood– their collective capacity to determine their own lives and their individual capacity to shape their existence in accordance with plans of their own.

All human beings are connected to the earth and each other through shared sets of needs. These needs are not– to paraphrase Marx– abstractions inherent in each individual. Rather, they are experienced as concrete requirements that must be satisfied if life is to continue. As such, they are experienced within the real social and cultural contexts of real human lives. Sekyi-Otu defends the “universality of the universalism that speaks in variegated tongues as they convey the ordinary languages of moral and political judgement.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 14) As needs, i.e., as life requirements they are the same and form the foundation of a shared human project: to overcome structural obstacles to comprehensive need-satisfaction like exploitation, alienation, and oppression. As concrete universals, the needs and the resources and relationships that satisfy them are different in their details. Groups need to organize their symbolic life in their own language, there are important dietary differences and rituals surrounding dinner which are not just cosmopolitan colour for tourists but essentially meaningful for some groups. Woman and men both have bodies, but their health care needs differ. Most importantly, all historically dominated people need to organise their own social and political and economic lives as social self-conscious, deliberative political agents. Colonialism denied the humanity of colonised people by denying they could not manage their own affairs– that they were still in their “non-age” as J.S. Mill said of Indians. Colonialism denied that humanity, but it could not destroy it– the proof was in the pudding of anti-colonial revolution.

Within this still vital political argument lies a sophisticated philosophical argument. Sekyi-Otu is not claiming that there are universal values up there in the heavens which all human beings apply to their own circumstances. Rather, his point is that there is no “up there” from which values can be drawn, but rather that the universal is the particular expressed as the basis of evaluative judgement and criticism. Sekyi-Otu explains that this “metaethical principle” “is neither an abstract ideal nor a foreign import … it is homemade, a regular product of our domestic discursive industry … committed to the criticism of unjust acts and relations in everyday life.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 18) This principle is activated every time we resonate with a fellow suffering human being: “It is under the aegis of such an everyday universalism that, upon encountering a victim … of harmful or degrading treatment, an Akan speaker in Ghana voices her outrage with this simple question:  … Is she not also a human being?”(Sekyi-Otu, 2019, 17)  His target here is ethnocentric ethical reasoning which says that all standards are local and the human good is the way things are done around here.

Drawing on the disappointments of African workers and women with the sorry results of post-colonial society (disappointments which he now shares first hand following his move back to Ghana from Canada) Sekyi-Otu warns (as Fanon did earlier) that these arguments too often are nothing more than ideological cover to excuse local ruling classes. Again, he pulls no punches when it comes to assigning ultimate responsibility for African problems to the legacy of colonialism. At the same time, a proper valuation of the humanity of African cultures and peoples demands that people criticise their own traditions– or those who would appropriate them for their own political and economic purposes.

The problem with ethnocentrists of any stripe is that they unwittingly repeat the very Eurocentrism they intend to contest. “To abjure universalism tout court,” Sekyi-Otu argues, “because of imperialist, Eurocentric, and discriminatory auspices of certain versions—as certain Western conscripts to the anti-imperialist cause in common with certain voices from the global South invite us to do, is the last word of the imperial act.”(Sekyi-Out, 2019, 14) By dividing the world into a Europe that speaks the language of universals, and indigenous cultures and subaltern identities that assert particular values in response, these critics miss the universal logic at the heart of any culture’s values- and thus undervalue it in the process whereby they aim to vindicate it. Here his work resonates with the “liberation ethics” of Enrique Dussel, the life-value philosophy of John McMurtry, and my “materialist ethics.” All concur on this essential point: universal values grow up out of and are embedded in the connections between human beings and the earth and each other. Higher level symbolic expressions grow up out of this soil. Different groups express these universal in their own way: they are the originators, but the orgination is not out of nothing, but from the common ground of life-conditions and life-requirements.

Sekyi-Otu does not confine his arguments to the western philosophical canon. Exemplifying his own claim that the universal is not an abstract “one apart from many” but is always expressed in concretely individual form, he examines in illuminating detail in how the argument between individualists and communitarians has played out in specifically African thought. As both listener to and participant in this conversation, Sekyi-Otu lets African philosophy speak in its own voice. This approach is a refreshing departure from too many anti-Eurocentric criticisms, which attack Eurocentrism using ideas drawn exclusively from the history of European philosophy and launched exclusively from within the halls of European and North American academia. Of all the chapters in the book I learned most from the fourth, in which Sekyi-Otu masterfully combines sympathetic and charitable reading with uncompromising critique of post-colonial African thought. It has failed to solve the main problem that it has with which it has grappled– reconciling space for individual freedom with the recovery of collectivist traditions attacked by colonialism– because it has operated with reified ideas of both community and individuality. Instead of either opposing a Western individualism to an African collectivism, or, conversely, finding in African traditions analogues of Western (possessive) individualism, African philosophers have to re-read, he argues, their own history to find (hopefully) Africacentric but not romanticised alternatives to failed western models of individual and collective life. Again, the universal can only ever be found in particular ways of life.

But Sekyi-Otu is a restless thinker. He wants to understand life from the inside as well as the outside. For this knowledge he turns to post-colonial African literature. This literature has long been dismissed, Sekyi-Otu tells us, for its purportedly superficial social realism, the obviousness of its politics, and the mechanical functionalism of its characters. Against this interpretation, Sekyi-Otu reveals the tensions– psychological as well as political, ethical and well as practical, metaphysical as well as mundane- that structure the best of this literature. In Sekyi-Otu’s re-reading, post-colonial African literature gives voice to the deepest tensions and contradictions of human life. It thus speaks to universal human concerns and ambivalences, but in the particular context of one of the greatest dramas of human liberation yet staged: the struggle to build democratic post-colonial societies. The chapter on post-colonial literature is a fitting conclusion to the book. It exemplifies the ways in which post-colonial African literature exemplifies the ways in which the universal always speaks a particular voice, which is the unifying theme of the five essays.

Like all liberal rights, academic freedom cuts both ways politically.  Much of the controversy that it engenders is a function of one side wanting to claim as its exclusive property a right that by its very nature is two-sided.  The growth of the  alt-right in the wake of Trump’s election and the return of arguments over political correctness (first time tragedy, second time farce) to North American campuses has made a public issue of what in less fraught times would be studiously ignored by everyone outside of academia.

In Canada, the main fault line today is the University of Toronto, and in particular Psychology Professor Jordan Peterson’s one man campaign against pronouns.  Cloaking himself in the mantle of “science,”  he has argued that there are no biological or social grounds for using genderless pronouns when referring to trans people, and has accused his opponents of violating academic freedom in their critical responses to his position.  Recently, he has upped the ante.  Building on his popularity as an alt-right icon, he has promised to start a web site to expose left-wing “cult”  classes on campus.  As he told CBC radio:

“We’re going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be designed to help students and parents identify post-modern content in courses so that they can avoid them,” he told CTV’s Your Morning in August.

“I’m hoping that over about a five-year period a concerted effort could be made to knock the enrolment down in postmodern neo-Marxist cult classes by 75 per cent across the West. So our plan initially is to cut off the supply to the people that are running the indoctrination cults.”

[Colleagues at the University of Toronto are alarmed.  Not only is this a gross failure of collegiality– we are supposed to criticize each other but not call each other names and try to destroy one another’s classes– but they are also worried– legitimately– that in the ionized political atmosphere that prevails today, being singled out on this website could make them the targets of violence.  I will leave these legitimate concerns to one side and use the example as a lens to examine the real meaning and value of academic freedom].

So, parents, before you start worrying that your child will go to U of T and come home next Thanksgiving in saffron robes singing hymns to Lord Krishna, let me decode Prof. Peterson’s invective.  “Post-modern”  was a term that was au courant when I was graduate student, more than 20 years ago.  Today, um, not so much.  “Neo-marxist” is even older.  Its referent– if it ever really had one– would be figures like Herbert Marcuse who, in the 1960s, tried to re-formulate Marx’s critique of capitalism to account for the ways in which the working class had been absorbed into the system.  So his terms of abuse are a bit out of date,  but hey, he is a psychologist and not a practitioner of the dark arts of Anthropology or English literature (two disciplines which have, according to the good doctor, been taken over by cult leaders).

What actually troubles him is that some disciplines have the temerity to challenge the authority of empirical science,  to expose its historical entanglements with very unscientific hierarchies of power, and to defend interpretive approaches to the problem of truth that take into account self-understanding, context, culture, and history.  In other words, students in these classes have the opportunity to think critically– the very opposite of cultish indoctrination.

Supporters of Peterson will say that academic freedom gives him the right to expose what he regards as unscientific dogma; his critics can rejoin that academic freedom gives them the right to teach methods and content critical of the western canon and natural science.  The truth is that academic freedom gives both sides the right (subject to key limitations that I will discuss below) to make whatever arguments they think need making.  Like the right to free speech, academic freedom is a formal right that protects the expression, in an academic context, of politically opposed positions.  Attempts to capture it by either the left or the right will always fail, because it protects expression, not content.

In order to understand academic freedom as well as its real value and importance, it is important that we not treat it as an abstract value but as a collective agreement right.  Academic freedom does not appear in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  While it might usefully be thought of as a species of free speech, the only documents that formally assert it and are able to protect it are faculty collective agreements (and, sometimes, University Senate by-laws).  Here are the relevant clauses from the Collective agreement between my Faculty Association and the administration of the University of Windsor:

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10:02  Each member shall be free in the choice and pursuit of research consistent with the objectives and purposes of the University and in the publication of the results, subject only to the normally expected level of performance of her/his other duties and responsibilities.

10:03  Each member shall have freedom of discussion.  However, in the exercise of this freedom in the classroom, reasonable restraint shall be used in introducing matters unrelated to her/his subject.  The University shall not require conformity to any religious beliefs, doctrines or practices.

10:04 The University shall not impose supervision or other restraints upon, nor will it assume responsibility for, what is said or written by a member acting as a private citizen.  However, as a person of learning she/he shall exercise good judgment and shall make it clear that she/he is not acting as a spokesperson for the University.

As should be clear,  the main purpose of academic freedom is not to protect marginalized political positions of whatever ideological stripe, but rather to ensure that research and teaching are unconstrained by administrative, economic, or political power.  The relevant contrast is not between left and right, but between truth and power:  academic freedom is necessary because the discovery of truths depends upon the free exercise of intellect, including its critical exercise against any and all authorities who would try to block the dissemination of certain truths that undermine their legitimacy.

The main threat to academic freedom is university administrations themselves, and the social, political, and economic forces that batter at the walls of the university demanding that research and teaching serve their interests.  That said, academic freedom itself protects Marxist economists and business professors, radical feminists and defenders of traditional marriage, nationalist historians of the First World War and post-colonial critics of imperialism.  So long as there are competing political positions in society they will be represented in academia.  All attempts of one side or the other to use academic freedom to de-legitimate the other side contradict the very value to which they appeal.

That said, there are two very good reasons for social critics to defend academic freedom even though it also protects the right of their opponents to attack them.   First of all, alt-right fantasies aside, the university is not ruled by neo-marxist cultists.  Boards of Governors are stuffed with business people, and senior administrators increasingly identify their role with that of a CEO.  While there are a few dogmatic leftists teaching, there are no neo-marxist cultists running universities.  Ordinary market forces are a much bigger threat to the existence of Anthropology and English Literature than Peterson’s website will ever be.  The totalitarian drum beat of jobs, jobs. jobs, abetted by administrators who design budgets that de-fund the arts and humanities (as well as basic research in the sciences)  in favour of commodifiable research, are rapidly shifting the university away from social criticism and toward conformity with money imperatives.  Academic freedom can be an important value basis for the critique of institutional degeneration.

Second, the left has to learn how to win arguments again.  We need to convince opponents that the world is wrong and stop being satisfied with patting each other on the back for our moral purity.  That means a willingness to engage the intellectual enemy and prove that we have more coherent and comprehensive understandings of the world, that we can expose their contradictions and one-sided constructions, and that we have a convincing program that can build multi-faceted majority support.

The only real and legitimate constraint on academic freedom is the truth that our research and teaching ought to serve.  Where there are contrary positions, both cannot be true, but to decide between them generally requires argument.  Argument is not ad hominem insult; criticism is not dogmatic rejection of whole fields of social and cultural research.  Moreover, truth is not the preserve of the natural sciences.  To be sure, natural scientific understanding of the elements and laws of material reality are of essential importance, both as intrinsically valuable achievements of the human mind, and also as essential contributors to collective health and well-being.  But science does not exist in a Platonic realm of ideas free from political and economic power.  Nor are the laws of material nature sufficient to understand human history, society, and culture.  There is no value free way to study values, and no way to fully understand human history, society, and culture without studying values.  That ensures that there will be disagreement.  Academic freedom is essential to ensuring that those disagreements are resolved by superior evidence, reasons, and argument, and not by campaigns to de-legitimate those disciplines with the historical competence to compile, evaluate, and articulate the evidence.

In We Can Do Better:  Ideas for Changing Society, David Camfield presents his “reconstructed historical materialism”  as the theoretical key to practical social transformation.  It is both concise and wide-ranging, but never becomes so dense that it ceases to be accessible to non-experts.  Camfield avoids academic jargon and pecayune analysis in favour of readable prose and familiar, effective examples.  At the same time, the book engages with complex philosophical problems and challenging impediments to socialist political organization with enough sophistication to engage the attention of academics and seasoned activists.  Philosophically, his reconstructed historical materialism retains the core strength of the original theory while providing novel solutions to older problems of misinterpretations like economism and mechanical theories of historical causality.  By stressing collective agency as the driving force of history, Camfield’s reconstruction prepares the ground for a new politics of struggle from below in which class, race, and sex-gender are intertwined rather than set against one another.  Camfield thus manages to develop a theory which coherently informs practice, and theorizes a practice that could plausibly produce the sorts of unified and global movements that progress towards socialism will require.

In the first part of the four part book Camfield examines three alternatives to historical materialist explanation:  idealism, biological determinism, and neo-liberal market fundamentalism.  According to the first, history is driven by ideal entities of some sort:  divine will, Platonic forms, or values that exist independently of the people who hold them.  According to the second, social history is determined by natural history.  Humanity’s genetic structure essentially programs certain forms of behaviour which recur in different forms in different societies.  According to the third, human beings are programmed to compete, which means that history is dominated by various forms of market relationships.  Capitalism is the final form of society because it perfects and universalises market relationships. Hence, it is both in accord with our competititve nature and the most efficient and just way of utilizing resources.

Camfield shows that each of these alternative explanations  fails as a coherent explanation of historical development and social dynamics.  Idealists beg the question, asserting that ideas determine historical development but unable to explain how the ideas arise in the first place.  Biological determinists have an account of where ideas come from, but their mechanistic and reductionist explanations cannot account for how a more or less identical genetic code can give rise to wildly different societies, cultures, and symbolic beliefs.  Market fundamentalism provides sound explanations of prototypical behaviour in capitalism, but cannot explain the dispositions, property forms, and social relationships that typified earlier egalitarian, non-market societies, nor the various forms of cooperation that underlie all forms of social life.  Of course people compete, but cooperation, not competition underlies all forms of society, because it is a presupposition of life itself.  The shared problem of all three approaches is thus that they reify and falsely universalise one aspect of human nature and society.

The great strength of historical materialism is that it exposes the problem of reification.  Reification refers to the process of turning a complex human practice or belief into an independent entity and then positing it as the cause of the practice.  Marx’s critique of reification has its roots in Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion.  Feuerbach argued that our idea of God is a reified projection of our own essential powers. Just as human beings are really the origin of the idea of God, so too are we the creators of economic value and the agents whose collective activity shapes the ideas according to which we act. Historical materialism can therefore do what none of the alternatives can:  explain the role of ideas, genes, and markets in historical context without according them independent existence and agency.

Camfield’s reconstruction of historical materialism is the content of Part Two.  He begins– as Marx’s original did– with the natural history of humanity.  We are  a mammallian species with definite needs which  force us to interact productively with the natural environment.  However, given our evolved neural architecture and social interdependence, we have developed forms of thought and communication that allow us to create what no other species can create:  a social-symbolic universe out of the giveness of nature.  History is thus always two-sided, a dialectical interaction between material production and symbolic explanatory reconstruction-justification of material production.  Ideas and values are thus interwoven with life-sustaining labour.  “Because humans create cultures, our context is never just a physical location.  It is always a cultural setting too.  The circumstances in which we find ourselves include ways of making sense of the world, giving it meaning and placing values on things. … Such ideas matter, but we must not make the idealist error of treating ideas as if they exist separately from people.”(p. 29)

We must certainly avoid the error of mechanical reductionism, but we also need to solve a trickier problem, (which Camfield’s reconstruction can help us solve, although I did not find myself convinced that the job is fully accomplished here), about the relationship between the ultimate material foundations of social life– reproductive and productive labour– and the histories of ideas, values, identities, and behaviours that develop out of those underlying processes.  The problem for historical materialism is how much relative weight to assign to natural as opposed to cultural factors in our explanation of individual behaviour and belief.  As an example, consider Camfield’s discussion of gender.  He quotes Connell in support of the view that gender “is not an expression of biology, nor a fixed dichotomy in human life or character.  It is a pattern in our social arrangements, and in the everyday activities and patterns which those arrangements cover.”(37) On this view biology determines our sex, but gender is a cultural product which is not determined  by our biological sex characteristics.  While it is true-  as the creation of a variety of trans identities prove– that sex does not mechanically determine gender identity, does this mean that biological sex plays no role?  Are male and female irrelevant to the ways in which gender has been constructed across cultural time and space?

The point is not to argue that biology determines gender identity, or anything at all in any mechanical sense.  At the same time we have to avoid cutting culture off completely from natural and biological bases.  In the 1960’s the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro (in On Materialism) warned against the naive optimism of culturalist interpretations of historical materialism which ignored the way in which our bodies and their infirmities act as frames that limit human possibility.  More recently, ecofeminists (for example, Ariel Sallehin Ecofeminism as Politics) have argued that women’s biology makes it possible for them to valorize nurturing relationships in a more profound way than men.  They do not thereby claim that women’s biology mechanically causes them to be nurturing, or that men cannot learn to be so, but they do argue for a closer relationship between biology and behaviour than Camfield seems to want to allow.  Camfield may not be wrong in his arguments, but there is more discussion to be had about this difficult issue than he is able to explore here.

Nevertheless, his stated position, read charitably, is the right one to take.  He argues that while productive and reproductive labour are foundational for human life and function as frames outside of which political, or religious, or artistic history could not exist, none of the forms those institutions and practices take are directly, mechanically determined by the economic structure, but have to be explained by concrete analysis of actual historical development.  Thus, from the fact that any capitalist society must exploit labour and create a political-legal structure that justifies and enforces it, no one can predict what state and legal form, beyond the generic necessity to justify and protect the exploitation of labour, any society will adopt.  Capitalism can be fascist or liberal-democratic, liberal-democrats can be nationalists or cosmopolitans; the law can enshrine formal equality between the sexes and gay marriage or it can enforce a sexual division of labour and demonize gays and lesbians.  The function of law is consistent, we can say, while is content differs given different traditions of struggle.

In this view, the key to understanding historical materialism is the dialectical relationship between context (the result of past activity) and action (interventions into the given reality which produce changes in it and generate a new context).  Camfield consistently affirms the agency of people:  we reflect, argue, and then act, and those actions are not, strictly speaking, predictable, but give rise to patterns from which we can learn if we study them. However, while the argument he wants and for the most part does make is dialectical and affirms human collective agency as the primary driver of history, there are moments where a more mechanical argument creeps in.

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However, for the most part Camfield avoids the error of mechanical determinism and provides as clear and accessible demonstration of what it means to think dialectically about society as one could hope to read.  There is no mystery to dialectical thought.  At root, all it really means is that one sees history as a process driven forward by struggles between opposed social forces.  Marx argued that the fundamental forms of opposition are between productive and appropriating classes.  Camfield does not alter this Marxist fundamental, but in Part Three makes clear, in a way that Marx occasionally noted but most often only implied, that the members of classes are not sexless and raceless abstractions but real people with definite sex, sexual, gender, and racial identities, with wider or narrow ranges of ability, with or without religious beliefs, and that all of these factors play into the contours of political struggle.

The real strength of Camfield’s book, its major contribution, is to provide a new theoretical and in practical  synthesis of the efforts of a number of thinkers over the past twenty years to develop a model of class struggle that is adequate to the real complexity of the working class:  the fact that most workers are non-white women, that class exploitation also exploits existing racial and gender hierarchies and any other means of dividing the working class that it can find or invent; that, therefore, anti-racist struggle, for example, is not some “extra”  outside of the main class struggle, but is class struggle, because white supremacy has been essential to capitalism from the beginning, and that the same can be said for patriarchy and struggles against all sorts of oppression.

Thus, if one wants to revive the old Marxist slogan that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself, one must remember that this self-emancipation is not only from the capitalists, but also from sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on.  “The goal of a self-governing society could only be reached through a process controlled by the great majority of people acting in their own interests.  All the way along, such a transition would have to be a process of self-emancipation.  No minority, such as a party or armed force, could be a substitute for the democratically self-organized majority.”(126)  When we combine this principle with the concrete explanation that Camfield gives in the third part of the book of the ways in which class exploitation, patriarchy, and white supremacy have intertwined in the history of capitalism, we are presented with a hopeful program for movement building which respects the contextual need for autonomous organizing within a non-dogmatic commitment to ultimately unified struggle.

Camfield’s hopeful politics is never naive but honest about the real challenges this politics faces.  He concludes Part Three with a chapter whose title faces the problem squarely:  “Why isn’t There More Revolt.”  He answers the question with admirable candor:  “Because the working class has become more decomposed, collective action by workers to address their problems does not see very credible … ordinary people have become more prone to directing their anger against other people who suffer social inequality in one way or another.  Muslims, migrants, poor people, foreigners, women, people who face racism, Indigenous peoples– the victims of scapegoating are many and varied.”(107)  How far we travelled away from Marx’s belief that the dynamics of capitalism would themselves produce working class consciousness and that all workers would realize that they “have no country”  and that all that they have to lose in revolution “is their chains!”

False theory is false theory and it has to be rejected no matter who formulates it.  At the same time, one worries that Camfield is holding on to the goal of the theory– an ultimately unified movement against capitalism– without replacing the materialist foundation which provided the explanation of why that unity would happen.  What we have seen in the two major waves of revolt provoked by the 2008 crisis of capitalism, the Arab Spring and Occupy, is not ultimate unification but sudden mass mobilization followed by fragmentation and division,  The door was thus opened to reaction and repression.  This opposition was not only structural, as between Islamists and liberals in the Arab Spring, but also divided all variety of subfactions in Occupy whose members all shared broadly similar goals of resistance and anti-capitalism.

That division is worrying because it seems to suggest that the left faces a problem first identified by John Rawls with regard to liberal society in general:  that unanimity is impossible because of the fact of reasonable pluralism.  In modernity, Rawls argued, where people are educated and allowed to speak, they will do so, and they will disagree, and nothing can ever overcome the fact of disagreement about political issues.  The ease with which anyone can broadcast their voice on social media today has amplified the problem–if we want to call it a problem– of pluralism.  Marx’s structural theory of class consciousness could be read as one way of solving this problem:  capitalist crisis will awaken different workers to their shared objective interests.  I agree with Marx and Camfield that there are objective interests, but the facts from the most recent round of struggles suggest that these interests will always be interpreted differently by different groups, which means that the moment of unity may not arrive.

Or it could mean that it will arrive in a different form than the one that Marx expected.  The fact of reasonable pluralism on the left seems to rule out the possibility of reviving vanguard party building, and that is not bad, given its obvious failures.  At the same time, it poses a problem that the left has not thought through fully enough:  how does a unified movement allow the expression of different interpretations of objective interests and remain coherently unified?  Where there is a disagreement about particular momentary demands the problem is easy enough to solve:  take a vote and majority rules.  But when it is over deeper questions like the relative weight of different histories of oppression, for example, with the question of whether white members can adequately comprehend their own privilege, or whether Islamic dress codes are compatible with women’s liberation, final answers that will prove satisfying to all members might be more difficult to attain.

I would have liked to have seen more reflection on this sort of problem, because I think Camfield’s reconstruction might yield important insights about how it can be addressed.  He does not go far enough along that road here.  However, theory, like practice, is open-ended, and I look forward to further developments of his productive reconstruction of historical materialism and socialist practice.

Historical Context and the Principles at Issue

Three recent controversies have raised questions about the value and limits to free speech and academic freedom.  The first involved the paintings of Canadian artist Amanda PL.  She claims that her paintings were  inspired by the work of the Anishnabe artist Norval Morisseau.  She has been criticized by the Chippewa artist Jay Soule as coming close to committing an act of  “cultural genocide.”  The second concerns an editorial penned by now-former editor Hal Niedzviecki in Write magazine.  He called for a “cultural appropriation prize”  for the author best able to write characters not of their own culture.  The third concerns a paper published in the journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia.  The paper argued that there was an analogy to be drawn between trasnsexualism and transracialism:  if people celebrate Caitlyn Jenner for changing sexes, then they should, by analogous reasoning, celebrate  Rachel Dolezal, (a white woman who lived for years as a black woman), for wanting to change races.  The article provoked an unprecedented public campaign that demanded the journal retract the article.

I will work through each of the criticisms in turn.  However, before any useful light can be shed on the controversies, the historical context of the emergence of the principles of free speech and academic freedom need to examined.  One of the most lamentable facts about public discourse in the age of Twitter is that even thoughtful people do not– indeed, cannot, because immediate comment is demanded– stop to think through the historical process through which contemporary political values  have emerged.  When we do stop and think things through historically, the political implications and limitations of the value in question become clear, and we are then better able to negotiate controversies and work out appropriate forms of response to controversial instances of their use.

On February 17th, 1600, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome.  His execution was ordered by the Pope because Bruno’s teachings:  that matter itself could be understood as the active, self-forming principle of reality and that an all-powerful god would create a universe teeming with other forms of life were deemed heretical.  One hundred and fifty years later the Enlightenment would confront the violent dogmatism of theological authority with the rational principle that disagreements be settled by the better argument.  My point is not to compare critics of potentially offensive speech to the Inquisition, but to remind everyone that the right to free speech was (and should still be) a social value.  It defended the right of individuals to question orthodoxy and repressive  power.  As such, it was a powerful tool in the struggle against all forms of oppression.  It is not–as it is sometimes thought of today– a right to say whatever one wants and give offense just because one can.  Rather, it was a right, in its origins, to explore alternatives and criticize; to expand the scope of human understanding; to protect the voices of the less powerful; to create a social space for the formerly voiceless to speak; and to catalyze non-violent forms of social and political change.

Academic freedom is a species of the genus free speech.  It has no constitutional grounds but is protected only by convention and faculty collective agreements.  In Canada its origins date to the firing of Harry Crowe.  In 1958 the history professor was fired for criticizing the religious authorities who ran United College (today the University of  Winnipeg).  His firing spurred the formation of the Canadian Association of University Professors, whose core mission includes protection of academic freedom from threats inside of and outside of the academy. The only reason any critical voices are heard in universities anywhere today is because of the space academic freedom protects.  Marxists, feminists, trans-activists, and critical race theorists would all be gone if academic freedom did not protect their right to criticize established structures of power, gender and racial norms, and anything else that can be made the object of critical scrutiny.  Struggles around free speech, free expression, and academic freedom have often been led by the most marginalized and oppressed groups.  Their struggles to give public expression to their realities and needs  has radically transformed the cultural landscape of liberal-democratic-capitalist society for the better.

That free speech has been an important vehicle for the struggles of oppressed groups does not mean that it should never be limited.  What principles should govern its limitation?  If the basic social value of the right to free speech is that it allows for the expression of perspectives that would be silenced otherwise, then the basic limitation on free speech, expression, and academic freedom is the opposite:  when one group’s free speech actively silences another group or explicitly targets them for destruction (as in anti-Semitic hate or racist hate speech that calls for the extermination of the demonized group) then the speech is no longer properly understood as falling under the category of free speech, but becomes an expression of oppressive ideology.  Merely giving offense does not pass this test.  To be offended is not to be silenced (if it were, no one would know that someone is offended, because the offended party would be unable to express their displeasure).

Cases in Point

I think that of the three cases, only the case of Amanda PL comes close to crossing the line towards forms of expression that are justly censured.  However, even in this case I think the gallery was wrong to cancel the show.  The case of Niedviecki is a case of misinterpreted satire that was then exploited by right-wing forces who have nothing to do with Niedviecki.  The Hypatia case is a debacle of the highest order and a serious threat to academic freedom.

1. The artist at the centre of the controversy, Amanda PL, studied at Lakehead University and claims inspiration from Anishnabe artist Norval Morriseau.  From what I have seen of her paintings, they would be better described as vastly inferior mimicry rather than works of art.  The colours, the motifs, the enclosing of structures within coloured spheres all linked together with curving tendrils are obviously reminiscent of Morriseau and other Anishnabe artists.  But as Soule points out, in PL’s case, it is all surface and no cultural-spiritual depth.  Morriseau, according to Soule, was giving painterly expression to stories that PL did not know and whose spiritual depth she could not understand.

Soule is right to criticize her for cultural appropriation.  Even though she acknowledges the source, the source is so obviously grounded in a cultural tradition that informed the work, and which has not become internationalized (in the way, say, that the blues or jazz have) that her mimicry is illegitimate.  Cultural appropriation is different from being influenced and inspired by a foreign culture.  Beckett wrote in French to make language seem strange, to force himself to think about the task of writing, but he lived in France and learned the language.  Amanda PL has not served any sort of cultural apprenticeship amongst the Anishnabe, has not tried to get inside the culture to learn the stories or the connection between style and story.  She has tried to advance her art career with derivative paintings that nevertheless look enough like admired Anishnabe work that it might sell.

That said, I cannot agree with Soule that the work counts as cultural genocide.  The United Nations defines genocide as:

Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

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physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

2. The Niedzviecki controversy overlaps with the Amanda PL problem because it to concerns the matter of who speaks for First Nations, Inuit, and Metis.  From my perspective it seems much less serious a violation of their voices than the Amanda PL case. Niedzviecki was clearly being satirical when he called for the creation of a cultural appropriation prize. The main thrust of his editorial was not about cultural appropriation but the importance of imagination to literature.  Literature is not just recounting stories, it is the invention of literary worlds.  Invention forces authors to go beyond their own private experiences to create worlds that do not exist in material reality.  Dostoyevsky did not have to murder a miserly slumlord in order to explore the psychology of guilt and the ethics of redemption in Crime and Punishment. If we limit art to mere description and representation, we destroy art, whose truth is the invention of worlds and not the accurate description and proportional representation of real members of this one.

Part of that invention has to be the imaginative occupation of perspectives different from one’s own.  If not, every work of literature would be nothing but monologue (but maybe even not that, since we are not transparent to ourselves but have different sides).  All writing therefore takes us beyond what the self has directly experienced. That was the main philosophical and artistic point he was making, but it got lost completely in the critique of an obviously satirical call for cultural appropriation and the cultural appropriation prize.

In humourous utterance, intent matters.  Niedzviecki intended to provoke, no doubt, but to provoke thought about the role of imaginative transposition, not to support cultural appropriation.  Now, I say this as white male philosopher not aware, from the inside, of what it feels like to suffer deprivation of voice. I am sure my history influences my reading. At the same time, I am not saying that Niedzwiecki is beyond criticism, but only that reasoned criticism takes time:  our world demands instant response, and instant responses are rarely wise.  A more productive conversation and critique might have been had had a moment’s reflection on context and intentions preceded the calls for retraction and resignation.  These do little to solve the deeper problems of First Nation’s and Inuit and Metis lives, but they do engage/enrage the right wing (like former national Post publisher Ken Whyte) who did intend to harm and humiliate by offering to fund the prize.

Niedzwiecki’s comments might have hurt the feelings of members of vulnerable cultures, but they were included in an edition of Write! given over to First Nation’s writers.  Clearly, in terms of actions, Niedzviecki was their ally, not their enemy.  All satire, all humour, runs the risk of giving offence to someone.  Do we really want a world without satire?  A world where everyone has to triple guess themselves before they speak lest some ears take offence? I’ll book my ticket for Mars — I’ll take a room in the Don Rickles suite, please– if jokes, satire, hyperbole, farce, and laughter are forbidden on earth.

Again, the principle is: fight back with the weapons that attack you (although in this case I do not see an attack).  If someone makes fun of you, make fun in turn.  It is better to laugh at each other than to destroy each other.

3. The cases of Amanda PL and Niedzwiecki at least raise important questions about cultural appropriation.  Hopefully these questions will generate on-going dialogue that explores the crucial issue:  how can members of dominant groups speak responsibly when exploring  problems stemming from histories of cultural oppression, and how can members of historically oppressed groups criticize that history as forcefully as they need to, without in effect silencing satirical voices.  The Hypatia affair has no such virtues.

The signatories to the letter demanding the retraction of the Tuvel piece are in open violation of the norms of academic freedom, and really over a paper that is eminently reasonable, whether or not one agrees with her conclusion.  The paper proceeds from the principle that thought must:

hold open a space for real intellectual curiosity, for investigations that deepen our understanding of how identity claims and processes function, rather than rushing to offer well-formed opinions based on what we already think we know” (Stryker 2015, quoted in Tuvel, p. 264)

The paper unfolds according to this logic of respectful inquiry and is sensitive to the ethical and political complexities involved.  Others may disagree:  they should do so and respond, but there is nothing in the paper that would warrant its retraction.

If we conspire to undermine academic freedom in the way proposed by the signatories of the letter we will all suffer.  I subscribe to the American Association of University Professors’ electronic bulletin.  Almost everyday it relates a horror story of a professor fired for running afoul of administrations or governments.  Turkey is in the midst of a purge which has seen thousands of academics lose their jobs.  The Turkish government’s position is clear:  academics serve at the pleasure of the President. Anyone who criticizes his line forfeits their job.

We cannot mince words here:  the principle that underlies the demand to retract the Tuvel piece is identical:  conform your thought to a reigning orthodoxy (or some self-elected group’s definition of orthodoxy)  or be placed on the Index.  That Hypatia is a path-breaking journal of feminist philosophy makes the demand all the more disgraceful.  Hypatia would not exist unless feminist scholars had successfully contested academic orthodoxy.  Academic freedom was a vital principle  in that struggle.

Philosophers, as philosophers, simply cannot call for any other to be silenced.  Ever.  Philosophy responds to untruth with better argument, always, everywhere, in all cases,  or it is not philosophy.  Not every political problem can be resolved by argument, but when we are active as philosophers, whatever our identity, we argue, we do not silence.  If people’s sensibilities and anxieties make it impossible for them to hear certain arguments, then philosophy is not for them.  “The study of philosophy is much hindered,” Hegel wrote,  “by the conceit that will not argue,”  a conceit which “relies on truths which are taken for granted and which it sees no need to re-examine.”  The truth in philosophy is always contested:  argument is the means of contestation:  no limits, no hurt feelings allowed.  Philosophers listen, think, criticize, accept criticism, re-think, revise, and re-argue, forever if need be.

The actual criticisms articulated in the letter may very well be sound. They should be developed into a rebuttal and published, perhaps with a response from Tuvel.  Maybe a special issue of Hypatia could be devoted to the controversy.  But the demand to retract smacks of the worst sort of moralistic Maoism.  Shall we have re-education camps next (or maybe just mandatory training)?  Thinkers who want to be taken seriously as philosophers have to speak out against this reactionary and repressive politics in the most forceful terms.

My previous post concerned some qualms I have about the ways in which Canadian universities are advertising positions asking for applicants to demonstrate how they will incorporate “indigenous knowledge”  into their courses.  As I was finishing that post, I received an email from Bruce Ferguson, an Algonquin philosophy student.  He was writing me as part of a an independent project he had undertaken to canvas Canadian philosophers about their understanding of and disposition towards indigenous philosophy.  The serendipity was spooky.  I told him about the post I just happened to have been working on, and he took the time to post a long thoughtful comment.  It can be found in its original form in the comments section of that post.  Since Bruce’s whole point in writing the philosophical community was to start a dialogue, I tried to respond at length to his substantive points.  With Bruce’s permission, I have re-produced his original intervention and my responses (in italics).

White people can’t teach indigenous philosophy! What?
Posted on February 4, 2017 by maqua2017

BACKGROUND

I recently started a research project that concerned itself with the clear lack of strategies and plans in which philosophy departments across Canada interact with Indigenous Traditional Knowledge, contemporary Indigenous Thought and ideas about how to systematically study the system of Indigenous thought and then the stupid question of whether indigenous though “qualifies” as philosophy.

This “stupid question” is often also asked of eastern philosophy.  If you were to make the comparison, I think you would find, with few exceptions, (Brock in St. Catherines and the University of Hawaii do take “comparative” philosophy seriously) that  Eastern Philosophy is generally treated as religion or spirituality.  Indigenous thought likewise (and also African philosophy).  Since the beliefs are often not expressed in propositional form, but as overarching world views, they are often not taken seriously as philosophy, because not articulated as arguments.  But of course much of the most important Western philosophy also uses allegory, myth, and metaphor to communicate overarching world views: Plato, most importantly, the long complex histories of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy, many ecological and eco-feminist philosophies (which often derive inspiration and content from indigenous knowledge); Nietzsche and existentialist thought).  

I literally sent emails to every philosopher I could find listed in a philosophy department website of the post-secondary institutions listed by the Canadian Philosophy Association. While receiving encouragement and thoughts, observations and so forth from professors I noticed an emerging set of themes; self-disqualifying statements,lack of time statements, a few guarded statements of disinterest but mostly (and shockingly) a political sensitivity – privileging the idea that only indigenous people can teach indigenous thought – a trend that I do not agree with and will argue as misplaced and unnecessary.

I think there are two issues with the disavowal of ability.  The innocuous one and one that is true, is that most of us have no education in indigenous thought, either as regards its content or its form (the importance and veracity of oral traditions, how to interpret myths, what to make of the integration of what from a scientific perspective are totally distinct realms of material structure—lands and waters—and symbolic-meaningful cultural systems).  If there is such a thing as indigenous knowledges-  and I think there is-  it has a different structure than western philosophy and science which are, in the main, literalist, written, empirical-logical, and falsifiable or refutable.  The second, and more problematic, might be—and I emphasise might-  a polite way of saying:  I know what I know and I do not want to bother learning, or trying to learn, anything fundamentally different.

In addition to misplaced political sensitivity is the problem of workload and priorities. Philosophers engaged in academia are very busy ensuring their responsibilities to the department are met, they are engaged with students at the level of teaching philosophy and forming “next generation philosophers”. Administration, evaluating students, career and academic interests and priorities all work towards philosophers who are too busy to do philosophy because of a demanding education system. We non-academic types “get it”.

EMERGING PARADIGM

Now here’s the emerging paradigm; Non-indigenous teachers cannot teach indigenous knowledge. – a statement I consider to be pure political and academic rhetoric.

I would repeat my two points above.  I think that you are right in one sense, but not in the other.  In principle non-indigenous scholars can learn and teach indigenous knowledges, I agree, but that would require much learning on our part (and maybe learning such a we are not used to—from elders not from books). It is/would be a big challenge.

So, why would I be against this well meaning and emerging paradigm? Simply because it is misleading, it indirectly validates the other side of the intellectual colonization coin. So let me get into explaining my thoughts on this.

I sense that this kind of political statement is influenced by the indigenous struggle for equality in Canada as well as the development and articulation of indigenous scholars in the sciences and social sciences. The territories of the humanities [philosophy] as a discipline versus the emerging territories of Indigenous studies all coming into conflict with one another and making for a politically sensitive environment that distracts from the role of teaching, learning and developing. I think both disciplines are too focused on themselves and ought to consider inter-disciplinary approaches as a balanced way to explore indigenous philosophy not to appropriate the philosophy but to develop some anchor of understanding that is qualified by relational statements such as “to the best of my experiential knowledge, cultural ability and limits within my life” and this is also true for me as an indigenous person. I can only make limited truth claims that relate to my own experience and shared experiences I have with my group in the human species. Beyond that, the possibilities of meta-analysis of emerging knowledge due to approaches such as ethno-philosophy can then reach beyond socio-cultural and experiential limits I sense (but am not certain of).

I think these points are well-made.  In work I did more than a decade ago (Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference) I was interested in exploring the common values beneath the different cultural systems in which people live and interpret their lives.  I focused on different groups in struggle (both within and outside the Global North) and abstracted the common themes that emerged.  The overwhelming commonality was that all asserted a right to self-determination and focused on some underlying shared conditions of achieving this goal (control over land and resources, economic forces and political institutions).  I claimed that these underlying conditions framed a core set of human needs (which I have explored in more detail in later work) and thus a core humanity, expressed different in different times and places.  Despite the differences, cross-cultural understanding and political solidarity is possible, because we can each interpret the other from the shared perspective of needs and conditions of self-determination.  Nevertheless (and I probably did not emphasise this aspect enough in the early work), cultural differences are real, and globally enriching, to the extent that they do not depend upon the oppression and domination of others.  The condition of realizing this value is intercultural dialogue and mutual learning, from a framework of equality (as I think you are also suggesting).   

MISPLACED SENSITIVITY

The misplaced sensitivity held by non-indigenous philosophers in this regard ( often encouraged by political rhetoric of indigenous academics who are forging out boundaries to protect their discipline(s) which are often an inter-disciplinary approach with all subjects indigenous) is that it puts a strangle hold on gathering and sharing knowledge; it is an indirect silencer of free speech and thinking, it is a dangerous precedent for a nation that values freedom One professor – in response to my emails – wrote back to me indicating a great interest in promoting and supporting indigenous philosophy in the academy; she discussed this with her indigenous colleagues but was told that her areas of study do not intersect in any way with indigenous philosophy and she could not be of help! How do these indigenous professors/teachers know this, how can they make this as a truth claim? The apparent messaging of these indigenous professors does nothing more than to promote the other side of the intellectual colonization picture. (And I am aware that I am responding to what I heard as a secondary source I have not heard this directly, so this statement is in no way judgemental of those indigenous academics – I treat this as a scenario or thought experiment).

This point raises an important underlying philosophical problem about solidarity:  what if the type of solidarity demanded by the historically oppressed group is passive; i.e., letting the oppressed have their space to find and articulate their voice.  I have no problem with this approach in the sense that one of the key aspects of oppression is loss of voice, not being able to peak in your own voice, and one of the things that non-indigenous members of the academy need to do is to make sure that our efforts to create space for indigenous scholars do not substitute for their efforts and voices.  Well-meaning attempts to broaden perspectives can reasonably be seen as appropriating voice if they are not combined with serious institutional efforts to change the composition of the professoriate.  I think that criticisms of solidarity can go too far, as when some members of oppressed groups argue that it is impossible to understand reality from their perspective and that the only solution is separation of some sort or other (some radical feminists in the 1960’s made this argument, the Nations of Islam make similar arguments vis-à-vis relationships between white and black America.  I take it from your position you would reject separatism, but I think the more limited demand for passive solidarity:  (Let us speak our own voice!!) must be respected by non-Indigenous academics, at least until the composition of the academy has changed more fully).
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However, if certain academics believe in what I like to refer to as an academic ghetto of inherent rights to a monopoly on certain discipline then what is the danger here? Nothing less than strangling knowledge! How do we know what intersects with what? The apparent statements from the indigenous scholars imply to me that they have either bought into traditional western divisions of knowledge; perhaps they do not see the validity in promoting a holistic and inter-disciplinary approach that much better reflects an indigenous methodology in gathering knowledge. The approach that is inclusion of all in the creation of ways of understanding what everyone is thinking within our limited ability as humans. Whatever the reason is, I would argue that it is wrong to promote the idea that only indigenous professors can teach indigenous philosophy.

Possibly, but might they not also be saying that prior to a productive inter-cultural dialogue, indigenous thinkers need time and space to think and talk amongst themselves.  Is the division permanent, or a precondition that can one day be dropped once conditions of equality (material, institutional, etc.,)  have been achieved?

Saying that though, there is no excuse for the academies to avoid hiring indigenous scholars because it is precisely that socio-cultural and experiential knowledge that helps a teacher delve further into the subject of indigenous thought, bringing it home as it were. It is an indigenous professor that can bring the non-native student deeper into an indigenous experience. I don’t think the majority of professionally trained philosophers would disagree with that.

I think this argument is dead on.  Real equality of voice and inter-cultural learning requires the presence of members of indigenous nations in the academy (just as the transformation of scholarship that feminism has produced and is producing required the presence of women).

UNNECESSARY

The position promoting “indigenous only” professors to teach indigenous philosophy is not just a power grab for resources, it is an inauthentic and unnecessary condition for philosophy departments to be avoiding the taking on “indigenous philosophy. Are indigenous academics prepared to live the consequences of this separatist position? If only indigenous peoples can teach indigenous philosophy, then does it follow that only western people (white) can teach western philosophy? I don’t think so; in fact, the other danger that comes in this statement is one of indoctrination and not education.

A very important point.  Certainly it would undermine the deep value of including other voices if those voices were then limited to speaking only what the existing authorities are prepared to hear:  the indigenous thought in some sort of ‘authentic” expression, but not interventions on his this thought re-contextualises and forces a re-thinking of the authoritative tradition.  It would also rule out—as you note-  indigenous scholars teaching whatever they happen to want or have expertise in, and that would be just another form of suffocating confinement and exclusions.  The Argentinian-Mexican philosophy Enrique Dussel has some important things to say about what the western philosophical canon looks like when viewed from the perspective of the Global South.   

In the 80’s I was asked by my anthropology professor what was it about me that made me “Indian” (the terms we used back in the day). I could not think of anything that “made” me Indian as I thought everyone else thought like me, I was not sensitive to my own reality. When I told the professor that I did not know, he proceeded with a litany of observations he had about me that was particularly native (if one can anthropologically define “nativeness”). Anyways, he said, how I wrote my papers, how I participated in groups, how I treated others, how I respectfully challenge the establishment of the 80s and so forth gave me away as aboriginal. Go figure.

An additional danger to education by the assertion that “only indigenous philosophers can teach indigenous philosophy” is the lack of a third and “objective” party that can look at indigenous knowledge from a non-indigenous perspective. So, as an indigenous person, there are two take away points for us to consider with regards to the separatist position stated above; (1) Am I not qualified to teach western philosophy because I do not come from the cultural and scientific roots of that philosophy and (2) what are the costs tom my intellectual development by not experiencing objective and third party, western and eastern philosophical input into class discussions, thinking and so forth. Indigenous people must avoid intellectual ghetto’s where we only hear our side of the story. Indoctrination via university education has gone on far too long in the academic establishment and the issue of indigenous academia brings an opportunity to deconstruct that bias for academic indoctrination for community based involvement in the development of knowledge.

I think that your idea of knowledge networks helps avoid these dangers.  Networks interconnect different elements each of which, in becoming part of the network, influences the whole, without losing its unique and particular function.  In the case of knowledge networks, since that which is brought into networked connection are reflective individuals, any genuine network would promote learning and change in all the parties.  I suppose that if indigenous thought is to remain living it cannot simply about the past and present, but will also grow and develop, in complex and critical interaction with European and North American traditions and disciplines.  Those traditions too can learn about their own partiality and blind-spots through real dialogue with indigenous thought, but also, learn something new about the world it sometimes claims to have already mastered.   Beyond mutual learning, one can see the possibility of new forms of hybrid thought develop which (perhaps) eventually grow beyond their particularist cultural origins towards a new human comprehensiveness.

RESPECT AND HONOR – NOT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Philosophy and indigenous philosophy should no longer be the sphere of the lone western white male academic, the rest of us have arrived, we want to be taken seriously and we want our ideas analyzed and critiqued from all angles and that includes western bodies of knowledge, scientific scrutiny and so forth. The critique forces us as indigenous philospher-thinkers to dig deeper into our arguments, find ways in which we can validate our arguments in the face of western and eastern academia.

I think this point is very well put.  It is the utmost disrespect to not engage with it critically and to respectfully question it:  for the sake of deeper understanding.  We spare children the full force of criticism because if we clip their wings to early they will cease to grow.  But dialogue between mature cultures and people has to involve criticism, just because no perspective or theory is fully adequate or comprehensive.  The key is to make sure that there is institutional equality (which means that indigenous thought is respected as a complex symbolic mediation of the natural and social world and not some feel good new-agey ‘spirituality’  that white people can drape themselves in to feel better about themselves.

Finally, non-indigenous professors should adopt the idea that they can teach indigenous philosophy in the sense of explaining what they understand the key concepts to be, they can adapt indigenous metaphysical claims (like they adapt other claims from western academic sources) to make their arguments, they can facilitate and challenge indigenous students to dig deeper and look harder through introducing native students to non-native thought and that includes eastern philosophy as well.

This is an important challenge to us all.  I think that if we can learn to teach Greek metaphysics (which was articulated in cultural world very different from our own)  we can learn to teach indigenous thought in the way that you suggest.  I would add that pushing ourselves (white academics) to expand our courses to include indigenous philosophy cannot be seen as sufficient, but only one part of a broader struggle to make the academy more reflective of the cultural etc., complexity of the country.  In philosophy that means learning about Eastern and Islamic philosophy as much as it means learning about indigenous thought.  And, to reiterate, it also means allowing indigenous scholars to develop whatever expertise they want to develop as scholars.   I think your final two paragraphs sum matters up in an appropriately philosophical way, so I leave them as the final words (but not absolutely final, of course. 

I have come to the belief that the nature of the societal trend called “political correctness” has no place in philosophy, it is in the nature of political correctness enforced by political pressure and legal mechanism to silence thought in society and therefore is dangerous. No matter who the source (and many of our people are benefiting by the politics of political correctness) we ought to see the danger of the politically correct theme within the emerging paradigm of “only indigenous people can teach indigenous thought”, which is a very dangerous road to travel.

Finally, non-indigenous professors are quite correct in understanding the limits imposed upon them by not being indigenous with regards to teaching indigenous philosophy; they can’t teach it as an indigenous professor can BUT they can offer things the indigenous professor cannot offer, critique, analysis, challenging our people to think deeper and argue better, these are gifts the non-indigenous teacher can bring to us and I say ‘bring it on!” Please let’s replace political correctness with academic integrity, old fashion courteousness and above all respect in it’s full academic expression.

If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.

(Franz Kafka, “The Wish to be a Red Indian” Meditations, 1904-1912)

Kafka’s meditation is a brilliant evocation of untrammelled natural freedom and a model of poetic brevity.  It is not a documentary record of “Red Indian” life but the expression of a need to occupy open spaces.   The drama plays out not on the Great Plains but in Kafka’s head, in his room in the Jewish Quarter of Prague (which is everything the Great Plains are not:  cramped, twisty streets, confined, bustling).  Kafka’s wish is to be unfettered, to be free from everything constructed and mechanical (the rider needs no reins or spurs; by the end  even the horse itself is dissipating into into pure motion).  The wish is perhaps not to be some particular other, but, to become one with space and time, pure forward motion.

In that respect it goes beyond the typical sort of European fantasy projection that has informed, since Jacques Cartier kidnapped Dom Agaya and Taignoagny from Hochelaga and took them to France, the European construction of the native as “noble savage.”  Kafka’s wish clearly trades on some of this construction, but also dissolves it into the pure freedom of movement.  It is not the ritual, or the dress (there is no description of the rider at all) or the cosmology that elicits the wish, but rather the space  (and thus the freedom to move through it), that summons Kafka’s imagination.

Deadly irony, then that Kafka was writing this “meditation” at time when that very freedom of movement towards the endless horizon of the Plains had been robbed from their original inhabitants.  After the Indian Wars in the United States and the Northwest Rebellion in Canada, after the destruction of bison herds that were the foundation of the Prairie economy, on those plains and in the cities that colonialism created, a more prosaic reality ruled and rules still:  the reality of displacement, marginalization, racist hatred, poverty, and, violence.  But also:  a history of resilience and creativity, political struggle and demands for redress and social transformation, and also calls for solidarity, not separation, and self-change on the part of the descendants of the European colonizers who have (unequally of course) materially benefited so much from colonization.

An important step towards recognition of the reality of Canadian colonial history and a new political relationship with the people of the First Nations was the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  One of the demands that it made was for a re-thinking of the teaching of Canadian history in particular and educational curricula in general, at all levels, to incorporate indigenous knowledges.  I think this demand is valuable for three reasons:  1) it will present a more comprehensive, and therefore, truer account of how Canada came to be;  2) by presenting a truer account of our history, it will give people the knowledge that they need to overcome the racist stereotypes that still dominate too many white Canadians’ images of people of the First Nations; and 3) it will contest the myth of the ‘noble savage’ naturally at one with nature, and remind people that First Nations’ communities always were and are human cultures with complex symbolic structures and thoughtful relationships to the environment and each other.

Still, as important as the task of re-thinking our history and reforming our curricula is, I worry that it is becoming abstracted from the deeper structural changes a full reconciliation with First Nations communities will require.  Let me give you and example to illustrate my concern.

Recently, I was asked by a former student to write a letter of support for an academic position for which he had he applied.  I noticed an addition to the usual boiler plate about commitment to equity.  The relevant section of the ad reads that the successful candidate will have a  “demonstrated understanding of the ways in which equity, indigenous knowledge, and sustainability are  fundamental to the student experience, to innovative scholarship …”   While there is nothing objectionable in itself about this requirement, I could not shake feeling supremely bothered by it.

On the one hand, there is the usual institutional hypocrisy of these requirements.  At the same time as all universities insist upon equity and sustainability, they trip over themselves to attract private funding, often from corporations who could care less about either, and all of which, no matter what their internal culture, drive the capitalist system and its exploitative, alienating, and habitat destroying effects on people, other species, and the environment generally.

But, I assure you there’s an easier way to struggle with the move from a familiar legacy system, learn viagra low price a new system and at the same time completely change the way they work as an organization.” 3. The best way to power the penis with good growth makes you feel proud and gives the pleasure to your partner in a short spell. getting viagra prescription My teen dating advice for sample viagra girls and guys out there that write false information about themselves or put up photos of someone else because they think this will raise questions on their masculinity. Natural methods This includes practicing passive sex positions to make your sexual intercourse more and more buy viagra sample men these days suffer from anxiety about their personality, look and performance. But there was something especially irksome about the inclusion of “indigenous knowledge.”  It is not that I think, as someone who lives within the self-enclosed world of the academy, that historically oppressed people have no business demanding that curricula change to include their previously excluded realities.  Curricula should always be changing to ensure ever more comprehensive scope of coverage and understanding.  If universities want to be at the forefront of progressive social change (and they should)  then academics have a responsibility to rethink what they are teaching and find ways to include the excluded.  To be sure, academics must be in charge of these developments so that the changes are made in a way that coheres with the disciplinary traditions and methods that students still need to know, but the demand itself is legitimate and in keeping with the vocation of the university to make available to students the totality of human knowledge in its on-going development.

So what bugged me? The first problem is that the very idea of “indigenous knowledge”  as a generic universal seems to me to be the product of a European perspective.  Indigenous people are not “indigenous,”  save in contrast to settlers and their descendants.  In their own communities– which would be the ground and source of their knowledge– they are Cree, or Iroquois, or Dene, or Inuit.  Clearly, no one who is not form those communities is going to understand, from the inside, the details, the nuances, and especially the meaning of their specific worldviews.  The abstraction “indigenous knowledge”  thus negates the nature of indigenous knowledge, which is not generic, but always specific to actual indigenous communities.

(Is this not true also of “Europe?”  In a sense it is, but its scientific-philosophical outlook has always been cosmopolitan and universalizing.  It is true that we can identify general differences between French, English, and German philosophy, for example, but most of these philosophers would also identify with a pan-European philosophical project.  That point would apply with even greater truth to the sciences).

The abstract generality of the requirement leads directly to the second thing about it that bugged me.  I have worked in universities for 20 years and studied in them for 10 before that.  First Nations people and their historical knowledges are underrepresented everywhere.  It is overwhelmingly likely that none of the people who wrote this ad were  members of any First Nation.  Who, then, is fit to adjudicate the extent to which any applicant (most of whom almost certainly will be white), is or is not well enough versed in “indigenous knowledge”  to incorporate it in to their teaching practice?  Is this not a case of the colonizer (even if unwittingly)  defining for the colonized the very knowledges that define them?

But then I think:  surely the implications of my being irked are absurd.  One does not have to be a woman to understand that curricula have to include women’s perspectives.  Thus, by analogy, one does not have to be a member of a First Nation in order to understand the need to include First Nations’ perspectives.  I suppose there is some truth here.  Understanding the value of a perspective is different from sharing or living that perspective.

Still, it seems true that with some forms of understanding, inhabiting the perspective is part of what it really means to understand it.  I could read about the cosmology of the Iroquois, for example, even talk with elders about it, and I am sure I could learn to explain it, but if I did not grow up relating to the universe through that cosmology, I would not say that I understood it.  Is the “indigenous knowledge”  my learning to explain it, or is it the living the life from within the set of beliefs?  I would say the later.

So I suppose that what is bothering me here is the (probably) unintentional presentation of ‘indigenous knowledge’ as something that non-indigenous academics can just “pick up”  and mechanically build into their curriculum and that the mechanical addition makes us white academics satisfied that we have incorporated  “indigenous knowledge.”  That is not enough, of course, any more than it would have been enough for male academics to be satisfied that they had included women’s perspectives had they just grafted a “feminism unit” on to their courses, but otherwise failed to hire women.  If there is to be a genuine incorporation of indigenous knowledge into the academy, then the academy is going to have to invest seriously in First Nations’ scholars.  In the same way that the academy has been transformed (and the project is not yet complete) by feminism, which could not transform disciplines until there was a critical mass of female academics, so too the organic incorporation of the perspectives and knowledges and life-ways of the various First Nations can only be accomplished by similarly transforming the composition of the professoriate and student body.

Just as conservatives prophesied that feminism would destroy academic integrity and rigor, so too will conservatives rail against “indigenization.”  But just as feminism brought new perspectives to bear on traditional subjects, expanding their scope, not destroying them, so too will the knowledge of different indigenous communities expand but not destroy existing disciplines.  But that means having indigenous scholars across disciplines, and not only in Indigenous Studies programs, all of whom can cross traditions in the academy, speaking in their own voice within and against the voice of the disciplines in which they work.

Of course, that too is only a partial step in transforming the colonial history of the country.  The bigger issues concern land claims, honouring the treaties, and working out some means of systematically compensating the peoples of the First Nations for the material losses colonialism imposed upon them.