Dickie's blog

Engage in resistance through dialogue!

IT is often argued, with some truth, that we live in an age of wilful ignorance in which thought is undervalued and we are encouraged to live in the now.

Delayed gratification is discouraged and replaced with the present. Commercial institutions have fuelled this process by encouraging us to think of ourselves as free-standing, self-interested individuals who want to buy things NOW, even if it means going into debt. In the political field it means the rise of populism in the USA, Brazil, the UK, Russia, Hungary, Turkey and India where it has gained power. And in many other countries it lurks beneath the surface.

But is there another cause for this phenomenon? Well, according to Brazilian philosopher Marcia Tiburi in The Psycho-cultural underpinning of Everyday Fascism – Dialogue as Resistance, yes there is. For her, central to the problem is an absence of shame among many leaders like Bolsonaro, Trump, Johnson, Erdogan, Modi and Putin. It’s this lack of shame which enables, indeed empowers them to lie with impunity. Tiburi writes: “The ridicule of several of the scenes involving these characters sounds to their followers like heroism. Therefore, this strange heroism of the tyrants of our time has become something ‘pop’ in a process of profound ‘political mutation’.”

In this world consumerism fills the vacuum, the emptiness of consumption. “We flee from analytical and cultural thinking through the consumerist emptiness of language and repetitive language. We flee from the discernment that analytical and critical thinking demand. We fall into the language of consumerism.” Now it should be said here that it would be wrong to suggest that there was a time when humans were perfectly rational but have somehow become vacuous idiots. It’s more that certain forces are becoming better at exploiting our inherent irrationality and undermining our counterbalancing ability to think – at least some of the time!

With that important caveat in mind then, Tiburi identifies the ‘great voids’ that have emerged in recent years. One is the ‘void of thought’ which Hannah Arendt identified as characteristic of Adolf Eichmann.

This emptiness of thought in Eichmann entailed the ‘absence of reflection, of criticism, of questioning and even discernment’. Tibury adds: “We can say that, in our time, this is becoming more and more common. More and more people are giving up the ability to think.” And in place of this ability comes ready made ideas or cut-and-paste ideas, as she puts it, largely distributed through social media networks.

Another great void, according to Tiburi, is an emptiness of feeling. She writes: “We live in a world that is increasingly anesthetized, in which people become incapable of feeling and increasingly insensitive.” It’s not that we don’t have emotions but, she argues, we ‘can speak of an emptiness of emotion precisely in the context in which people seek any kind of emotion.’ Further: “The inability to feel makes the field of sensitivity in us a place of despair. From joy to sadness, we want religion, sex, films, drugs, radical sports, and even food to provoke more feeling.”

Not all is lost, however, because for Tiburi at least part of the answer lies in the encouragement of dialogue, very much like the skill we practice in Salisbury Democracy Café. Tiburi argues that: “Dialogue is not just a form of philosophy, rather philosophy in its pure state. Dialogue is the attitude that can alter the spiritual and material condition in which fascism arises.” For Tiburi dialogue is a ‘type of psycho-social resistance, which holds the power of social transformation at its most structuring level – shaping dialogue matters when we want a democratic society’ and it is also the specific ‘form of philosophy as a practice, or as activism’. Furthermore: “We need an education for democracy that is education for art and poetry, for science and critical thinking.”

And she claims that dialogue at all ‘levels is undesirable in authoritarian systems’.

It’s hard not to equate Tiburi’s thoughts with those of deliberative democracy promoted by Salisbury Democracy Alliance (SDA) both in the democracy café and in its campaign for Citizens’ Juries. It’s the very point that SDA made in its highly successful stand in People in the Park last year – and will make again this year – when it argued that without the engagement of ordinary people in real dialogue in general, and Citizens’ Juries in particular, our representative form of government remains just that – representative and not fully democratic. And as, the Tory grandee Lord Hailsham once said, it is always in peril of slipping into an ‘elective dictatorship’.

The pitfalls of oratory

IS it better to suffer wrong than to do wrong? It’s an interesting question and one is rarely, if ever. asked these days. It goes beyond mere altruism, which simply demands that we act with the aim of benefiting others with expectation of reciprocal good. This has more to do with the Bible’s claim that one should turn the other cheek when wronged, rather than seek revenge. Yet is a question that goes back much further in history – to Plato, in fact, in his Gorgias dialogue.

In this famous dialogue Plato writes of Socrates in dialogue with two professional orators – Gorgias himself and Polus, both of whom begin by arguing that the orator need do nothing other than persuade others that they are right, but ultimately baulk at the emptiness of this idea. In Gorgias we have an old and experienced orator who finally concedes that the budding orator should first be tutored in ethical standards before he embarks on oratory. And the younger, less experienced, Polus who cannot bring himself to deny that doing wrong is worse than being wronged.

In our day it’s quite hard to see if this has any resonance. But perhaps it might parallel the politician who wants to speak the truth despite the adverse consequences this might entail, against the one who says what she thinks people want to know. Or the political party that wants to lead electorates, even though it might suffer in the polls, against the one that shifts and changes in order to get elected, regardless of the truth.

But Socrates goes even further: “As a general rule the man who does wrong is more miserable than the man who is wronged, and the man who escapes punishment more miserable than the man who receives it.” And still further: “Whatever the punishment which the crime deserves he must offer himself to it cheerfully, whether it be flogging or imprisonment or a fine or banishment or death.”

Amazingly, Gorgias and Polus seem to be quite happy to accept this conclusion, even though there appears to be a flaw in Socrates’s argument. And that happens when he tries to draw an analogy between money-making curing poverty, medicine curing disease and justice curing ‘excess and wickedness’.

Apart from anything else, Socrates has shifted away from punishment to justice as though the former is equivalent of the former, which it isn’t. Sometimes justice requires something other than punishment, like rehabilitation. And of course punishment is not necessarily a cure at all and it doesn’t always even act as a deterrent. These claims go unchallenged by Gorgias and Polus, who might at least have made a case for a less stringent conclusion like, well, altruism.

Instead Socrates emerges triumphant only then to face the rage of Callicles who asks the largely silent Chaerophon, loyal friend of Socrates. “Tell me Chaerophon, is Socrates in earnest about this or is he joking?”

To which Chaerophon replies in one of his very few utterances: “In my opinion, Callicles, he is utterly in earnest.” We then learn that Callicles is of the opinion that conventional morality – although it is not clear that Socrates’s position is at all conventional – is merely an invention of the weak to undermine the strong. The obvious parallel to Nietzsche’s herd mentality undermining the nobility of the powerful and dynamic Ubermensch is hard to avoid. As a classical philologist Nietzsche is bound to have read Gorgias and was almost certainly influenced by Callicles’s views.

In ant case, Callicles rounds on Socrates: “Nature…herself demonstrates that it is right that the better man should prevail over the weak and the stronger over the weaker.” As a matter of interest this position contravenes antecedently David Hume’s is/ought principle, which states that one cannot infer a value proposition from a factual statement. But Callicles ploughs on: “My belief is that a natural right consists in the better and wiser man ruling over his inferiors and having the lion’s share.”

David Hume; portrait by Allan Ramsay, 1754

Ultimately, however, Socrates succeeds in extracting an important concession from Callicles – namely, that there is a distinction to be made between good and bad pleasures, which allows Socrates to condemn politicians who cravenly pander to citizens’ baser pleasures rather than to their wellbeing and that correction of in dividuals, groups and even states is better than the unrestrained hedonism of the powerful originally advocated by Callicles. The latter then, and somewhat fortuitously for Socrates, then virtually absents himself from the argument as Socrates rams home his advantage at great length. And, finally, he concludes that a politician should only be allowed to enter the public realm after they have had sufficient instruction morality and with the aim of improving the character of the populace.

By such high standards many of our modern day politicians fail dismally. Perhaps today we would talk about improving the conditions of citizens, rather than improving their moral character. But it often seems that our politicians under our representative form of government are more interested in winning elections, with the welfare of their citizens coming almost as an afterthought. Now, this is not true of all politicians or all political parties. Indeed, most of the time it’s not a matter of bad or corrupt politicians but the extent to which a party has to bend its policies in order to be acceptable to a largely indifferent electorate. Indeed, representative government is expressly designed NOT to engage citizens in politics, more to turn them into spectators. Which is why it doesn’t really qualify as a democracy but rather as an elective dictatorship, and it will remain so until a degree of deliberative democracy, including citizens’ juries and assemblies, is introduced – some thing that Salisbury Democracy Alliance has been campaigning for for years. Of course, some politicians are moderate by nature and have no need to moderate their behaviour. But it’s a real problem for less moderate politicians who might want to effect fundamental change changes in society but are forced to moderate their views in order to be electable. But perhaps the solution is not necessarily to moderate one’s views but to continue to hold true to your position while being prepared to compromise in order to get as close as possible to one’s aims.

To humanity and beyond!

WHAT must it be like to reject all of our beliefs? Liberalism, humanism, neoliberalism, socialism, Christianity – indeed, all religion – in fact ALL the characteristics and ideas with which we define ourselves. All gone. Even the category of being human. What if we only care about ourselves and have no interest in others?

Well, that’s the startling position of the maverick philosopher Max Stirner (1806-1856) demands that we do.

Nothingness? Even here there is something

He is anti-moral, anti-political and anti-social philosophy – indeed, at first sight at least, he is anti everything. It does at least have some resonance with our atomistic society. And a common response to this is to build communities again, to build a political and social system that reconnects isolated individuals in order to create the sort of society that enables autonomous individuals to flourish across all demographics. Stirner, however, is utterly contemptuous of such efforts but, surprisingly, he is not a nihilist. According to Jacob Blumenfield in All Things are Nothing to Me Stirner argues that it is ‘only after we learn learn how to care for ourselves can we begin to care for each other as singular equals, and not as generic representatives of groups, classes, identities, and states’.

This, claims Blumenfield, is ‘Stirner’s provocation’. From this hollowing out Stirner ‘defends insurrection, advocates crime, and incites individuals to find each other in free unions or communes that can expand ones power against the state’.

For Stirner ‘any theory which only considers the aggregate of conditions…from which something emerges will never be able to fully show how that emergent something becomes itself in all its singularity’. And he includes all theories including the ones mentioned above but also materialism, empiricism, idealism – even humanness itself. Because, as Blumenfield explains, what Stirner calls the ‘unman’ refers to the uniqueness of the individual ‘which is not explainable by humanness’.

Interestingly, it has been noted that Stirner’s ideas seem to chime with the ancient Hellenistic philosophy of Stoicism, which asks how ‘I should live’ not how ‘I should live in a community’. But, writes Blumenfield, Stirner’s position has nothing to do with egoism. And that is because the ego is a concept, not a real thing. To recycle a phrase by Gilbert Ryle when he was attacking Descartes’s mysterious immaterial self, the ego is just a ‘ghost in the machine’. “In other words,” writes Blumenfield “the actuality of any unique ‘I’ is not identical with its expression in language or thought.” For Stirner, we must bring to the fore all our theories and preconceptions – and then dissolve them.

One of Stirner’s central claims is that freedom cannot be given by a government, state or political party – it can only be taken. Freedom is not a gift. It is, rather, appropriated by the individual. And while political liberalism is a positive development, it is not the answer because it ‘pierces through the veneer of freedom, but goes no further’. Meanwhile, socialism unmasks exploitation and inequality, but is problematic because labour is taken to be the new essence of humanity – and, like humanness, labour is only on of the individual’s properties, not its core essence.

Some thinkers use the communities of creatures like ants and bees to draw parallels with humanity and, in particular, the emergent properties of consciousness. Stirner disagrees.

The key shift is to regard individuals as owning themselves and, as owners, they ‘make themselves individuals’. Blumenfield writes: “To be an owner is to individuate oneself through the appropriation of one’s own conditions and the dissolution of everything alien to them.” But, and this is crucial, owning oneself does NOT mean self-interest or selfishness. So there is no succour here for Ayn Rand or the libertarianism of Robert Nozick. Blumenfield argues that the modern fashion for ‘finding oneself’ often means simply ‘adapting one’s soul to the needs of the market’. It is a critique of ubiquitous mindfulness in the West that it merely helps the individual to adapt to poor working conditions, rather than fighting to change them, thus normalizing the poor working conditions. Stirner exhorts us not to ‘know oneself’ but to ‘own oneself’.

There’s no room for egoism in Stirner’s world.

One of the main criticism of political liberalism is that it often relies on a mythical pre-civilized state of nature in which humanity is either in a brutish and chaotic state (Hobbes) or in a noble one which is destroyed by civilization (Rousseau). But Stirner will have none of this, even though he is often accused of holding such a position. According to Blumenfield, Stirner argues that ‘society precedes individualism, binding us in all sorts of relations of dependency from birth onwards’. Indeed, although Marx was severely critical of Stirner, the latter’s position is actually closer to the former than to the individualism of Hobbes or Rousseau because, for him, society is the state of nature. And leaving society means not alienation but an ‘association of free individuals, building the commune’ sounding now more like the anarchist Kropotkin than Marx or the liberals. As Blumenfield writes: “Breaking social ties allows us to associate ourselves freely and create new forms of intercourse.” And in the process of breaking down the barriers between US and THEM we must, urges Stirner, unite with others to ‘abolish the conditions that constrain us’, again sounding like Marx but moving beyond his insistence that humanity if defined by work.

For Stirner, then, individualism, properly understood, just is communism and Blumenfield bewails that, sadly, ‘but unsurprisingly’ the secret of communism has not been taken up up since Stirner ‘neither by communists not individualists, Marxists nor anarchists’. Maybe that’s because Stirner’s vision is psychologically impossible. Is it really possible for humans to dissolve all their preconceptions without creating new conceptions; to reject humanism as being only a part of what it means to be an individual? Maybe not – and maybe Stirner serves as reminder that communism, properly understood, may be unachievable. But he may still also serve as a purge or corrective to our fondly held beliefs. And, perhaps, an assault on the selfish egoism of Homo Economicus, while reinforcing the need to ‘abolish the conditions that constrain us’.

How the West made Putin

AS Putin sends his troops and tanks in to Ukraine in an appalling piece of unprovoked aggression that beggars belief, it is, perhaps, useful to remember the role that the West had in creating the conditions that made it easier for someone like Putin to take control of Russia.

Ukrainian troop prepare to defend their country

So, let’s recalls what was happening in 1991. In July that year, as the days of the USSR were numbered, Mikhail Gorbachev was still in power. His policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were being used by him to lead the Soviet Union towards the kind of representative government enjoyed by Scandinavian countries. The press was free, elections had been held for the Russian Parliament, local councils, president and vice-president. Gorbachev wanted a free market economy but with a strong social security net along the lines of the Scandinavian model.

As Naomi Klein points out in The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism the West was at first very supportive of Gorbachev and ‘on a visit to Prague , Gorbachev made it clear that he couldn’t do it all alone’. He said: “Like mountain climbers on one rope, the world’s nations can either climb together to the summit or fall together into the abyss.” He was about to attend his first G7 meeting.

But, as Klein reports, ‘what happened at the G7 meeting was totally unexpected’. She writes: “The nearly unanimous message that Gorbachev received from his fellow heads of state was that, if he did not embrace radical economic shock therapy, they would sever the rope and let him fall.”

Gorbachev wrote of the event: “Their suggestions as to the tempo and methods of transition were astonishing.”

The shock doctrine was developed by the economist Milton Friedman, the proponent of unfettered capitalism, now often referred to as neoliberalism. He believed that major crises could bring about real change and he thought it was his job, and those of his followers, to strike early and wherever possible to ensure that the mass privatization that was at the heart of the Chicago School of Economics gained traction.

But let’s not forget that two years before that G7 meeting relations between the Soviet Union and the West were very different. In his address to the Supreme Soviet on 1 August 1989 Gorbachev said: “Western Europe is realizing more and more how essential it is to achieve mutual understanding and cooperation with the Soviet Union.” It was a different matter after the G7 meeting. According to Klein, Russia was presented with the choice of either carrying on with the reforms of its political set up with representative government or ‘in order to push through a Chicago School economic programme, that peaceful and hopeful process that Gorbachev began had to be violently interrupted, then radically reversed.”

A month after the G7 summit Boris Yeltsin became the hero of the new Russia when he stood on a tank during a failed coup.

Boris Yeltsin addresses the crowd from the famed tank

Not long after that he forced the resignation of of Gorbachev. However, Yeltsin was much more sympathetic towards the Chicago School way of thinking, which had its first run out with Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s. And a series of violent events unleashed by Yeltsin, culminating in a coup on 4 October 1993, brought him to power. Yeltsin imposed shock therapy on the fledgling representative government but could only defend it by…dissolving representative government, receiving enthusiastic support from the West.

There followed a fire sale of Russia’s public wealth, which led to the rising power of the fabulously wealthy oligarchs. But just as Yeltsin positioned himself as the saviour of representative government, so Putin positioned himself as the stabilizing, reassuring figure in 1999 and, as Klein puts it ‘several oligarchs engineered a quiet handover from Yeltsin to Putin, no election necessary’.

Putin was originally seen as a backlash against the shock therapy even as ‘tens of millions of impoverished citizens were still excluded from the fast growing economy’. However, the warning signs were there with a ‘new breed of “state oligarchs” rising around the Kremlin’. Meanwhile a ‘growing number of journalists and other critics die mysteriously, and the secret police enjoy seemingly total impunity’. Nevertheless, as Klein puts it, ‘the memory of the chaos of the nineties has made many Russians grateful for the order Putin has restored’.

Of course, the events we are seeing today might have happened any way without the imposition of shock therapy in the 1990s, but perhaps we should at least acknowledge that without the intervention of the G7 as Russia was peacefully reforming itself under Gorbachev, the world might have been very different.

Why the authorities hate XR

NON-VIOLENT protest or civil disobedience is often thought of in a passive, negative or defensive way. We shuffle along on marches, sit down on roads blocking traffic and annoying people. As Shelley writes in The Mask of Anarchy:

“With folded arms and steady eyes,/And little fear, and less surprise,/Look upon them as they slay/Till their rage had died away.”

These words conjure up an image of passive resistance, not aggression. But then he writes towards the end of the poem:

“Rise like lions after slumber/In unvanquishable number -/shed your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you -/Ye are many – they are few.”

And that is a very different image. It gives the impression of taking matters into your own hands, of positive, even aggressive action against oppression.

In a way it’s the difference between purely passive protest and the more proactive protest of Extinction Rebellion (XR). Some people argue that people should be allowed to protest as long as they don’t rock the boat. But it is the XR protest that captures the imagination and grabs the headlines precisely because it is annoying and causes disruption, prompting governments to reach for the statute books. And the idea of ‘aggressive non-violence’ or what Albert Einstein called ‘militant pacifism’ is the key concept in The force of non-violence by Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Protesters sitting down outside the Ministry of Justice in Westminster, London, during an Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate change protest.

In this book Butler makes two main claims. Firstly, non-violence has to be understood ‘less as a moral position adopted by individuals…than as a social and political practice undertaken in concert’. And secondly, perhaps more contentiously, ‘non-violence does not necessarily emerge from a passive or calm part of the soul’. As she points out, it is often an expression or rage, indignation, and aggression’. It’s not merely that non-violence can be aggressive. Butler argues that ‘non-violent forms of resistance can and must be aggressively pursued’, while also insisting that aggression should not be conflated with violence.

Not normally the image one might associate with non-violent protest!

In fact, the book’s title is derived from Gandhi, who insisted that satyagraha should be seen as a ‘non-violent force’ that can generate ‘matchless power’. Intriguingly, however, Butler also makes the point that in practice non-violence cannot always be guaranteed because when a protestor puts her body in the way of oppression she is ‘presenting a force against force’. And she adds: “Non-violence is less a failure of action than a physical assertion of the claims of life.”

Butler draws a distinction between liberal individualism and what she calls the inherently social activity of non-violent protest: “Some representatives of the history of liberal political thought would have us believe that we emerge from a state of nature,” she writes. Indeed, it has been argued often in this blog that various theories of liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls have invented the mythical concept of the social contract in largely failed attempts to create a link from the fully formed, free standing context less individual to the collective. Others, of course, and in particular right wing libertarians don’t even attempt to build a bridge. But as Butler writes: “I want to suggest, however, that no-one actually stands on one’s own; strictly speaking, no one feeds oneself.”

Butler takes a strongly collectivist position of the individual, similar to the Marxist view that our consciousness is largely determined by our social and material being, not the other way round. “The individual is not displaced by the collective, but it is formed and freighted by social bonds that are defined by their necessity and their ambivalence,” she writes.

Another key element of Butler’s thesis is equality, which for her resides in the matrix of violence and non-violence, or rather the point at which non-violence morphs into violence. She writes: “For non-violence to escape the the war logic that distinguishes between lives worth preserving and lives considered dispensable, it must become part of the politics of equality.” And it must accept the ‘interdependency of lives’. It has to be said that this probably the least convincing and most perplexing part of the book. In particular there is no reason to suppose that equality lurks somewhere between violence and non-violence, although she does concede that non-violence must be part of the politics of equality rather than the creator of equality as she seems to suggest earlier.

Butler’s analysis of non-violence treads a delicate, often Byzantine and confusing pathway between violence and non-violence and in doing so delineates a nuanced defence of protestors like XR and Insulate Britain.

Some people may bridle their tactics, which can cause considerable disruption to ordinary lives (it should also be said that it is easy to support them until such time as one is actually caught up in one of their protests!) But the protestors might respond by arguing that ‘ordinary life’ might not remain ordinary for long if humanity fails to take effective action against climate change, and, further, a bit of disruption now is worth it if it results in such change. And if it is a measure of effective action that our government has felt it necessary to introduce legislation in the form of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill – which will return to the House of Common on 28 February to consider amendments from the House of Lords – parts of which are designed to make such protests more difficult, then it has already been very effective. And Butler’s book explains why governments hate activists like those in XR – they certainly rock the boat!

From resistance to…POWER!

IT often seems that if we want to change of any kind there is nothing we can do. In our representative form of government we are encouraged not to bother ourselves with politics, except to put a cross on the ballot paper ever few years. After all, so they say, we elect people to do the thinking for us don’t we? Indeed, as Salisbury Democracy Alliance (SDA) continues to campaign for a Citizens’ Jury in the city, this a common refrain we have encountered.

But we also often forget that the so-called cradle of democracy in ancient Athens largely eschewed elections, which they feared would be nothing more than elected oligarchs, or cliques, much as we have now – although we shouldn’t forget that the Athenians also excluded women and slaves from the democratic decision-making process. Which is why, of course, modern day forms of Citizens’ Juries and Assemblies involve the random selection of people and ways of ensuring a cross-section of the community.

Even Tory Grandees are not averse to calling our form of government into question with Ken Clarke recently describing our current government as being close to an ‘elected dictatorship’, echoing the words of Lord Hailsham in the 1960s.

And even the founding fathers of the American republic did not regard the system of representative government as being democracy. Indeed, up until the end of the 18th century elective governments and the sort of direct government pioneered by the Athenians were thought to be incompatible. It is not clear how the word ‘democracy’ came to be attached to representative government, but one theory is that Maximillian Robespierre welded the two together when the French experiment in direct democracy after the French revolution went horribly wrong.

But whatever the cause, the unification of representative and democratic politics ensured that the campaigns for change tended to concentrate on extending the franchise. As Matthew Bolton writes in How to Resist: “The Chartists, the Suffragettes and others endured prison and faced death in their struggle for the chance to have a say in the governance of the country.” However, he also argues that it’s a mistake to assume that they were only ‘fighting for for the chance to put a cross in a box every few years’. Rather, they were, writes Bolton, fighting for power – to have more influence. Now we have the vote, however, we seem to be content to sit back and let others run things. We have ‘mistaken politics for Parliament and have come to see democracy as something to watch on television or follow on Twitter – or worse, to switch off from completely; losing trust in politicians, losing trust in the media, losing trust in the system’.

For Bolton, however, and, for that matter, SDA, democracy means ’embedding political action into our day-to-day lives, in our communities and work places’. His book is a rallying cry for a new kind of populism – that is the ‘mass participation of people in politics’ but not ‘populism as an approach by politicians to divide and rule, but populism as democracy, for the people by the people’.

What Bolton wants is for us to take back control from the ruling cliques (certainly NOT elites) who gain power both in politics and business on a comfortable conveyor belt private or grammar schools to a ‘decent university and a great career’, whatever the stripe of political party.

Bolton, who is deputy director of Citizens UK and lead organizer for London Citizens, believes that if you want change you need power. It is not that power in itself is corrupting – rather that it is so ‘unevenly distributed’.

And one of his main claims is that in order to change the mindset of powerlessness, we need to understand that, actually, everyone has some power and that those ‘with less power tend to have more than more than they think, or they do not use their power strategically enough’. He is not averse to using self-interest as a tool for effecting change, and he should know because he has used it with great success, including his Living Wage campaign. His book is punctuated with examples of how the seemingly powerless found their power and, while their campaigns may have started with self-interest, they also often turned into the common interest.

One of his key concepts is that protest needs to be turned into action. The difference, according to Bolton, is that protest is often simply reacting to power, as is resistance (which makes one wonder why he chose How to Resist as the title of his book); whereas action means having a plan. If you have a plan you are ‘initiating the changes and someone else is going to have to react’.

You need a plan to effect change, not just protest.

Bolton’s book, while it has some theory, is packed with practical advice on how to effect change and examples of success. As such it is a refreshing booster for anyone jaded by constantly being knocked back by the established order, or having their enthusiasm sucked out of them by energy vampires.

Perhaps the last word should go to Margaret Mead of the Mead Trust, who said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Hear, hear!

Judgement versus Reckoning

DEPENDING on what you read Artificial Intelligence (AI) is either the ultimate threat to humanity – always supposing we survive the climate crisis of course – or it’s our great saviour. Some argue that AI is developing so fast that it will take over the jobs currently done by humans, leaving humanity without meaning or purpose.

Will AI take over from humans – does it matter?

Others, while agreeing with that premise respond by saying ‘bring it on’. If the late David Graeber is to be believed, then many of the occupations we have now are nothing more than bullshit jobs that exist only because of the protestant work ethic – work is good regardless of how pointless it is. The argument runs that we should let robots get on with the jobs they are best at, and let humans do the work that robots can’t do – jobs that require compassion and judgement, for example. The second argument is often accompanied by the assertion that we need a Universal Basic Income to compensate for the reduction in paid labour, paid for by increased productivity from the robots.

Underlying the second argument there appears to be a more profound claim being made about the difference between humans and AI. And that is certainly the view of Brian Cantwell Smith in The Promise of Artificial Intelligence – Reckoning and Judgement. He starts the book by writing: “Neither deep learning, nor other forms of second-wave AI, nor any proposals yet advanced for third-wave, will lead to genuine intelligence.” And he draws a distinction between the brute reckoning of AI and the ‘human-level intelligence and judgement, honed over millennia, which if of a different order.

He reserves the word ‘judgement’ for the ‘normative ideal to which I argue we should hold full-blooded human intelligence – a form of dispassionate deliberative thought, grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action’. And although he acknowledges that not all human activity reaches this level, nevertheless it is an ideal to which ‘human thinking should ultimately aspire’ – an aspiration that is beyond AI.

Human intelligence is of a different order from AI

Reckoning of the kind he attributes to AI refers to the kind of ‘calculating prowess at which computer and AI systems already excel – skills of extraordinary utility and importance’. Within this matrix Smith is most concerned that we humans in our admiration of AI attempt to emulate it by relying on ‘reckoning systems in situations that require genuine judgement’ and that by being ‘unduly impressed by reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human mental activity in a reckoning direction’. Rather, he argues that we should indeed use AI to ‘shoulder the reckoning tasks at which they excel’ while we ‘strengthen, rather than weaken, our commitment to judgement, dispassion, ethics, and the world’.

A similar point was made by Prof Stuart Russell during his Reith Lecture on Radio 4 before Christmas. And although things don’t look great on issues like climate change, it is not all doom and gloom because these sorts of human responses have been successful in virtually eliminating the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Smith outlines four main areas in AI research that he thinks could counter the dangers inherent in systems that don’t exhibit these sorts of human attributes: 1 – take the body seriously; 2 – take context and surrounding situations seriously; 3 – consider the possibility that the mind is not just in the brain but extends into the environment as a form of ‘cognitive scaffolding’; 4 – don’t separate thinking from full-blooded participation and action.

Towards the end of the book, after a considerable amount of detailed analysis of AI, Smith returns to his main theme of distinguishing between reckoning and judgement, arguing that ‘ultimately, you cannot deal with the world…without judgement’. And that with judgement comes accountability which ‘can serve as the grounds not just of truth but of ethics as well’. Although he acknowledges that emotion, as well as reason, plays a significant role in our lives, he believes that the sort of judgement to which he refers – that is ‘authentic judgement’ – demands ‘detachment and dispassion‘ which can free us from the ‘very vicissitudes most characteristic of emotional states’. At the same time, however, he rejects the ‘idea that intelligence and rationality are adequately modelled by something like formal logic’.

This is a rich and rewarding book. And although Smith doesn’t refer to it, his position echoes Enlightenment thinkers who, properly understood, did not privilege Reason above all else, but argued that a little more reason in a world dominated by emotion, superstition and blind faith, might not be a bad thing.

Politically, it underpins a more communitarian approach over the individualism of liberalism. It is embeddedness in the world and in our communities that is the key feature in judgement and distinguishes is from the brute fact of reckoning.

Ultimate reality – what if anything is the truth?

“Whether you’re a scientist of not, consciousness is a mystery that matters. For each of us, our conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is nothing at all, no self, no interior and no exterior.”

So writes Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in his book Being You. And in writing it, of course, he explodes the myth, as espoused by Tartaglia in the previous blog, that neuroscientists have to abandon the concept of consciousness. This is true of some neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers, but by no means all of them. Of course, Seth still has to make his case that consciousness can be captured in a satisfactory way by materialism, but he is in no doubt that his ‘preferred philosophical position…is physicalism’ or materialism as we have been calling it here. In this the fourth, and final, blog on this subject – for now at least- we explore his materialist approach and try to find a solution to the great materialist v idealist debate.

In a really simple and effective way he points out that materialism and idealism have similar, indeed, mirror problems. Whereas for materialists it’s the problem of how the mind emerges out of matter, for idealists it’s ‘how matter emerges out of mind’ – although, as we have seen, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle argues that this is a pseudo problem because mind and matter should not have been split asunder by philosophers like Descartes in the first place.

Seth begins his climb up from brute matter to consciousness by claiming that there are actually several levels of consciousness which are linked to the idea that ‘every conscious experience is both informative and integrated, inhabiting the complex middle ground between order and disorder’. He simplifies this claim by writing that ‘a system is conscious to the extent that its whole generates more information than its parts‘. But Seth goes further than this and his position rests on the argument, much like Kant and Schopenhauer as we have seen in previous blogs – and indeed Tartaglia – that the world as we perceive it is a ‘construction of the brain’ or, as Seth puts it, a ‘controlled hallucination’ in order to distinguish it from the uncontrolled hallucination of our dreams.

In short, Seth argues that the brain is a ‘prediction machine’ and that what we ‘see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s “best guess” of the causes of its sensory inputs’. Interestingly, if true this would furnish a materialistic account of intentionality, or aboutness, so beloved by some idealists who argue that matter simply can’t accommodate this aspect of consciousness. What Seth is saying is that matter, in its particular manifestation as the brain, can.

According to Seth our perception of a cup of coffee, for example, is caused by our sensory signals but the image itself is constructed by our brains as its best guess of what is out there. He writes: “We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them.” This, again, is very close to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Schopenhauer, both of whom acknowledge the existence of an ultimate reality that lies forever beyond out knowledge.

Still further Seth argues that what the brain is doing is deploying Bayesian logic or abductive reasoning, often referred to as ‘inference to the best explanation’, the insights from which are central to understanding how conscious perceptions are central to ‘understanding how conscious perceptions are built from brain-based guesses’.

For Seth all this has a profound impact on who we are – or think we are. For him the ‘ground-state of conscious selfhood’ is ‘formless, shapeless, control orientated perceptual prediction about the present and future physiological condition of the body itself. This where being you begins, and it is here that we find the most profound connections between life and mind, between our best machine nature and conscious self’.

Curiously, both idealism of Tartaglia and the materialism of Seth have the same basis – the Self. For Tartaglia that leads to his form of idealism which thinks of ‘ultimate reality as something within each of our perspectives, while materialism does not’. As we have seen, however, this is a mischaracterization of materialism, or at least the positions of materialists like Seth. Tartaglia’s position is also in danger of falling into solipsistic abyss in which each individual flails around unconnected to any other Self. It also ignores the possibility, as Seth suggests, that our internal experience is formed by the physical world, even if we have no direct intuition of that world.

Seth also dodges the solipsistic problem by acknowledging that even though there is no actual essence of self, part of what gives us the sense of selfhood is what he calls the ‘social self’, which is ‘all about how I perceive others perceiving me’. And he adds: “It is the part of me that arises from me being embedded in a social network.” Accordingly, the ‘social self emerges gradually during childhood and continues to evolve throughout life.’

We have come a long way since the first blog on ultimate reality was posted last year. It has felt sometimes that there is no principled way of deciding between idealism and materialism – and dualism doesn’t seem to solve the problem because it too has the seemingly irresolvable mind/body bifurcation. Maybe there simply isn’t a single ultimate reality. Maybe it’s a bit like the wave/particle dualism of photons or the duck/rabbit illusion.

On the other hand either idealism is true or materialism is true – but not at the same time!

But if one were forced to make a decision then it could be argued that materialism just edges it mainly because it avoids the problem of solipsism and acknowledges that Ultimate Reality resides outside of us as individuals. No doubt there are idealists out there who have answers to meet these problems and nothing that has been written here suggests that either side has a knock-down argument. But for now at least that’s all folks, and this blog will move on to other topics.

Narrowing Ultimate Reality

IN the last blog we investigated the somewhat bewildering range of positions on ultimate reality. So, it is now time to narrow things down. And to do that we will be eschewing dualism, or at least remaining agnostic about its truth, simply because of the seemingly unsurmountable problems it has with how two different substances can interact with each other. No doubt its proponents have a way of resolving these problems but that may be for another blog. For now we will be concentrating on trying to determine whether Idealism of Materialism is true – and of course if one or the other is found to be true then dualism falls by default. Helping us through this enquiry are two thinkers – James Tartaglia with his book Gods and Titans, which promotes Idealism, and Anil Seth in Being You, in which he promotes Materialism.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Tartaglia begins with a plausible account of materialism, which is also where he started as a philosopher. What makes Materialism seem obviously true, he writes, is that we are living in a ‘physical world out there which exists independently of us’. Furthermore, with the rise of science we have an excellent description and explanation of this physical world. And while there are still some philosophers out there who believe there are immaterial things like minds and gods, or God, this is ‘obviously old-fashioned, superstitious nonsense: there are no spooky, immaterial things floating around in the physical world’.

It is true that this is a plausible account of ultimate reality and it is one that has held sway for the last 100 years or so. But it is at this moment that Tartaglia makes a startling claim: “This is just one big misunderstanding. You can pick holes in anything…but there is nothing to be said for any of the above.”

His most important attack is one that he takes to be the materialists’ attempts to ‘discredit our natural, subjective understanding’ of our experience – although, as we shall see later, this criticism does not apply to all materialists.

But Tartaglia makes the point that if there really are immaterial things like minds then it cannot be right, as the materialists suppose, to ‘think of them floating around in the physical world’. He continues: “Any philosopher who ever seriously contended that minds or experiences were non-physical was not thinking about them objectively, but rather subjectively – in terms of the subject who has them.”

Tartaglia’s positive argument for Idealism begins with: “Each of us lives through a stream of conscious experience, which is intermittently interrupted by sleep, and then, eventually, permanently ended by death.” It then gets a little more complicated because he argues that the stream of consciousness is all that our lives consist in.

“Everything we know or care about either enters into our experiences or else we believe in it in order to make sense of of what does.” Science, far from describing Ultimate Reality, simply describes and explains what we experience not experience itself. “Experience is all we can be sure of has independent existence. The key difference from materialism is that ‘idealism thinks of ultimate reality as something within each of our experiential perspectives, while materialism does not’. So, for Tartaglia, them, ‘ultimate reality is to be found within each of our individual experiential centres’.

Interestingly, Tartaglia argues that we need to see that ‘mathematical physics does not describe the world we see and touch, but it is rather a means of predicting and controlling our experiences of that world’ and we ‘need metaphysical beliefs rooted in the concrete reality of experience, rather than the abstract predictions of mathematics’.

This argument is intriguing because, as we shall see in the next blog, Seth argues the same point from a materialist’s position except that for him this predicting and controlling that the brain does just is our consciousness.

There are at least four main problems with Tartaglia’s position. One is, as we see here, he assumes that materialists have to deny our individual subjective experience and consciousness to maintain their position; as we shall see this not necessarily true. Secondly, he also assumes that the only alternative to idealism is the objective world as unveiled by science. But there is another reality that he ignores and this is the noumenal of world-as-it-is-in-itself of Kant or the Will according to Schopenhauer, which is, for them, forever beyond the knowledge of scientists or individual experiences.

At the risk of drifting into politics, it could also be argued that Tartaglia’s vision of Ultimate Reality draws us away from the world into our solipsistic selves and downplays our engagement with the world.

It is also odd to suggest that if there is an immaterial mind then it has to exist outside of the physical world. Far from solving the problems of how anything immaterial can exist in a physical world, this simply pushes the problem one step back and risks splitting Tartaglia’s insistence on mono-idealism into the Cartesian dualism he rejects.

In the next, and final, blog in this series on Ultimate Reality we shall look at a modern take on materialism and see if it can solve the problems of Tartaglia’s position and counter some of his attacks on materialism.

The labyrinths of Ultimate Reality

THE first move here following on from the last blog is to is to give a brief definition of Ultimate Reality – and are there are two possibilities. The first is that it is whatever the universe is in itself regardless of our position within it. Secondly, it is what ever presents itself to our understanding regardless of our position within in it. Another important distinction to make is the difference between Ultimate Reality and metaphysics – the latter being the method by which we develop our understanding of Ultimate Reality rather Ultimate Reality itself.

In the last blog we looked at the history of materialism and idealism. So, we now begin with a closer look at what these terms mean. It could be argued with some cogency that the most basic or the purest form of materialism is physicalist materialism, which bases its position of Ultimate Reality as being whatever the discipline of physics asserts Ultimate Reality to be. A variant of this is what is often called emergent materialism within which there are certain complex entities like minds that, while they have their origins in the brain, are not wholly reducible to it.

Of the first type Rex Wilson writes in Philosophy, Neuroscience and Consciousness that ‘conscious properties must somehow be properties of physical things’. Of the second type neuro-philosophers, writes Wilson, argue that although ‘conscious properties’ remain within the ‘framework of science’ they nevertheless retain an ‘open-minded willingness to refrain from inferring that conscious properties are also reducible to micro-physical properties of neural events’.

Turning now to idealism, one of its most important aspects is the concept of an essence both in the abstract and the concrete. So, in this sense, according to many idealists at least, there is the universalism of humanness – or a type – of which all humans are tokens. But many also argue that there is such a thing as concrete essence which relates to a specific class of things like humans or dogs – and because this is, unlike the fixed abstract universal, dynamic and developing it can accommodate the individual. It is likely that these two concepts can be merged as when abstract universal humans rights apply very concretely to individuals.

One of the other aspects of idealism is that the mind cannot be reduced to the brain or a higher level of reality, like consciousness, to the firing of neurons in the brain. In fact idealists go further to argue that while matter can be explained by the mind, matter cannot explain the mind. Indeed, idealists like Arthur Schopenhauer, following on from Immanuel Kant, argue in his The World as Will and Representation that the ‘world is my idea’. That is the ordinary everyday phenomenal world is created by our brains and the world beyond our representation of it – the world as Will as he put it – must forever be beyond our understanding, although it can at least be inferred to be undifferentiated.

Is the world as we know it created by our brains?

In terms of Ultimate Reality many idealists either believe that it rests in the everyday, solipsistic experience of each individual, as Scottish philosopher David Hume of Bishop Berkeley believed, or, at the other extreme, there lies the pantheistic idealism of Baruch Spinoza. Most philosophical idealists, however, attempt to steer a middle course between these extremes.

The third aspect of Ultimate Reality is dualism whose adherents claim that the mind is a non-material entity that not only cannot be reduced to the brain but doesn’t even have its origin there. This distinguishes it from emergent materialism and those idealists who claim that Ultimate Reality is nothing other than purely non-material, although it can come close to thinkers who try to find a middle way. The distinctive aspect of dualism is that they believe that there is indeed a material world in which resides the brain, but the brain is is not part of the immaterial world of the mind. In this sense, then, Ultimate Reality is made up of these two entirely separate and unconnected substances, although it’s not clear whether the mind can be described as a substance as such.

Rene Descartes, of course, is the best know exponent of dualism in the modern era, although it was Gilbert Ryle in the 20th century who memorably and disparagingly dubbed Descartes’s immaterial mind the ‘ghost in the machine’ in his The Concept of Mind.

Karl Marx is often thought of being a pure materialist but as Karl Popper notes in his The Open Society and its Enemies there is a sense in which he too can be described as a dualist. In the third volume of Capital, for example, he clearly equates the Kingdom of Necessity with the material world and humanity’s interaction with matter. But his idea of the Kingdom of Freedom, even though it has its origin in the Kingdom of Necessity, nevertheless transcends it when it breaks away into the immaterial world of the mind beyond the drudgery of material machinations. Not a pure dualist, then, because of the link with matter but Marx does seem to think that Ultimate Reality, is ultimately, dualist. Perhaps Marx could be seen as one of those thinkers adopting a middle way, which, of course, is very far from his political thought!

In the next blog we look at ways of narrowing the field down, to make it more manageable in an attempt to work some sort of conclusion.