The dawn of the new year always generates ambivalent emotions. People resolve to overcome all the bad habits that gave some pleasure to their lives, media outlets compile their best of everything lists, while professional doomsayers sing their yearly Jeremiads, warning that the next year will be the year when everything that has been falling apart for the past year, and the year before that, and the year before that, finally collapses. The climate, the return of Trump, runaway malevolent AI, another pandemic, nuclear conflict with Russia … we are all going to die!

But maybe we will struggle through another year, despite Trump and natural gas stoves. And if we are still breathing come January 2nd, we will have to soldier on, facing the mundane problems we have always faced about how to run major social institutions, how to communicate with each other, how to evaluate where we are as societies, how to identify and solve problems. For most of human history these tasks were reserved for social elites, typically men with some sort of aristocratic pedigree which they took to be a sign of superior talent and capacity which entitled them to decide on behalf of everyone else how society would be governed. These elites were capable of works of epochal intelligence (as in ancient Greece, whose language gives us the English world aristocracy– rule of the best). But the free time required to walk, reflect, and compose the words that still resound today was– as Aristotle admitted– purchased at the cost of the freedom of women and slaves who did the work so that the “great souled” people could spread their genius.

We easily forget that the canonical Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were critics of Athenian democracy and defenders of slavery. Plato’s Republic is an extended reflection on how the principle of democratic equality corrupts the polis. In a democracy, he argues in Book Nine, the slave is as valuable as the master, the son as valuable as the father, and everyone’s position on matters that concern them is considered in the deliberative assembly even if they lack the expertise that wise decisions require. Therefore, he concludes, democratic equality is a contradictory equality between unequals, doomed to collapse. Democracy, he concludes, is a violation of the social conditions of intellectual excellence, a dangerous consorting with the lowest of human desires, and a fatal step towards disorder that can only end in tyranny.

There are shades of this aristocratic critique of democracy in the left-liberal reaction to the re-election of Trump. While they do not always say so out loud, there is an undertone of disdain for working class Trump voters: maybe they just aren’t smart enough to understand their own interests. After all, the core of Trump’s base are men without university degrees. If people were better educated, then perhaps they would stop entrusting their interests to autocrats like Trump and Putin. Had they read The Republic they would know that tyrants are elected because they promise to protect the interests of the poor.

In contemporary politics as in Newtonian mechanics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The left-liberal critique of the masses produces an abstract democratic-populist defense of the masses. It is difficult to assign any precise ideological identity to those who disagree with Trump but would defend the right of working class people to vote for him, but one common thread that links what I might call left-conservative populists with right-conservative populists is a gnawing angst about the state of popular culture and the educational institutions that produce the people who shape it. (i am not sure this term is correct, but it is at least not oxymoronic. Andrew Collier has written an excellent essay on the philosophical overlap between Marx and classical conservatism). Rather like Plato and his aristocratic friends, left and right populists worry that there is a destructive slackening of standards and values and that the educational system, and in particular, universities, share a great deal of the blame.

One could understand such a criticism coming from classical conservatives, for whom the democratization of higher education after World War Two was synonymous with slackening of standards. “Undergraduates without Latin and Greek!! Preposterous! What’s next, eating fruit with one’s hands at High Table!?!” But how can populists, who, after all, claim to be on the side of the people, worry that the consequences of the democratization of higher education are in effect destroying it? The question is not easy to answer. I want to look at two recent examples of what I am calling, for lack of a better word at the moment a left-conservative populist critique of higher education to tease out what is true in their arguments from what is a false romanticization of a past that never existed.

Joanna Williams (“The Death Throes of the University are Upon Us”) and Joel Kotkin, (“The American University is Rotting From Within”), both writing in spiked-online, warn that the cultural politics of the twenty-first century campus are destroying the intellectual integrity of the institution. They are not wrong to warn that universitiess in the United States, the United Kingdom (and Canada) are in a period of serious crisis. Kotkin notes that undergraduate enrollment in the United States has declined from 18.1 million in 2010 to 15.4 million in 2021. The decline is even steeper in the arts and humanities. In England, Williams adds, amidst the general decline in enrollment symbolically important programs like Philosophy at the University of Kent and English at the University of Canterbury have closed. In Canada and especially Ontario, universities, in particular smaller and comprehensive schools, are facing dramatic budget crises as a result of decades of government underfunding and a sharp decline in international student enrollments as a result of recent changes to federal immigration policies. My home institution, the University of Windsor, is facing a deficit of perhaps as much as 30 million dollars, which is about ten percent of its annual revenues. The Vice President of Finance has warned that the deficit could require “catastrophic” cuts.

(At present the administration has not presented a comprehensive plan to address the crisis. When they do, I will return to the political economic dimensions of the crisis of universities. Here I want to focus on the pedagogical and political thrust of Kotkin’s and Williams’ critique).

That thrust is nicely summed up by the subheading of Kotkin’s essay: “The modern academy is a threat to reason, liberty, and Western civilization.” What follows is mixture of anecdote and statistics that purports to prove that there has been a fundamental transformation in the nature of academic reason. Whereas universities were once focused on the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth that mission has been overtaken by a Cultural Revolution-like indoctrination campaign led by tender-hearted, weak-kneed, and soft-minded left liberals. Williams paints an analogous picture of the English university.

The targets will be familiar to those who follow the institutional politics of the contemporary English language university. There are purportedly absurd infiltrations of a “social justice” agenda into science, such as the engineering assignment that Williams discusses that asked students at King’s College to create ‘a product for LGBTQ+ people focused on providing education or safe spaces.” There are complaints about the decline of literacy, the capacity of students to read complete texts, lamentations about the proliferation of trigger warnings on classic literary and philosophical texts, politically correct changes to departmental nomenclature, and a climate of general hostility to the achievements of Western civilization adapted from anti-imperialist critiques of colonialism and racism. Kotkin sums up the problems:

“Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.”

There is much truth is Williams’ and Kotkin’s arguments. Trigger warnings are childish and anti-intellectual; there have been dozens if not hundreds of cases of academics fired for violating institutionally imposed ideological lines; scientific method is often caricatured and misunderstood as an ideological construct of ‘the West,’ “inclusion” is often promoted at the expense of intellectually essential confrontation, contestation, and rational debate, and the research and teaching mission of universities too often clouded by platitudinous and practically useless commitments to extraneous political goals like “decolonization.” Williams is correct: academics who value their vocation as teachers and researchers must oppose these tendencies to the extent that they interfere with the teaching and research mission of the university.

However, both Williams and Kotkin are both guilty of romanticizing the history of the university and confusing demographic uniformity of the student body and professoriate with “reason, liberty, and Western Civilization.” The historical fact of the matter is that the nineteenth century model of the university which still forms the basic structure of the contemporary university was populated exclusively by white middle and upper class men who had time to devote to their studies because they did not have to work to pay tuition. The university system expanded rapidly in the nineteen sixties to absorb the Baby Boom generation, allowing working class students to access higher education for the first time, but also women, Blacks, and other minority groups. The transformation of curricula still ongoing today and often denounced as intellectually weak and anti-Western, the introduction of various forms of critical theory that questioned the philosophical, literary, and artistic canon and exposed links between political, economic, and cultural power and science, objectivity, and truth, was largely the result of struggle against a suffocating normality which young people in revolt against their parents’ world refused to accept without question any longer.

One generation’s revolution is the next generation’s normality and the new generation’s object of struggle. The ‘critique of Western civilization” that Kotkin decries is largely a function of the fact that Western societies and student bodies have become even more multicultural at the same time as voices from the Global South and Indigenous peoples refuse to be spoken for any longer and rightly insist on speaking in their own voices against the worst of Western civilization: imperialism, colonialism, racism. While the nations of the Global South have achieved political independence, the forces that oppressed them politically continue to operate on the socio-economic level. All one needs to do is to examine the flows of wealth from Global South to North and consider the degree of material inequality to understand that the history of imperialism and colonialism continues to damage the lives of people in the Global South. If the worst of Western civilization is that legacy of racism, its best aspect is its capacity for self-criticism that underlies both scientific method and philosophical questioning. Indeed, systematic criticism of “Western civilization” was the hallmark of The Enlightenment: read Condorcet, or L’Abee Raynal, or Diderot if you want to find impassioned denunciations of what passed for civilization at the time. Far from a dispassionate and neutral exercise of reason in pursuit of objective truth, the best scientists and philosophers at the time consciously deployed science and reason against established structures of rule and assumptions about what is true, valuable, and just. Today’s critics of Western civilization carry on that legacy (even if they often misunderstand ‘Enlightenment reason’ as part of the problem).

Kotkin and Williams might agree, but would perhaps rejoin that social criticism is not the problem but the illiberal and anti-intellectual effort to mold the university exclusively in their own ideological image. These efforts extend to efforts to get institutions themselves to take positions on key political struggles like the Israel-Gaza war. These are both real problems: the university, as the name implies, is an institution devoted to the free production, dissemination, and critique of knowledge. Academic freedom is an institutional right whose purpose is to ensure that these defining missions can be pursued. It cannot be qualified by any institutionally-imposed political postures. Moreover, the mission also cannot be qualified by groups outside of the university, whether corporate donors or politically mobilized groups trying to impose their agenda on teaching and research. The academic mission of universities is negated to the precise extent that the principle of freedom of inquiry, teaching, and mutual criticism is subordinated to money or particular political-cultural agendas.

At the same time, just because it is a space for free inquiry, teaching, and argument, the university campus is a politicized space. The wave of encampments that swept North American and UK campuses this summer were fully in keeping with the best traditions of the critical exercise of reason. What side do you think Voltaire or Diderot would have been on were they alive to witness the systematic destruction of cities that were home to 2.3 million people? Are babies being left to freeze, women and children forced to beg for food, and men stripped to their underwear and paraded around being treated with the dignity that Kant argued was the due of every human being? The fact that some protesters made some stupid comments in support of Hamas does not negate the right to protest the Israeli response. What is Israel’s reflex attack on any critic as anti-Semitic but an attempt to short-circuit debate of its history and policies?

As for the much maligned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda, one must not forget that its original incarnation as “Affirmative Action” was necessary to open the academy to women and Blacks. It too was attacked as a dangerous weakening of standards, when in fact it was an expansion of perspectives beyond the white middle and upper class men who completely dominated all academic fields prior to the 1960’s. The broadening of voices engaged in teaching and research inevitably broadened the range of subjects and methodologies taught and utilized, but that broadening was– and should still be understood as– rooted in the university’s mission to encompass the evolving whole– the universe– of human intellectual work. The universe of human knowledge encompasses both empirical methods that must be judged on the basis of their results and critical methods which expose the historical and social forces that always act shape knowledge production. That social and political forces shape knowledge production does not mean that knowledge and truth are nothing but social constructions. The atomic weight of nitrogen is the same in Beijing as it is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But who gets access to scientific education, who gets positions at the most prestigious universities, which research programs are regarded as credible and which regarded as pseudo-science, have all been affected by non-scientific forces and assumptions. The belief that there was a a time when science was a pure pursuit of objective truth now compromised by ideological agendas is simply untrue. Consider only the history of military funding of scientific research at the best American universities. Is the US military not motivated by ideological concerns? Truth is not reducible to a social construction, but the institutions that pursue the truth are always structured by social forces that are motivated by social, political, economic, and ideological motives that determine what is regarded as legitimate and illegitimate scientific work. When critical methodologies help us understand those forces they actually make scientific work more scientific. Ideological influences compromise scientific objectivity, but if they remain undiagnosed their distorting influence cannot be corrected.

That is not to say that the DEI agenda cannot become a threat to academic freedom. David Robinson, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers argued in a recent edition of the CAUT Bulletin that there is a difference between academics committing themselves to curriculum development and institutions mandating commitment to administrative DEI programs as a condition of hiring and promotion. (David Robinson, “EDI Statements: A Threat to Academic Freedom?” CAUT Bulletin, Vol. 70, No. 6, September-October, 2023, p.7) When DEI becomes an imposed public confession of faith it is indeed a threat to the mission of the university as an institution of free, open inquiry and argument. And it is not only administrations that are to blame here. Kotkin and Williams are right to focus attention on students and (mostly younger) academics for mobilizing against perspectives and people with whom they disagree. There have been too many instances of talks being cancelled, colleagues being publicly shamed, mobbed, and fired, for articulating positions that run afoul of left-liberal orthodoxy. George Elliot Clarke, Professor of English at the University of Toronto and past poet laureate of the City of Toronto sums up the problem: “It is cowardice and hypocrisy to pretend that the only threat to ourselves arises from Neanderthal administrators or authoritarian (foreign) governments or states, We also need to reject forthrightly censorship calls from both leftist and rightist, self-righteous “activists” as well as from their often nicely tenured allies who will okay bullying tactics so long as the Putsches are conducted against persons whose ideas they dispute.” (George Elliot Clarke, “Letter to the Editor, CAUT Bulletin, Vol. 70, No. 6, September-October 2023, p. 18). Such efforts are a direct threat to the university as a space for open inquiry and argument. Those who insist on the need for ideological conformity are free to resign their academic position and start a revolutionary party. Otherwise, tolerance and the unforced force of the better argument (Habermas) must prevail on campus.

But that principle cuts both ways. Curriculum reform, questioning and opening the canon, exposing the ideological and social forces that shape the disciplines, exposing the role of economic and political power in the determination of what counts as legitimate knowledge production, and allowing free play and learning to listen to formerly silenced voices is actually the best of what the university is. What have the best artists, philosophers, and scientists done over history other than break free of imposed orthodoxies that had become barriers to the growth of knowledge and the creation of beauty? That is what Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo did with regard to Aristotelian physics, that is what Einstein did with regard to Newtonian mechanics, and it is what critical race theorists and feminists and Marxists and anti-colonial scholars are doing today when they deploy their analyses to promote the growth of knowledge rather than obfuscate material reality.

Is the human intellect constricted or expanded when it listens to the voices of the colonized speak about their experiences? Is out literary sensibility constricted or expanded when we read literature in English written by authors from outside England? There is too much of the middle-aged scold in arguments like Kotkin’s and Williams.’ One fears that they would have been on the side of the salon directors who refused to show Impressionist works, or amongst the stampede of outraged concert goers fleeing Stravinski’s Sacre de Printemps, or nodding in agreement with Einstein’s rejection of quantum mechanics. But God does play dice with the universe, paintings do not have to be constructed on the basis of Renaissance theories of perspective, poems do not have to rhyme, and philosophy can criticize traditional standards of objectivity and truth. Science does not thereby cease to be science, painting and poetry art, or philosophy critical engagement with knowledge claims in the service of the goal of understanding our world in all of its aspects as broadly and deeply as we are capable of understanding it.

In a rare act of political intelligence, Bashar al-Assad fled Syria rather than prolonging a probably futile fight to save his regime and life. Does this portend a better result for the Syrian people than the Libyan or Iraqi? The victorious rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has also shown some political intelligence, saying all the right things, that the victory of the rebel forces is a victory for all Syrians and promising to respect the rights of minority communities. Thus far the transfer of power has been as disciplined as possible given that it comes at the end of a 13 year civil war. The government stepped down, the rebel forces have been ordered to respect state institutions, to refrain from looting and destroying public property, and to withdraw from heavily populated urban areas.

Most analysts that I have read were surprised by the rapidity of the regime collapse, but with two weeks of hindsight perhaps it was not so surprising as it initially appeared. The leading rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was supported by Turkiye while Assad’s main backers, Russia and Iran, could not or were not willing to expend the resources necessary to blunt the rebel advance. Iran has over-extended itself in its conflict with Israel and Russia remains in a brutal slog against Ukrainian forces almost three years after its invasion. The Syrian army, now mostly poorly paid conscripts, clearly refused to fight. If only that had been the case thirteen years ago. Political wisdom, it seems, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

It also remains stoically silent. The fall of one autocrat teaches other autocrats nothing. Gadhaffi watched Saddam fall, but fought to the end. Assad watched Hussein and Gadhaffi fall and ultimately fled, but not before killing hundreds of thousands in the civil war and forcing millions of others to flee as refugees. One wishes that they if they were going to go, they would go before destroying the lives and life-conditions of their people for generations.

But now Assad is gone. Al-Sharaa is playing the role of the wise statesperson well. Is he sincere? Is he merely trying to build credibility with the foreign powers– and there are many (Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkiye, and the United States)– who hold the future stability of Syria in their hands? Is he buying time before eliminating rival factions? We will find out in the coming weeks and months. But the bigger problem than his intentions is whether he will be able to control the internal and external situation. What the Syrian people seem to be clamouring for more than anything at the moment is peace: time to breath and think about their future free from fear and intimidation by one side or another. The political signs, whatever al-Sharaa’s intentions, do not encourage hope that Syrians will get what they most need right now.

The streets of Damascus were full of cheering Syrians, understandably overjoyed by the collapse of the regime. Horror stories spilled out of the political prisons in which former dissidents and rebels were held and tortured. Hands flashed peace signs and faces remembered how to smile. But across the country Israel was destroying stocks of strategic weapons, air defences, and advancing into the buffer zone created by the treaty that ended the Yom Kippur war. Russia was securing its naval and air bases, while the United States was bombing what it said were Daesh positions in the east. In the North, Turkish sponsored forces were attacking Kurdish militias even as refugees streamed back into Syria.

It is impossible for those of us who live in politically stable countries to imagine what it is like to live in a environment in which at any time a foreign military can start bombing or shelling or launch an incursion. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham did nothing to resist the destruction of the Syrian military’s strategic weaponry nor did it act against American encampments in the south. It spokesperson wisely demurred when asked what its position on the Israeli incursion was. Perhaps they have learned the lesson that Hamas (and Hezbollah and Iran) have been learning painfully over the past year. It is politically insane to wage a primarily military struggle against vastly superior military forces. If their goal really is stability and reconstruction then they will have to arrive at and maintain a modus vivendi with all the major powers in the region, regardless of their ideological commitments.

Arriving at an agreement with Turkiye should be easiest, since they are Hayat Tahrir al-Shamm’s main sponsor. Nevertheless. if they really do want to represent all Syrians, they will have to end the fighting between the Turks and Kurds, and it is not clear how they could do that, if the Kurds choose to keep fighting (and why would they stop, so long as they are attacked and their national aspirations unfulfilled?) How will Russia react to the threat to its bases in Syria? These are vital to projecting Russian power into Africa and maintaining the laughable facade that Putin has constructed as an anti-imperialist. Does Russia have enough money to pay the rebels off to secure the future of their installations? It is unlikely that Russia would enter into an armed conflict against forces with a high degree of popular legitimacy at the moment, but if they have no money or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham won’t be bought off, how far will Putin go to protect these assets?

Even more worrisome for the new regime is Iran. All the analysts that I have read agree that Iran is the major loser in the fall of Assad. Al-Sharaa stated explcitly that the new regime will not tolerate Iranian interference in Syrian affairs. But without that cooperation,Iran will have extreme diff iculty re-arming Hezbollah. How far are they willing and able to go to undermine the new regime? They are not going to invade, but they are skilled in covert operations and must still have allies in the Alawite power structure and military. Can they accept defeat and walk away, even if it means abandoning Hezbollah? That would be the politically wise move: Iranians elected a reformer and are demanding concrete steps to improve their living conditions. But inertia and path dependency often trump intelligence in international relations.

Iran’s next moves will also be influenced by its knowledge that if it and Hezbollah are the main losers then Israel (and the US) are the strategic winners. Israel is sending a very clear message to the new regime: we retain overwhelming military superiority and can destroy whatever is left in the country. The United States has celebrated the fall of Assad. But Hayat Tahrir al-Shama has its origins in al-Qaeda and remains a designated terrorist group. There are still US forces on the ground. How will the US and Israel behave long term towards a terrorist group if they should end up forming the next government of Syria? On the other side, how will an Islamist government (terrorist or not) relate to Israel and the United States? If they ignore Palestinians, how can they claim that their victory is a victory for the whole Islamic nation? If they intervene, even with only ideological support, how will they avoid the wrath of Israel and the United States? Thus far they have chosen silence in favour of stabilizing their own country. But missionary fervor is probably drowning out clear reason in the heads of some members of the Islamist movements. Will al-Sharaa be able to keep the most radical forces in his own movement under control?

Hamas seems hopeful that the fact that the victorious movement is Sunni will lead them to eventually offer some sort of support. If so, they have become even more delusional over the course of the war than they were when they launched the self-destructive attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023. I argued at the time that Iran and Hezbollah were not going to help them achieve the strategic victory they hoped they would. Iran and Hezbollah have been decisively weakened. A young government with its eyes focussed on domestic problems will not be keep to intervene in a doomed military struggle. But even if they did, without air defences (the fatal weakness of the so-called ‘axis of resistance’) they would accomplish nothing accept the further destruction of the country that they are promising to rebuild.

The final question concerns whether they will be able to re-build the country and create the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions for national unity. Western commentators have largely celebrated Assad’s fall but judged Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Islamism a permanent obstacle towards achieving the goals of national reconciliation and progress. Some suspect that al-Sharaa’s conversion from terrorist to national liberation fighter to peaceful politician is a ruse. Perhaps. But Islamism and fundamentalist terrorism are not identical and there are other examples of Islamist movements consciously rejecting violence after advocating and practicing it. The best example is the conversion of Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Islamiyah, whose leadership ultimately rejected violent struggle without renouncing its fundamentalist interpretation of the primacy of Islamic law and the need for theocratic rule. What they rejected was the terrorist principle that religious rule could be imposed by force. If the people are not ready for religious rule then trying to impose it would be both unjust and impossible. (See Sherman A. Jackson, “Islam and Peace: A Muslim Fundamentalist Perspective,” Peace Movements in Islam, Juan Cole, ed). Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham undergo a similar conversion? Perhaps, but there is an important difference. Egypt’s al-Gama’ah al-Ilamiyah were the losers in a long struggle with the Egyptian state. Their conversion to non-violence occurred in prison. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has just won the civil war. Victorious movements which see themselves as doing God’s (or History’s) work are rarely capable of the sorts of compromises that politics on earth requires. Those who would build (or prepare) the City of God on earth (whether Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim) are not looking in the right direction. They look up in order to build down below, whereas they need to look into the eyes of their fellow citizens and see them first as fellow human beings. That look of recognition is possible from different religious perspectives, but I cannot see how it is possible from any fundamentalist religious perspective. If Islam (or Jesus, or Yahweh) is the truth then those who belong to different faith communities or atheists who reject the truth of them all cannot but appear to be inferior. They might be tolerated, but how can they be regarded as equal?

Syrian socialists and feminists have joined in the celebrations unleashed by Assad’s fall, but are far more circumspect about the near term future of the country under its new fundamentalist leadership. Swiss-Syrian socialist Joseph Daher cautions that:”it is still an open question as to whether HTS will follow through on these statements. The  organization has been an authoritarian and reactionary organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideology, and still has foreign fighters within its ranks. Many popular demonstrations in the past few years have occurred in Idlib against its rule and violations of political freedoms and human rights, including assassinations and torture of opponents. It is not enough to tolerate religious or ethnic minorities or allow them to pray. The key issue is recognizing their rights as equal citizens participating in deciding the future of the country. More generally, statements by the head of HTS, al-Jolani, such as “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly,” are definitely not reassuring, but quite the opposite.” That concern is amplified amongst revolutionary Syrian women. Writing in the Guardian Mona Eltahawy quotes Razan Zaitouneh, disappeared by the Assad regime in 2013, who warned against naive or opportunistic hopes that there was any important political differences between Assad’s technocratic and the Islamist’s religious terror:”We did not do a revolution and lose thousands of souls so that such monsters can come and repeat the same unjust history,” she wrote to her friend and fellow human rights activist Nadim Houry, in an email dated May 2013. “These people need to be held to account just like the regime.” What good would it do to replace one oppressor with a different one?”It would do no good at all.

Unfortunately, the victory of the rebel forces emphasizes once again the extreme weakness of the Left in the Arab world. In the West, the Left in power is synonymous with over-caution and practical betrayal of working class interests. In the Arab world, it is synonymous with authoritarian personal rule and top-down dirigiste state control of the economy. The promises made in the early days of Nasserism in Egypt and Baathism in Syria and Iraq failed to deliver shared wealth, universal education, and secular-socialist national solidarity. As in Iran in 1979, a movement which thinks that the solution to all life’s problems is found in a single book written 1500 years ago has the revolutionary initiative, weakening further the link between the practice of revolution and the value of social progress beyond “ancient, venerable prejudices” (Marx, Communist Manifesto). How can they lead a complex, pluralist society with a long history of secular (albeit violent and authoritarian rule) into the future?

The virtue of secular as opposed to religious rule is that the later can allow individuals to fully and freely develop their religious sentiments and rituals while leaving state institutions as public frameworks of interaction that do not rest on any sectarian basis. A theocracy, by contrast, cannot allow the full and free development of non-religious forms of life. The separation of Churches and state does not eliminate churches but allows for religious freedom in the private and non-political public sphere (civil society). But a fundamentalist religious regime can tolerate social and religious differences but cannot recognize their equal value. If a regime is fundamentalist then it will insist on the incorporation of its values into social fundamentals, especially law and education. Again, this problem is not unique to Islamic fundamentalism, but it is posed with extreme urgency today in Syria, where a generation’s hopes for revolutionary liberation are now threatened not by failure to overthrow the regime but success.

The calendar says late fall; the unrelenting grey, the bite in the West wind say early winter.

The days will grow shorter still for two more weeks.

The ways of the world:

Hymns are sung to the season of peace and goodwill amongst men.

Another genocide report has been released.

Values float free of reality.

People stock their liquor cabinets before the crush on Christmas Eve.

Hollow eyed children stare into the rubble; children’s eyes agleam in the forest of Christmas life.

Existential injustice.

Everyone is dead: one cannot help but feel sad; everyone is alive: one cannot help but feel happy.

There is no contradiction.

The 80s are back!

Drone bombing. All out ballistic missile attack. Revenge strike.

The overnight snow limns the boughs of the cedar tree: a Bailey’s and coffee.

What immortal hand or eye can frame that fearful symmetry?

There is nothing better than shortbread, except shortbread and a whiskey.

Power grid collapse. Oil depot fire. Apartment block implosion.

It all happened, just like that.

Taking the pass on the fly; cutting hard to the net.

They were dancing when the shooting started; the bass drowned out the grenade explosions.

The pink roses, still in bloom.

Middle aged conscripts hunker, trapped in a fire pocket.

Meat grinder assault.

Eat, drink, and play, the downtown holiday way!

Civilians flee rebel advance. Will the country disintegrate?

Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews; Anarchists, Conservatives, Liberals, Marxists:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world.

No one knows how to change it.

The calendar says late fall; the unrelenting grey and the bite in the West wind say early winter.

The days will grow shorter still for two more weeks.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2024 Booker Prize winning novel Kairos explores the interpersonal drama between a young woman, Katharina, who falls in love with a sophisticated older married man, Hans. The novel teeters on the precipice of the banality of its theme, but Erpenbeck’s sparse, unadorned prose and unique interlacing of the personal and the political prevents it form falling over the edge. Erpenbeck lets the story unfold itself and refrains from interjecting moralizing commentary from on high. In other words, she wrote a novel, not an emotional instruction book that tells the reader how they should feel. The author mercifully refrains from nudging the reader to be “outraged’ about power imbalances. There is no hand-wringing about the “inappropriateness”of the relationship. What is appropriate and inappropriate is left for the characters to decide. Erpenbeck understands– and too many today do not– that the artist’s job is to show, not tell.

The relationship begins with a chance encounter on a bus. Spontaneity and chance are the origin of desire. Kairos: the time for critical decisions, in ancient Greek. Does she approach him? Does he respond? The aleatory begin of their affair reminded me of Nicholas Mosley’s Hopeful Monsters, as did Erpenbeck’s emotionally restrained prose, but whereas Mosley concentrates on the forces carrying people from place to place, into and out of each other’s lives, Erpenbeck focuses on the fraught entwining of inner life with inner life and both with the world in which they find themselves. Katharina, young and naive, wants Hans’ life to absorb her own; Hans, older, urbane, a veteran of many affairs, wants her close and not close, wants her to be his although he refuses to be hers. The emotional breaking point is reached when Katharina, working at a theater in Frankfurt-am-Oder, succumbs to a young co-worker’s advances and sleeps with him. Hans– despite having earlier broken off the affair (humiliating Katharina at the train station in Frankfurt)– is consumed by the jealously only a late-middle aged man can feel at the thought of his young lover in bed with a younger, stronger, more vigorous man. He rekindles the romance. To spite her? because he does really love her? both? But he still will not leave his wife and son. She indulges his mildly naughty demands: she dresses in her schoolgirl-like Pioneer uniform and allows Hans to spank her with his belt. Does she desire to be punished? Does he desire to punish her because she slept with the young man? Or is he punishing himself through punishing her for his guilt at his father’s Nazi past? Or his own complicity with the regime that allows him perks and privileges?

The answer is “yes” to everything in all the ambivalence and contradiction between past and present, love, desire, and obligation, of the human, all too human wanting ‘a’ and not wanting ‘a,’ of wanting ‘a’ and ‘not-a,’ and not wanting ‘a’ and ‘not-a.’ Erpenbeck’s confidence as a writer lies in her not simplifying things. She leaves the reader to wrestle with the ambiguities and obscurities of intersecting lives in a moment of impending social collapse.

The first time they have sex, soon after first meeting on the bus, Hans plays Mozart’s Requiem. Kairos: the decision has been made. The Mozart metaphor is obvious: they are doomed, their society is doomed. Obvious though it maybe, it establishes an effective frame around the narrative. Their passion is as intense as Mozart’s dark tones and as hidden as the body in the grave. Once their society collapses and Katharina and her friends flock across the now smashed wall to shoplift clothes they realize that the “Wessies” freedom might not be the profound political-philosophical ideal it was sold as being. Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin, also treats the political side of the narrative with a light touch. She avoids both overt nostalgia for the East and triumphalist celebration of the West. What she does do brilliantly is let people’s complex emotions shine through. Without any obvious effort on Erpenbeck’s part the reader is dizzied by the kaleidoscopic options suddenly opened up to the citizens of the East– but we are also chilled at the cold brutality with which the intelligentsia of the East (of which Hans is a leading member) are dismissed as if they had never had a thought, penned a word, or conducted an experiment worth sharing. Brecht’s early death perhaps serves again as a rather obvious metaphor for a society that died before it had a chance to fully develop. Katharina attends a few meetings of young reformers who wanted to use the opening created by glasnost and perestroika to democratize their system. But these young democratic socialists are run over in the stampede of the majority to the shopping malls that would anesthetize them while their factories and research institutes were closed, their real estate bought up at pennies on the dollar (or pfennings on the mark), and their society dismantled. There was no dies irae, just a quick bang as the wall was smashed down and then a whimper as West absorbed East like an amoeba extending its pseudopod around a food morsel.

But before the East collapses the novel gives those of us who grew up on the other side of the Wall during the Cold war a glimpse into the inner and daily lives of citizens of the East. When I was younger I was fascinated by the question of how people lived behind the Iron Curtain. I took great pleasure in finding out what seems obvious now but was not when all we had to judge the daily lives of people was capitalist propaganda that portrayed life beyond the Berlin Wall as grey, drab, humourless, and emotionless. “Sure the Russians are good at hockey, but did you hear they operated on Tretiak’s legs so that he was more flexible?” But it turns out that people on the other side of the wall were just like those of us on the West: they fell in love and had sex with people they weren’t supposed to fall in love and have sex with, they did the same terrible job negotiating the contradictions and ambivalence of love and desire; they drank wine and listened to Mozart. Katharina had a pet guinea pig when she was a girl (which, even three decades after the wall came down, genuinely surprised me– I never imagined that kids would have had pets– propaganda works!). She used to roller skate in the summer and she finds paint for her new apartment; Hans goes to the Baltic for sea vacations with his family every summer.

Seeing that a visitor was shocked at the simplicity of his home, Heraclitus said “come in, for the gods dwell even here.” Erbenbeck shows us that human beings lived even there, behind the Iron Curtain. She even humanizes Hans’ complicity with the regime. It turns out that his privileges were a result of his agreeing to spy on members of the artistic community. Finding that fact out after his death, Katharina suddenly sees the interrogations that Hans subjected her to when she returned to Berlin from Frankfurt in a new light. But it is not the light we might expect. She does not see Hans’ truth as the Stasi operative beneath the jilted lover. Rather, she sees the human being beneath both desiring the impossible– to know, fully and completely, another human being. Reminiscing as she looks through his file, she tries to remember what they were doing on the day that he decided to quit spying. “May 13, 1988, is when she wrote him her reply to the third cassette: I want you to know me through and through, skin and hair and everything beyond. If only “I’d known that I was your mirror image. But he can neither see her nor hear her, and he can’t replay either.” (294).

Tuesday afternoon and into the early evening I was expecting a Harris win. Then, when CNN declared a victory in Iowa for Trump, I started to think that the polls showing Harris ahead or tied with Trump in most battleground states could be wrong, as, indeed, they were. As dawn broke, the scale of Trump’s victory was becoming evident … and the predictable bloviating from anti-Trump quarters had begun to make the rounds on social media.

Whether the second Trump presidency will prove to be the fascist take-down of “American democracy” his critics are warning about remains to be seen. I am not inclined towards catastrophising in politics: capitalist political institutions are system-preserving. Liberal democratic institutions have served American capitalism very well. They enjoy broad support- as we will see, Trump was not elected because his supporters want to destroy “democracy.” Most, I will argue, want it to work for them and not just wealthy urban professionals and bankers. They have, as they did in 2016, made a very bad choice, but one should remember that they did choose, by the rules of the democratic game as it is played in America. The “power” the people exercise in actually existing democracy is meagre: the economic power by which the ruling class shapes public life and policy is regulated by the state but never fundamentally compromised no matter who assumes office. That does not mean that it does not matter who gets elected; party policy can make a difference in peoples’ lives. But it remains true that the machine rolls on no matter who is at the helm. My suspicion is that just as in his first term Trump will produce more smoke than heat. More importantly, the damage that he threatens to do to targeted groups can be resisted– if people organise, rather than mourn.

Two broad explanations have been offered for Trump’s victory. Each expresses one side of a more complex truth and say at least as much about the politics of those who authored the explanation as the dynamics of the election itself. The first is the most predictable and the least supported by the available polling evidence: the Trump victory is a victory for racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. For example, Moustafa Bayoumi writing in The Guardian argued that “The very idea of another Trump presidency is devastating. His entire campaign consisted of unbridled race-baiting, woman-hating and fascist-in-waiting messaging, yet still he prevails. This is what succeeds in this country? The answer, it’s now clear, is a resounding yes.” If true, then it must be the case that everyone who voted for him is racist, misogynist, and xenophobic. Some Trump voters undoubtedly are racist, misogynist, and xenophobic, but the scale of his victory and his performance with a wide variety of voter groups suggests that overall, his voters were not motivated primarily by hatred.

Trump’s improved standing amongst women, Latino’s and (to a much lesser extent) Black men, and Harris’ corresponding underperformance suggests strongly that what fueled Trump’s victory was a repudiation of the Democratic party’s campaign as much as it was an intrinsically pro-Trump vote. While inflation has slowed, it dogged the last years of the Biden administration and its consequences for living standards pushed voters towards Trump. The the actual results as expressed in a series of exit polls reported by CNN paints a picture that is not easily explained by the argument that Trump rode a racist wave of poor and religious whites to victory: 46% of Latinos voted for Trump, 65% of Native Americans voted for him and, in the crucial Michigan battleground, only a quarter of Arab-Americans voted for Harris. Those groups were not motivated by racism. While it is true that about 8 in 10 Blacks voted for Harris, that was down from 9 in 10 that voted for Biden. But 3 in 10 young Black men under 45 chose Trump- a small but noticeable statistical increase over the general pattern. The results prove that people do not simply mechanically vote their identity but think about the available options. Many Latino’s voted for Trump despite the bad joke about Puerto Rico at the convention because they too are concerned about immigration levels and many are opposed to anything that smacks of “socialism,” given their experiences in Cuba and Venezuela. One might disagree– strongly– with their choice, but to simply dismiss Trump voters as racists and misogynists risks displaying the “contempt for the masses”‘ that Ernesto Laclau argued underwrites elite criticisms of populism (On Populist Reason).

The competing explanation, better evidenced than the first, argues that the reasons that Trump won were primarily economic. Thus Bernie Sanders argued that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them … While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” Sanders echoes concerns that have been expressed in a number of quarters, none more carefully argued than Thomas Piketty’s critique in Capital and Ideology, that social democratic parties in Europe and the Democratic party in the United States (which functions symbolically as a centre-left party even though it is not) have indeed abandoned the working class: in terms of policy, in terms of culture and ideology, and in terms of their mass base. Social democrats and the Democrats are becoming the party of urban professionals and highly educated youth. This group is not a class, as critics of the “professional managerial” class argue, but are better understood as class fraction– the educated and cultured upper tier of the petite bourgeoisie. While many (professors, for example) have material interests in government spending, they are united less by objective economic concerns and more by a general cultural outlook- the “diversity and inclusion agenda” pilloried by critics of ‘woke” politics and the target of Trump’s and the right’s generally satirical rhetorical attacks. Whereas “inclusion” used to be thought of in material terms: furnishing historically oppressed groups and exploited classes with the resources that they required to satisfy the full range of their needs and freely develop their life-capacities– the basic political economic goal of socialism, broadly construed– today it has become– or, what amounts to the same thing, successfully portrayed as becoming– an out of control ideology adrift from both material rationality and the culture of large sections of the population. The economic explanation of Trump’s victory argues that people flocked to Trump because they are tired of having their material interests ignored, that they believe in fairness but reject the interpretation of fairness that involves downplaying the interest of one section of the working class (whites) against other sections of the working class (minority groups), and they believe Trump when he says that he will work for all Americans. Polls and interviews support this interpretation, but also abstract from some important splits noticeable in the working class vote.

The most important split is between unionized and non-unionized workers. Exit polls showed that 55 % of unionized workers voted for Harris and only 43% for Trump. Now, 43 % is not nothing, but what we should pay attention to is the per centage gap: 9 per cent is a huge difference in politics, and it suggests that unions remain spaces for political argument. That is, where leaders can engage members and members can engage each other, a majority of workers can be brought round to seeing what might seem obvious but, politically, is not: a billionaire blow hard property developed is not going to work in the interests of the working class. What this fact further suggests is that Sanders and other left critics of the existing Democratic agenda might indeed have a point: if Democrats concentrate on those economic concerns that link and unite the experience of different members of the working class they will be able to undercut the apparently unifying but actually divisive arguments of Trump. (The same argument holds in Europe, where the far right has gained at the expense of social democratic parties who, like the Democrats, have been abandoned by working class voters).

But I think that not only do the policies need to change, so too does the rhetoric. What I called in my book The Troubles With Democracy “the politics of commas” (a political claim is asserted and is then followed by an endless list of every particular group and sub group to ensure that no one’s “story” is left unacknowledged) needs to give way to a politics of concrete universality. The term is technical but the meaning is simple: humanity is a self-determining species; unlike rocks, we are capable of shaping our social and individual reality. Those self-determining capacities are expressed in distinct ways: different languages, different philosophies, different cultural traditions, different cuisines, different modes of making art, different family patterns. Patterns are good or bad not according to their content (secular versus atheist, English versus Spanish, heterosexual versus gay marriage, etc), but according to whether their organization and practice depends upon the domination and oppression of other groups. So long as some citizens’ worship of the god they believe in does not impede others from living as atheists, so long as one person loving the person they love does not impede another from loving the person they love, then both are good. Everything good in human life is a living expression of our human capacities to make sense of our place in the universe and forge mutualistic bonds across differences. The principle that the best society ensures the satisfaction of everyone’s natural and social needs so that they can live the lives they find meaningful and valuable, so that everyone can make contributions to the common (social, cultural, and economic) wealth– has to become again the organizing centre of left politics. That was the principle that early animated the socialist movement and it has to become the animating centre again.

However, it is also important to register concern with the degree to which a culture of conservatism has taken hold amongst those sections of the working class that voted for Trump. The problem with this culture is not necessarily its content– there is nothing inherently wrong with the nuclear family, or heterosexuality, or being white. Clinging to any or all as the bedrock of civilization and attacking other forms of social relationship and ways of life is the problem: every bit as much the problem as the identity politics and the woke agenda that conservatives attack. The political problem with both form of identity politics is that every group silos itself in defensive reaction to the mere existence of other groups, no one can talk to one another, and arch-opportunists like Trump– who, if you ask me, believes in nothing except his own power– are able to exploit the divisions.

In one of the more perceptive analyses of the election that I have read, Ben Davis drew an analogous conclusion. He argued that “while the new right has made great hay of returning to a communitarian model of politics, economically populist, socially conservative, and focused on family and society, the truth is that the Trumpist movement is the opposite. It is hostile to the very concept of society and community. To combat this, we need an unabashedly pro-society left. The way to win back power for a solidaristic and humanist politics is to rebuild working-class democratic institutions. In 2020, Sanders asked the question: “Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know?” This is the question we must ask over and over again and the work we must do is making sure the answer becomes yes.” A pro-society left, I would argue, goes deeper than just working class institutions to the foundations of social life in need-satisfaction. The problem with identity politics is that it starts from difference and has no way other than (often cloying) pleas for solidarity based on the unique vulnerabilities of the group doing the pleading. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s attack on the “wretched and pinched style” of his socialist contemporaries (The Will to Power, 77). Today’s style– platitudinous, preachy, and above all self-righteous– annoys, but the bigger problem is that moralistic pleading does not work (and when poorly articulated because too easy a target for sarcastic critiques from the right).

Solidarity must be built up from common interests and those interests are grounded in shared natural and social needs. Properly nourished, everyone’s body can dance in its own way. Coherent valorization of differences must start from their roots in shared human needs and capacities for self-making and self-expression. Only once differences are understood as the expression of underlying, universal human needs and capacities can people learn that they enrich themselves by appreciating other people’s dances, even if they would not dance that way themselves. Once a common basis of understanding has been established, hard cases of conflict can be resolved through good will, honest but sharp debate, and compromise.

On Tuesday, November 5th, 2024, between 45 and 50 per cent of eligible Americans who choose to vote will cast their ballot for Donald Trump. The 2024 election will be the third time running that up to half of American voters decide that a man who has a civil conviction for sexual assault on his record, is facing a panoply of criminal charges stemming from his first term, has made open threats to use the power of the Office of President to revenge himself on his enemies, who has vowed to use the military to forcibly expel immigrants who entered the country illegally, and gives free play to his boorish and bullying personality (but now expressed more erratically than in his first two campaigns) is the better choice to lead their nation. His cross class alliance of the ultra-wealthy, the least educated segment of the white working class, evangelical Christians, and rural voters retains its political integrity despite objective differences of material interest (tax cuts for the rich, for example, deprive working class communities of the resources they need to invest in the public services they require). The solidity of this coalition induces exasperation amongst Trump’s opponents: recall Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” quip and Biden’s exasperated reference to Trump voters as “garbage.“

There are, no doubt, some deplorable figures surrounding Trump and much that comes out of his mouth is garbage. And yet, his attraction, to those for whom he is politically attractive, has not been diminished by the tireless efforts of journalists to expose his lies, lawyers to expose his crimes, and his opponents to warn that at best a second Trump term would result in the most partisan authoritarian Presidency in American history and at worst, the fascist destruction of American democratic institutions.

They have reason to worry. I have already noted his threats to his opponents, but these might be dismissed as bluster. More troublesome is the historical similarity between the cross class alliance he has constructed and the social basis of European fascism in the 1920s and 30s. European fascism was spawned by deep socio-economic crises and was designed to save capitalism by destroying working class opposition. However, it succeeded by advancing an organicist view of the state which deflected attention away from the political economic causes of the crisis. The ruling class mobilized workers for a fascist solution by constructing demonized “internal enemies” (paradigmatically, in Germany, Jews and Communists). The projection of the causes of crisis onto ethnically and politically stigmatized scapegoats proved effective in bringing working class supporters on board for a project that soon liquidated their traditional economic and political defence mechanisms: social democratic and communist parties and trade unions. Having destroyed the organized opposition, the fascist parties were free to remake the nations they now ruled- Spain, Italy, Germany– into totalitarian states ruled by overt violence.

While the class basis of Trump’s electoral alliance bears some similarities to the social foundations of fascism, and his rhetoric is certainly authoritarian and fascistic (most notably, his constant references to illegal immigrants as a racialized enemy within), and some of his supporters manifest the fanaticism of the SA– armed gangs that the Nazis employed in their early days to intimidate their enemies– there are important differences. While his most extreme supporters are fanatical, they lack a coherent institutional structure. More importantly, Trump does not command an ultradisciplined paramilitary force akin to the SS. Whereas European fascist parties could count on the complicity of the armed forces, all the available evidence suggests that the senior commanders of the US Armed forces and its officer corps are deeply opposed to Trump and would almost certainly refuse to obey orders to deploy against fellow citizens. There is also no evidence that rank and file soldiers are itching to mutiny and become an armed phalanx of the MAGA movement. Moreover, the American ruling class, like American society generally, is deeply split, unlike the ruling classes in Europe in the 20s and 30s, which were more solidly behind a fascist solution. As Micheal Roberto reminds us, it would be wrong to conflate fascism as an extreme solution to the structural crisis of capitalism with the form that it took in the 1920s and 30s, but I think it would also be wrong to ignore the dissimilarities and much deeper wells of opposition that Trump would face were he to actually try to abolish the formal rule of law, criminalize political opponents, and destroy the institutions of the democratic state (weak as they might already be). (see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth)

But what interests me here is less precise social and political analysis of the class base of Trump’s movement and more the reasons why it is so impervious to the astounding pile of evidence that can be marshaled against his record and program. Least effective of all has been the attempt- which those who make the charge think of as their ace in the hole– of branding him a fascist. True, there is a sizeable internal Republican opposition to Trump, but the tens of millions of people who are going to vote for him are not in the least dissuaded because of media and academic criticism of Trump’s authoritarian, and perhaps fascist tendencies.

That none of his committed supporters are moved to rethink their support by credible arguments that he is a fascist is cause for serious concern. But does it mean that MAGA is an incipient fascist movement just waiting, like the Nazi’s, for a Bundestag fire to seize power and install one-party, totalitarian rule? There might be elements within that movement and amongst Trump’s more virulent advisors who would implement something like this strategy (Project 2025 ), but I am not convinced that America is on a 1933-knife edge. As I noted above, I think that there is simply too much organized opposition to Trump and too much of a mass basis of resistance to any overt moves to systematically dismantle the constitutional order for him to succeed, even if he were to try.

But I suspect– and of course, I could be wrong– that, just like Trump’s first term, his bark would be worse than his bite, and that his supporters, save the most rabid, also think that way. Like people laughing at a politically incorrect joke they take some of his more extreme bluster with a grain of salt, making his most vociferous critics sound like prigs with no sense of humour. People might be naive when they dismiss Trump’s threats, but I think that it is true that critics of Trump still often misunderstand his tactics: he makes outrageous claims (for example, that Haitian migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio), not because he thinks that they are true, but because he knows it will make his opponents apoplectic, and he can then use their reaction to make the real move that he wants to make. The real — and politically effective– move that Trump wants to make is to paint his opponents as people who do not care about, are actively opposed to, the material interests of the “ordinary American.” So, he will say something for which there is no evidence and, when the absence of evidence is pointed out (as it was, in real time, about the cats and dogs, during the debate) he pivots. He does not admit the falsity of what he says but sows uncertainty- during the debate he shrugged and said “we’ll find out.” But this act is all prelude- what he really wants is for his opponents to rise in defence of the community that he attacks. He wants them to do this so that he can say to his constituency: “see, they care more about “them” than they do you.” He thereby creates a wedge between those who Trump identifies as ‘real” Americans (not exclusively white, it is important to add– “real” Americans for Trump are people who were born in America and vote for Trump) and migrants, whom he portrays as invaders.

But why does his tactic work? Because, like all effective political tactics, it connects with a real element of people’s experience, but it abstracts that element from its historical background causes and proposes a solution which, when analyzed, appears laughably (or damnably) simplistic and unworkable, but is read by supporters as a genuine response to their concerns. During the 2016 election Trump mobilized his base by threatening to ban Muslims from visiting the US and promising to build The Wall all along the US-Mexico border. The Muslim ban did not survive court challenges and The Wall stalled due to its extreme costs and logistical challenges (bark, bite), but they both served Trump’s political aims. His aims were to exploit fears about the link between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism (a link which is real) and people’s belief that illegal immigrants unfairly jump the queue and deprive needy American of resources for which they pay taxes. The Muslim issue is less front and centre in 2024, but the immigration issue remains Trump’s most important mobilizing tactic. It would not work unless it addressed real concerns felt by ordinary people– and not only whites’ concerns, as Trump’s critics are too soon to charge. Black communities are also affected and have expressed frustration that while their needs have been ignored for decades, resources are found almost overnight for migrants.

By careful abstraction, isolation from historical causes, and sloganeered simplicity of solution political realities are constructed out of material reality. Critics have to understand the process of construction and why it is effective: life is short, people suffer when their needs are unmet, and they want them satisfied now. The further down the socio-economic ladder one goes, the more unmet needs there are, making a large subset of those groups fertile ground for recruiting to politicians like Trump. The fact is, Democrats (and social democratic parties in Europe, many of whom have lost badly to far right movements in recent elections) have failed to deliver meaningful socio-economic benefits to their working class constituencies. They are portrayed, and not without reason, as run by effete elites who are afraid to get their hands dirty “doing an Honest day’s work” and despise those who do. They are not interested in criticisms of Trump as a fascist because they are not interested in political theory but the integrity of their communities. They feel that their ways of life are derided and, like people who feel disrespected, lash out defensively. They end up at odds with communities (immigrant workers) with whom they have more in common than the ruling class false saviors for whom they vote. That underlying commonality needs to be the starting point of effective response to the Trump’s of the world.

Instead of demonizing Trump supporters as garbage, Democrats have to start by taking their concerns seriously. It is true, sadly, that some Trump supporters do seem to be beyond the pale: fed a steady diet of on-line right-wing conspiracy theory and closed to any confrontation with counter-evidence, they perhaps cannot be convinced by anything other than a smashing political defeat, and even then, they might still not change their minds. I do not know what per centage of Trump supporters fall into this category, but I believe it is a small minority. The rest (of his working class voters) are motivated by real concerns: there are legitimate questions about fairness when it comes to the distribution of housing and other resources to migrant communities when millions of Americans are unhoused or poorly housed. Climate change is a reality, of that there can be no rational doubt, but, if you are a worker in an industry that is threatened by the necessary energy transition, you might well feel personally threatened and search for a simplistic solution: it is a hoax, and Trump will dispel it.

Effective political argument must begin from the opponent’s premises. As Socrates understood, what matters initially in a political and ethical argument is not whether what the interlocutor believes is true, but that they believe it. Of course, Socrates not only failed to convince his interlocutors, he was sent to the grave for his troubles. It may prove to be the case that too many Trump supporters put themselves beyond the reach of critical political reason, but opponents must try to get underneath the fear, bluster, and anger and encourage Trump’s working class base start to consider problems in a more comprehensive light; to ask themselves if they really believe that a selfish, narcissistic, failed property developer and self-promoter understands their problems and has any concrete plan to solve them?

I was visiting my mother in my home town up North over the Thanksgiving weekend. The weather was mostly glorious: cool, dry, sunny. There were still leaves on the trees: red maples, yellow birches, orange oaks, iridescent spikes amidst the grey-green needles of spruces, pines, and cedars. I was able to indulge one of my favourite simple pleasures: to walk aimlessly in the bush in the morning, impelled by the joy of forward motion, enlivened by the autumn chill, stepping without orienting goal, just moving in open space, alone for an hour, my mind and eye open to whatever presents itself– maybe I tarry with a thought, but most I let go, perhaps a bird or tree catches my attention, but I don’t stop– I am not hunting for stories to tell but seeking release from the demands of projects, the freedom of moving my feet.

I wondered: what if, instead of baroque boardrooms and imposing wooden tables covered with laptops, important papers, and crystal pitchers full of water, surrounded by aides and flunkies, cameras and microphones, the political leaders of two sides locked in conflict met at the edge of the bush and walked side by side, deeper and deeper into the trees, without security personnel, unobserved by the media, in whatever clothes they normally wear at home when no one is looking. It takes profound trust to walk into the bush with a stranger. Each would be wary, the first steps around the corner past which they could not be seen would be taken with trepidation. But if they kept going they would both feel that release from tension that all good walks produce.

Then, maybe they could start to think outside of the self-enclosed dogma-worlds of politics. Looking down, they would see their different shoes supported by the same ground. Listening, they could hear the silence of the earth and feel its indifference. The earth supports whomever walks upon it; it does not recognize borders; it does not care about traditions; it does not speak human languages. Above, the sky would not look down upon them: it too is just there, indifferent to what goes on down below. If they could hold their tongues (but, alas, as Spinoza says, even though “the human condition would would indeed be far happier if it were equally in men’s power to keep silent as to talk … experience teaches with abundant examples that nothing is less within men’s power than to …hold their tongues.” Ethics Part 3, Scholium Proposition 2) but if they could, perhaps the felt indifference of sky and earth would help them put their historical conflicts into geological perspective.

History is short, geology is long. A century of tension and war is as nothing to the 4 billion year old planet, the 13 billion year old universe. Maybe, if they shut up long enough, and there were no cameras to posture in front of, no one to hear the pithy catch phrase or slogan, the thought would take shape in both of their heads that neither of them, nor the people they represent or claim to represent, live for even a century, and, therefore, if they are to enjoy the goods of mortal life, they have to enjoy them right now and not in some future that never arrives in which absolute justice would have been been attained.

Perhaps cool, still morning air would calm their passions and their measured steps would slow their thoughts. After kilometers, perhaps, Spinoza’s desire to talk would overcome them and they would both start to speak at once, but, freed from the coiled tension of enclosed spaces, they would both stop and say: “you first.” And that willingness to mutually yield would teach them that both of them have something to say and the right to say it, but if they shout slogans at each other at the same time, neither one will get across what they intend to say. And then, perhaps, they would realize that they are capable of staying silent and listening, and that it takes strength and courage to hold one’s tongue so that the other can speak.

They would have to mutually adjust their pace so that they stayed side by side so that one could hear when the other talked. They would give themselves over to the spontaneous logic of footsteps and conversations: walks end when the walker gets tired, talks end when neither side has anything more to say. A walk is not a race, a discussion is not a speech. Just as there is strength in silence there is strength in giving ourselves over to spontaneous dynamics. We lose sense of the passage of time, we lose sense of our self as controlling ego, we become part of a process that embraces our interests but in a more comprehensive unity with the interests of others and the world in which those interests are formed. We recognize ourselves as an active power, but in an order of things that we did not invent and cannot one-sidedly control. All understanding is understanding of limits; all understanding of limits is recognition of the implications of interconnection and relationship.

Socialists have paid much attention to political and economic structures, historical forces, and the dynamics of social struggle, but relatively little to the people that stand in social relations to each other. They have paid little attention to the inner dynamics by which people might change themselves, to free themselves from ancient hatreds, from the desire to punish and harm, convictions of absolute superiority and the righteousness and heroism of sacrifice They have tended to see personal transformation as a sub-political problem that will be mechanically solved by institutional changes. But people who are motivated by hatred, by belief in their superiority, by the need to be absolutely right will not transform into receptive, open, people capable of understanding others’ perspectives just because they succeed in making an institutional change. They will just be the same people in different institutions, and treat people as they have always treated them: as subordinates whose job is to do what they are told. Resources might be spread around somewhat differently, but social relationships, at a depth, emotional-ethical level will not have changed. Old conflicts will re-appear in new forms so long as we cannot walk side by side with people and listen to what they have to say.

Political conflicts are ultimately relationships between people, and in relationships, both sides are causally implicated in their dynamics. If they are dysfunctional, both sides will have to understand their role and change themselves. Activists might fantasize that the opponent will be completely overcome by the righteousness of their cause, but total victory that would eliminate the opponent entirely is never possible, and even if it were, it would require such monstrous levels of life-destruction that the outcome would be as bad or worse as the system it was supposed to replace and improve upon. There will be no solution to destructive human conflicts until individual people learn to relate to each other as human beings: free from ceremony and symbolism, free from history, free from rhetorical posturing, free from ritualistic displays of power and superiority, and, most of all, free from the belief that their side is absolutely right and the other side absolutely wrong.

Another way of putting this point is to say, simply, that warring sides need to learn to communicate. Communication is reciprocal: one side talks, the other side listens, back and forth until agreement is reached. Marxists tend to pay most attention to Hegel’s master slave dialectic, but they have to keep reading, to the end of Chapter Six, to find out how Spirit becomes self-consciously present to itself. Individuals recognize that they are essentially spirit (social self-conscious agents) when they forgive each other for their failures. Forgiveness is the highest form of recognition: since we are finite and fallible mistakes are inevitable, but since we are all parts of the same social whole, we have to live with each other. Freedom becomes a concrete reality in a society in which each recognizes themselves as parts of a greater whole, accepts their own and, crucially, others’ limitations. Cooperation presupposes that on its own each side is incapable of accomplishing its goals, but together they can create a world in which each of them can fully develop, contribute, and enjoy. Until people want that for the other as much as for themselves there will be no end to violent antagonism.

I developed my initial reaction to the October 7th attacks through a critical dialogue with a blog post written by Gilbert Achcar. Achcar explained the historical context that prompted the attacks but also criticized Hamas’s fundamentalist fanaticism and the potentially severe consequences their terrorist adventure might have on ordinary Palestinians. I agreed with the thrust of his position but in my own (on-going) analysis I tried to steer clear of the issue of the historical background to this latest phase of the conflict, not only because most everyone on the Left was focusing upon it, but, more importantly, because I think that the conflict will never be solved if both sides keep appealing to history to justify their failed tactics and strategies.

My two major conclusions at the time were:

“The Netanyahu government is composed of open racists who
have long dreamed of a pretext to crush all Palestinian national liberation struggle if not expel
the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories outright. Shockingly, Hamas has given
them this pretext. All oppressed people have the right to resist oppression and to choose the
means by which that resistance is pursued. But it is the most lunatic, abject, political stupidity to
launch an invasion of a state with vastly superior military means under the assumption that a
spectacular assault by a few hundred guerrillas will be a crushing blow.”

and:

“Attacking military targets is one thing, gunning down unarmed teenagers attending an all night rave is indeed barbaric. Anyone who believes that such tactics can advance a liberatory cause is both politically deluded and morally bankrupt: ends do not justify any means whatsoever. Liberation and vengeance are distinct. Vengeance is born from hatred, justified or not. Liberation is born from the need to live freely: free to create democratic institutions that give voice to the collective goals of people, but also free from ancient hatreds that imprison the emotions and imaginations of people and poison their relationships with each other.” (See “Love is not the Answer, but it is a Start.“)

The year that has passed since October 7th 2023 has not given me any reason to revise those initial arguments. However, it has given me more reasons to believe that unless movements on both sides of the violence emerge and convince people of the need to free their thinking from attachment to past atrocities, the present problems cannot be solved and a future peace never constructed. Impossible as it might sound, Palestinians and Israelis have to sit down and start talking about what happens today, for the sake of tomorrow. That means no one at the table invokes the Holocaust or the Nakba, to say nothing of God’s will. The problems are human-made and can only be solved by human creative intelligence focusing on the way in which the current cycles of attack and counterattack are undermining everyone’s most basic interest in the social peace necessary for the secure enjoyment of life. Policies which manifestly undermine the interests that they are intended to achieve are materially irrational. Rational people, regardless of which side they are on, should be able to recognize this fact.

However, “utopian” would seem to be too mild a criticism of this argument. Materially irrational or not, everyone is, for the moment, locked into the thinking that generates revenge cycles. Ayatollah Khameini argued that Iran’s missile attack at the end of September was “legal, legitimate, and rational.” I doubt that it was legal, perhaps it was legitimate by the rules of the existing game, but it was certainly not rational, given Israel’s (in alliance with the United States) capacity for disproportionate response. Following the strike, and entirely predictably, Israel assured the world that it would respond in kind. Netanyahu argued that Israel had a “duty” to respond to bombs with bombs. If politicians have duties towards their citizens they would be, first and foremost, duties to ensure that the conditions of life-security and life-development are met. Those conditions have deteriorated for Israelis since October 7th. If Netanhayu is serious about duties, and Khameini is serious about rationality, and if the different Palestinian factions and their allies are serious about making political progress towards some sort of political solution, radically different strategies and tactics are needed.

Again, “utopian” seems too mild a criticism of this argument. The problem is not only leadership– although that remains a major problem. The problem is that the general population on both sides of the conflict seems to have given up hope that peaceful co-existence is possible. The recent “Pulse” Israeli-Palestinian poll, jointly conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University found, unsurprisingly, that the two camps were more polarized than ever. Almost identical numbers viewed their people as the primary victims of the conflict (84% of Jewish Israelis and 83 % of Palestinians) and there is an almost total absence of trust between the communities (94% of Israelis and 86% of Palestinians say the other side cannot be trusted). The reason why? 66% of Jewish Israelis and 61% of Palestinians believe the other side wants to eradicate them.

But is the situation totally hopeless? There do seem to be constructive political attitudes, at least on the Palestinian side. Notwithstanding the almost complete destruction of Gaza and repeated attacks across the West Bank, more Palestinians support a two state solution (40%) than a single state in which the Jewish population would enjoy limited rights (33). Implicit in this finding is the sort of constructive thinking that can free people from revenge cycles. Those who prefer the two state solution view Palestinian self-determination as a creative, forward-looking project and not an opportunity to punish Jewish Israelis by depriving them of the rights that Palestinians have been denied. They understand that ‘resistance” is not an end in itself. Ultimately, political struggles for national self-determination are about creating an institutional structure in which people exercize collective control over the resources and institutions that good lives require. Resistance movements must ultimately justify themselves on the basis of positive results for the lives of the people they claim tor present. Rhapsodizing about heroism and martyrdom as hellfire rains down from F35’s ensures only that the pile of bodies and rubble will grow higher.

Unfortunately, as support for a two state solution rises in Palestine, it has declined among Jewish Israelis. Twice as many Jewish Israelis support annexation of the West Bank without equal rights for Palestinians (42%), as those who support a two-state solution, (21%). That figure represents a 13-point decline from 2022 and the lowest since the early 1990s. 14% of Israeli Jews support a single democratic state.

If one wanted to view those results with rose coloured glasses firmly on, one could say that it is encouraging that even a quarter of Jewish Israeli’s have not abandoned hope in favour of a policy of expulsion and eradication. But to believe that they can win the political battle within Israel would seem naive in the extreme. Half a million Israelis demonstrated in favour of a negotiated ceasefire for the sake ensuring the release of the remaining hostages. Instead, Netanyahu delivered an invasion of Lebanon. The first step towards calming this conflict as a precondition for renewed negotiations towards a political solution is going to have to be taken by the one actor outside the region who could halt the fighting tomorrow: the United States.

While US policy seems rudderless and ineffective, people should recall a few months ago, prior to the invasion of Rafah, when Biden halted delivery of 2000 pound bombs and demanded that Israel vastly increase the quantity of aid allowed into Gaza. The result was immediate. Israel complied with US demands. It is also true that they soon resumed ignoring US concerns about the invasion of Rafah, but the lesson I take from that incident is that credible US threats to halt military assistance get Israel’s attention. Hence, a credible threat to suspend all military aid would force Israel to the bargaining table, first for the sake of a ceasefire and then– if consistent and credible pressure were maintained– toward a political solution to decades of violence and dispossession. Without US leadership the conflict can continue indefinitely, to the detriment, primarily, of Palestinians and their allies. Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas can effectively repel Israeli airstrikes and Iran, although it is too large to conquer or subdue, could be seriously damaged by joint Israeli and US strikes. I doubt that the restive population of Iran is interested in the further erosion of their living standards for the sake of Khameini’s foreign adventures.

Everyone concerned, therefore, has a reason to climb down and start to learn how to work together. As it is with people so too with peoples: the free development of each is the precondition of the free development of all.

The seemingly unstoppable Israeli ultra-violence in Gaza and now Lebanon is a paradigmatic example of what happens when structural social and political problems become personalized. When people think about social structures as the source of problems they can reason constructively about how to fix them. However, when they think of distinct groups of people as the problem, the passion to destroy the enemy is aroused. The decision-maker cannot rise above their enmity and lashes out, ensuring that the history of trying and failing to solve a social and political problem by eradicating the enemy will be repeated. Failure and mass life-destruction are guaranteed in equal measure.

The locked-in pattern of kill and response currently plaguing the Middle East is another sad case in point. Presenting its operations as a response to evil, the current Israeli leadership cannot see what is obvious to almost everyone else: that it does in spades what it accuses Hamas and Hezbollah of doing– indiscriminately killing innocent civilians. The 8 year old daughter of the Hezbollah member killed in the exploding pager attacks is hardly responsible for her father’s political convictions. But instead of rising above the provocations and appealing directly to those Israeli’s in the street demanding a ceasefire, Hamas and Hezbollah militants respond in kind, giving Israeli fundamentalists exactly the rhetorical ammunition they need to work around growing global condemnation of their way of conducting the war and to continue it with even greater destructive force.

There are of course deep historical causes to this conflict, but there is also a subjective dimension which must be exposed and understood. Self-righteousness in a political cause fuels the cycle of life-destruction. As soon as any group or movement convinces itself that it is at war with an irrational, evil enemy, it becomes capable of the most outrageous atrocities. It cannot understand its actions as atrocities because it does not see suffering human beings on the other side but only an enemy, a thing to be exterminated. Once that ethical blindness to the underlying humanity of the people constructed as the enemy takes hold, rational argument cannot get leaders to change course.

That political struggles always involve two sides and that both sides construct a narrative to justify their actions does not mean, as Nietzsche argued, that there is no right and wrong but only clashes of perspective and afterwards the winner defines the truth. There are structures of power and those that benefit from them and those that suffer. Struggles are justified when ruling structures deprive groups of what they manifestly need as human beings: basic life-security and life-resources as well as control over social institutions where history has shown separate institutions to be necessary for basic life-security and access to life-resources. Perhaps we will evolve beyond nation states and distinct societies towards a new cosmopolitan system of political and social organization in the future. Right now, oppressed people and nations require control over their own state in order to protect themselves from the predations of the more powerful states in which they are forced to exist without rights, protection of the law, and, perhaps most importantly, respect as fellow human beings.

Struggling for the basic conditions of survival is to struggle for the most universal of human needs. Any group who enforces a system that structurally deprives other human beings of what they manifestly need because they belong to some demonized identity-group knowingly harms those victims. One can say, with justice, that they behave in an inhuman way. No one is obliged to suffer inhuman treatment meekly and without response. The hard part is to struggle against the inhuman structures and the groups who impose and maintain them without dehumanizing the opponent and conceiving liberation in terms of their liquidation and destruction.

I have been thinking about the ethical foundations of creative and transformative political struggle while working on a new book about the moral economy of peace. I was motivated to undertake the new work first by the political irrationality of the Russia-Ukraine war and convinced to continue by the on-going horror show provoked by the October 7th attacks. As part of this research I have recently been reading the work of B.S. Chimni, a Marxist critic of international law but also a sensitive thinker influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of militant non-violence. Unlike most Marxists, Chimni is interested in the impact that different subjective ethical dispositions have on the effectiveness of struggles for fundamental social change. Reflecting on how he was led through Marx to Gandhi, Chimni wrote that he “wished to understand the meaning and salience of the relationship between self and social transformation. I was seeking a response to the question whether we can bring about human emancipation and protect nature by altering material structures alone or whether it requires an evolved ethical and spiritual self.” (“The Self, Modern Civilization, and International Law,” 1160) His reflections have convinced him that Gandhi’s general political-ethical argument was correct: history teaches that violence can change systems but not create the conditions for all-round human security, need-satisfaction, capacity realization, and life-enjoyment. Leaders who take it as their primary object to destroy the enemy rather than create the conditions for peaceful co-existence and mutually affirmative, egalitarian , creative interaction and relationships. New leaders might succeed in installing themselves in power, but will then prove incapable of ruling in the universal life-interest. History under such leaderships and movements thus ends up being an exchange of one tyranny for another.

Where we find progress in history it is not a function of the violent overthrow of dehumanized enemies but overcoming the structural constraints that existing institutions impose on the need-satisfying and life-serving use of resources. Progress has indeed required political struggle, but those struggles are progressive not because they kill a hated enemy but because they free resources for the sake of more comprehensive need-satisfaction, self-creation, and life-enjoyment. At the level of human interests, genuinely progressive struggles free the people who are the object of struggle too from their own prisons of ethical narrowness, one-sidedness, and hatred. It is easy to forget that Marx too taught that members of the ruling class were functions of the structures and dynamics of capitalism and that they too were alienated from what is most human in themselves. It is also true that he argued that the ruling classes were happy in their alienation, but that happiness is a delusion if it must be purchased at the cost of other people’s lives when an alternative that satisfies everyone’s shared life-interest is available. Socialism was not about liquidating the class enemy or smashing the state– cliches that resound most hollow when they are intoned by academics sitting safely in their campus offices far from the front lines. Socialism was about creating the conditions in which ‘the free development of each was the condition of the free development of all.” That goal cannot be achieved by people motivated primarily by hatred.

Politically, successful construction of a life-affirmative society requires patience. Patience is contrary to the passionate demand for justice. The sufferer wants an end to suffering right now; they want the complete restoration of what has been wrongly seized; they want, as Walter Benjamin insisted, vengeance for all their murdered ancestors. But the demands for absolute justice are contrary to the facts of human mortality and the pace of human historical progress. Horkheimer was correct to remind Benjamin that the dead are dead for ever; they cannot be brought back to life to enjoy the goods of which they were cruelly deprived. If hatred of what the enemy has done is used to fuel struggles oriented by the impossible goal of making good the sacrifice of earlier generations of victims they will succeed only in creating more victims on the other side. Instead they have to be directed against the system that crushed the dreams and extinguished the lives of past victims and proceed by the argument, expressed while looking the enemy squarely in the eyes, that it is never in the real interests of human beings to deprive other human beings of what they need and to protect that structure of oppressive deprivation by exterminatory violence.

The time is not always ripe for that sort of ethical-political argument. One can imagine the dead rejoicing at the final liberation of their community and one can hope that sheer force of will expressed as courage on the battlefield can accelerate historical change. Unfortunately, societies cannot be radically transformed until propitious objective conditions have emerged: the society cannot be ruled in the old way because its internal structures are collapsing, and the oppressed masses cannot tolerate being ruled in the old way. Hamas and Hezbollah have calculated that Israel is now in such a position. Hamas leader Yayah Sinwar claims that Hamas is prepared for a long war of attrition that will eventually break Israel’s will to fight. The evidence suggest, rather, that every militarized reaction from Hamas’s allies in the region increases Israel’s willingness to fight. Moreover, unlike America in Viet Nam and Afghanistan, Israelis are fighting on their home turf. No academic analogies about parallels between the settler colonialism societies built by Europeans in North and South America and Israel are going to change the facts of international law or the long view of Jewish history. Israel’s pre-1967 borders are legally legitimate and Jewish people have historical ties to those lands in ways that European settlers in the “new world” did not.

But the more important point is that everyone is where they are right now, and the task is not sending anyone elsewhere but addressing the legitimate historical grievances of the Palestinian people wrongly and violently dispossessed in 1948. The most powerful tool the Palestinians now have is the political force of world opinion which is turning more and more against Israel’s unjustifiable scorched earth policy in Gaza (and now Southern Lebanon), but the armed wing of the movement keeps giving Israel political room to breath by continuing an armed struggle that they are not in a position to win and exacts far greater costs from innocent Palestinian and Lebanese civilians than it imposes on Israelis. Both sides must somehow stop valorizing their struggle in terms of exacting a maximum price of pain from the enemy and instead find someway to begin reasoning with each other, starting from the premise that, since neither side is going anywhere, some sort of rapprochement is going to be necessary. If the problems can only be solved by negotiation and compromise, and every day that negotiations and compromise are delayed means more people who could have enjoyed a stable peace are killed and thus removed from the list of being capable of enjoying life, then reason dictates that negotiations should begin immediately. But the passions of enmity and mutual hatred fuel the self-righteousness that blocks recognition of the humanity of the other side. In the pressure of that boiling cauldron, abstract philosophical argument is insufficient to lower the temperature.

Still, philosophy is not useless. As Marx said, philosophy is of use where it becomes the servant of history. Here the history of the the supremely patient struggles of Canada’s First Nations might be instructive. They were betrayed by the Europeans they initially welcomed, their lands were stolen by violence and fraud, their cultures were marked for destruction, and yet they have endured. While they have used violence on occasion (the Northwest Rebellion), they have, for the most part, struggled politically and philosophically: they have argued, blockaded, maintained their traditions and languages against overwhelming odds; they have fought in court and in the media, and they have slowly begun to turn the tide. While in the abstract it might have been better for their societies had Europeans never arrived, they understand that the clock cannot be turned back. As Mohawk philosopher and activist Taiaiake Alfred has argued in this regard, there is little to be gained by personalizing historical problems. For that reason he says that he “is not a big fan of guilt as as a political tool. I think what guilt does is it paralyzes people, and it alienates people”(119, All About the Land). Instead, Alfred argues in favour of the descendants of the initial European colonial project to take collective responsibility for the historical fact that the wealth of the current country of Canada was generated through the violent expropriation of First Nations peoples. Collective responsibility has concrete implications: the treaties that were broken must be honoured and lands that were illegally seized must be returned. Treaties are “a fundamental agreement that is solemnized and recognizes the fundamental equality of the two parties.” Treaties create “commitment[s] on the part of the two parties to the agreement. It creates a commitment on the two parties to recognize both the independence of each other and the interdependency of each other on the land. That is what we mean by treaty in the Canadian context.”(118) Restoring Indigenous sovereignty over lands seized by violation of treaties that were purportedly negotiated in good faith does not mean that Canada as it currently exists must disappear; it means that it must be reinvented in a spirit of nation to nation equality and constructive creation for the sake of building a better confederation that is “good for everyone.”(169) Despite the violence Indigenous people have and continue to suffer, they have for the most part eschewed militarized forms of struggle, have survived, and are slowly winning the fight to restore their sovereignty over their traditional lands. One could always argue in the abstract that colonization should never have happened or that it should not have taken 500 years for wrongs to be righted. But history is indifferent to abstract argument. Colonization is a fact and the effects it had on Indigenous lifeways are not easy to undo. But I think that the changing relationship between Canada and the peoples of the First Nations is evidence that violence and mutual hatred can be overcome, if there are real efforts to overcome the structural problems imposed on the historically oppressed groups.

But in the Middle East any sort of constructive dialogue is lacking. Leaders on all sides will shout: the enemy is incapable of reason. To which one must respond: since no one is really talking (by which I mean, really listening) how does one know? Those same leaders will perhaps rejoin: talk is cheap, history proves that real change demands action. Indeed it does, but reason responds that negotiations are actions, concessions and compromises are actions, as are mass protests, strikes, blockades, and boycotts. The most momentous change of the last 50 years, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact happened almost without violence, because the objective conditions were such that the societies could not be maintained. No one who witnessed German youth smashing down the Berlin wall could believe that the Stasi were not gunning them down. And seeing that the Stasi were not gunning them down, those same youth did not pelt them with stones. Instead, East and West Berliners rushed towards each other and embraced and danced.

Well, they were all Germans, one could respond, and that obviously played a role. But it is even more true that we are all humans. When senses are attuned to reality we all know when other people are suffering: anguish sounds the same in every language because it is expressed in shrieks and sobs, not words. We all know when people have been unjustly deprived of what they need, and we all know, in general, what must be done to overcome that injustice. What we have not solved– but it is the most important thing– is how to make the changes that everyone, deep down, knows must be made, before tens or hundreds of thousands of people are killed by people trying to hold back the tides.

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Futurist, software engineer, and the head of the Google Mind project, Ray Kurzweil has been the leading champion of transhumanist technotopianism. Central to this movement is the belief that human biological sentient and cognitive capacities are too constraining to be ultimately satisfying. In order to realize its full value, the capacities that make life meaningful must be developed to their furthest imaginable range and depth. The fullest imaginable range and depth is limited only by the laws of physics (the ultimate entropic decay of the universe). These limits cannot be reached within the biological form of sentience and intelligence. Therefore, human destiny is to first merge with Artificial Intelligence (the subtitle of Kurzweil’s latest book) to form the “Singularity,” after which point human evolution by natural selection will end and the conscious transcendence of all biological limits on human life-capacities begins.

In 2005, Kurzweil predicted that the Singularity would occur around 2045. He maintains that prediction in the current book. The new work does not add anything fundamental to the arguments that he deployed in The Singularity is Near but seems to have been written (perhaps at his publisher’s prompting) by the spectacular success of Chat-GPT-4 in emulating human powers of argumentation and textual analysis. The title The Singularity is Nearer perhaps became too delicious to resist in the glow of warm media embrace of Chat-GPT’s apparent powers.

While the underlying transhumanist arguments are the same as in the 2005 work, Kurzweil’s tone is not quite so rhapsodic. In 2005 he prophesied (there is no other term for it) that the Singularity will evolve towards divine perfection: “Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater eloquence, … greater beauty, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation. … Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God.” (389) if I were to be picky– and I will be– I would point out that evolution (as Daniel Dennett explained in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), evolution does not move toward anything at all. Evolution was a revolutionary idea precisely because it provided mechanistic explanations for dynamics which, in earlier ages, were assumed to require the existence of a divine entity or Idea to steer them. It is a fact that more complex neural systems have evolved, but not because “evolution” (which is, in any case, a process, not a thing) was being guided to it as a goal. Moreover, it is at least debatable whether human beings have become more loving or politically or morally intelligent over time. We have a grasp on the problems of social life but we have as yet proven incapable of solving them.

Kurzweil’s tone is thus more sober in the new work, his time frame limited to the period between now and 2045 when he expects the Singularity to burst forth, and his technical arguments focused for the most part on the development of existing engineering achievements in mind-machine interface (Musk’s Neuralink, for example) into full-scale brain-cloud interconnection. The Singularity is nearer because we understand the physics and mechanics of connecting mind and computers through sensors that translate electrochemical energy to binary code; it will be achieved when we fully merge with Artificial Intelligence. The existing engineering needs only to be scaled up (or, rather, down, since nanobots will be the interface linking the cerebral mass of humanity to the cloud). (72)

As we gradually merge with AI through the 2030’s, Kurzweil foresees, first, an exhilarating increase in the speed of thinking and expansion of the range of information to which we have near-immediate access, and then the emergence of virtual analogues of ourselves which will represent a new form of self-conscious existence. Kurzweil addresses the problem of whether a computational system can really become conscious with a functionalist answer: if the behavior of the computational system is in every respect identical to, or at least indistinguishable from, a biological consciousness, it is conscious. “And if an AI is able to eloquently proclaim its own consciousness, what ethical grounds could we have for insisting that only our own biology can give rise to worthwhile sentience.”(65) He develops this account in dialogue with the philosopher David Chalmer’s idea of zombies: entities that are indistinguishable from living beings but have no inner life, no self-consciousness, at all. (79-81) Whether one finds philosophers’ thought-experiments compelling means of advancing scientific arguments or not, there are problems with Kurzweil’s argument. The biggest issue is that he conflates the problem of the evolution of sentience with the design of neural networks.

Already Chat-GPT can carry on conversations with people, but, if you ask it whether it understands what it is saying, even Kurzweil will admit that it will tell you it does not. A more sophisticated AI might indeed–and some day soon– be able to “proclaim itself” conscious and even provide a cogent explanation of what that means, but it will not thereby have crossed the main ethical threshold from non-life to life. The ethical difference between conscious and self-conscious creatures and AI systems that can verbally assert their consciousness is life. Conscious beings feel themselves alive and strive to create the conditions in which they can feel more alive. My cats cannot argue with me that they are conscious, but they do not have to, because they prove by the (limited repertoire) of their expressions that they are alive. As such they have preferences, desires, and goals of which they are aware (in a cat-like way) and, more importantly, they can undertake self-directed action to bring those goals about. Unless and until an AI crosses the line between non-life and life it will not cross the threshold towards making a claim on ethical consideration.

More technically, Kurzweil’s argument makes two mistakes. The first is to collapse all the powers of consciousness (feelings, emotions, ratiocination, evaluation, etc.) into information processing and the second is to overlook the possibility (as Terence Deacon has argued) that life-activity cannot be explained simply on the basis of what living system are and do, but what they are not and seek out. There is no doubt that brains operate by processing information from the environment, but it does not follow, I would argue, that feelings or logical inferences are nothing more than information. If life-activity were nothing more than information processing then Kurzweil’s hopes for digital apotheosis might be sound. But human beings are not their brains and neural architecture alone: we are integrally unified bio-social agents whose relationships with their world have a qualitative, felt dimension which cannot be cashed out in informational terms alone. We prefer, or desire, or need some states more than others, and we actively shape our environment in response to these felt needs. Deacon has argued in exquisite detail that the emergence of life must be explained by the emergence of “teleosearching” chemical systems which act so as to bring about a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. (See his Incomplete Nature and my review, here). In simpler terms, the behaviour of these systems cannot be understood without reference to what they are not, but strive (at first purely unconsciously, via basic physical principles) to bring about. Living systems are conscious of what they need, and, moreover, posit goals which are not physical or chemical but moral and political. But there are no goals properly speaking until there is life and intentionality. No matter how complex or fast an information processing system is, it is not alive until it seeks to maintain itself.

Living things are composed of non-living elements, so it is not impossible or inconceivable that new forms of artificial life might evolve. The crucial question will be not whether such an entity can generate cogent explanations of what it is, but whether it can become conscious of being the sort of entity it is and strive to maintain itself, At present, no matter how impressive Chat-GPT’s responses to prompts are, it cannot do anything until it is prompted. My cat, indeed, an amoeba or paramecium, can act on its own directions.

These criticisms are also relevant to the speculative engineering proposal that is central to his project for practical immortality: the “uploading” of consciousness to a digital platform. “Freeing” consciousness from biological limitations is essential to the emergence of the post-Singularity superintelligence. Kurzweil assumes (as he also assumed in the 2005 book) that consciousness is some sort of pattern which could be precisely modeled and emulated in an artificial neural network. Perhaps. But I think that it is more likely that consciousness is not a fixed pattern that could be captured in some sort of snap shot and then re-printed, so to speak, in a neural network. I think that it is much more likely that consciousness is a dynamic process that depends upon the the coordinated functioning of the whole of the body’s organic systems in integral connection with the natural and social environment. If that is the case then rather than the first step towards the Singularity Chat-GPT and its like might be the last step in the development of AI.

Kurzweil does not avoid criticisms but his responses tend to sidestep the most difficult issues. Thus, he does not seriously inquire into the bio-chemical dynamics of life or consciousness but assumes that they are reducible to information processing. Since computers are information processors par excellence, they will eventually figure out how to transpose consciousness from biological to a digital platform. The same sort of arguing around problems characterizes Kurzweil’s treatment of the economic dimension of technological development. Kurzweil is one of the few transhumanists to understand that scientific and technological development has social and economic dimensions. For Kurzweil, those economic dimensions involve a secure intellectual property rights regime on the one hand and an emergent quasi-evolutionary dynamic that he calls the “law of accelerating returns” on the other. “The law of accelerating returns describes a phenomenon wherein certain kinds of technologies create feedback loops that accelerate innovation. Broadly, these are technologies that give us greater mastery over information.”(112) Each increase in information processing capacity catalyses a new round of innovation that increases our processing power even further, generating an exponential growth dynamic which is theoretically without limit.

Theoretically, yes, but Kurzweil forgets that statistics express historical trends. A historical trend may continue into the future, but then again it might not. It is one thing to plot a curve on a graph that extends from the present to the future, it is another thing for the future to play out like that. There is no causal relationship between the mathematical model of the future and what will in fact happen. As I noted above, the law of accelerating returns is an economic principle because its operation depends upon social conditions that encourage investment. Protectionism, weak intellectual property rights, and high taxes could all slow investment and therefore the innovations that depend upon it. Even if we assume propitious investment conditions, mainstream economists have wondered for some time about why digital technologies have not increased productivity or catalyzed growth in the real economy. Kurzweil’s answer is that economists are looking in the wrong place, productivity tables, when they should be looking at price.(213) Kurzweil argues that the major economic impact of computing technologies lies in the constant reduction of the price of computation per unit. The increase here is truly mind-boggling: computer power that would have cost millions of dollars in the 1950s and been accessible only to governments or major corporations is now available to children for pennies. (see the Appendix, 293-312).

Be that as it may, Kurzweil does not address the problem of productivity but changes the subject. It may be true that consumer purchasing power has gone up exponentially, but productivity is a measure of output relative to input (especially labour time) and that has not gone up nearly as much as mainstream economists would expect. Robert Solow quipped in response to this puzzle: “we see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.” The practical implications of this debate are significant for Kurzweil’s project: if innovation is linked to investment and investment to profitability in the the real economy, growth might not be self-amplifying as he believes. Good old fashioned economic stagnation (such as the globe has been experiencing) can limit technological development. And even if any slow down proved temporary, there are serious scientific questions to be raised about Kurzweil’s speculative projections of what is technologically possible.

But let us assume the law of accelerating returns operates as Kurzweil argues and engineering problems like nanobots and mind uploading are solved and the Singularity does occur in 2045. Then the question becomes a philosophical one: should we let the new evolutionary course play out, or switch it off and go back to our slow-witted biological lives. In Embodiment and the Meaning of Life I argued that we should, precisely because the humanist values that Kurzweil believes that he is serving depend upon– if I am correct– the frames of finitude (aging, disease, the possibility of failure, and death) within which we struggle and work. Kurzweil treats struggle and work like he treats aging and death, as problems to be solved. But we are embodied beings and embodied beings must deal with a world and other people outside of themselves. Our successes are valuable not only because they express the achievement of a goal, they are valuable because they could have not worked out. No one is celebrated for climbing an imaginary mountain; imaginary friends cease to satisfy our emotional needs once we are no longer toddlers. Isn’t virtual reality just another word for imaginary?

Kurzweil and other transhumanists would argue vociferously that it is not. A mature cyberspace would be indistinguishable from material reality except that we– or the Superintelligence that supplants us– could imagine into being anything that is logically possible. But whatever such a creature might be it will not be a human being: human beings are individuals. Our identity is shaped by our differences; friendships and other forms of mutualistic relationship are valuable because they connect us to something we are not. Embodied humanism of the sort that I have defended works within these limitations to increase the value of human life by overcoming obstacles and socially created roadblocks to all round need-satisfaction and the unfolding of our living capabilities.

But old fashioned humanism and political struggle is too slow. Once we merge with AI we can download problems-solving to it and free ourselves to think “millions of time faster.” (265)

About what?

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