One of the things that I missed most when I was confined to quarters and teaching from home during the pandemic were chance encounters with colleagues. One of the best things about working as an academic are the brilliant people from other disciplines with whom one works. What other job let’s you talk to a chemist on one pathway, an artist around the corner, and a historian in the quad? The university concentrates the historical and systematic development of the human intellect in a few city blocks.

Learning is not confined to classrooms on campus: the entire space is an opportunity for pedagogical path-crossings. A conversation with a student as we walk together after class is just as philosophically important as what I said during the lecture. The university, indoors and out, is a learning commons.

Learning happens in lectures, seminars, labs, and chance encounters, but it also occurs at demonstrations and protests. The university has long been a space for political education, too. There have been dozens of rallies during my time at Windsor, including quite loud demonstrations earlier this year during the early days of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Those demonstrations included the “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” chant that has become notorious, but I do not recall anyone lodging a formal complaint with the administration or the media even bothering to cover the campus marches.

But the student encampment movement was not so ephemeral as a march and attracted mainstream and social media attention across North America. Unlike other universities, Windsor’s administration decided to negotiate in good faith with the small band of student occupiers and recently reached an agreement to end the occupation. The language of the agreement is mostly promissory and platitudinous, but it does contain commitments to expand its Scholars at Risk program to Palestinian colleagues and students, to review the University’s investment policy, and to ensure that its academic relationships conform to its own existing ethical guidelines.

The condemnation was as swift as it was predictable. Jewish students, the B’nai Brith, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and local Jewish leaders have claimed that the University gave in to intimidation, an illegal occupation, indulged in one-sided and unfounded condemnation of Israel, and capitulated to a distorted understanding of that history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Critics are free to criticize and the University will have to answer for its commitments, but I had not heard any complaints until the agreement was signed that the encampment was viewed as intimidating to Jewish students or anyone else. I do not know what law the protestors were violating. I would argue that the encampment was a form of political argument and therefore a legitimate action if we view– as we should– the whole campus as a learning commons. Even if one does not adopt that view and argues, like other universities have, that the campus is private property, the law of trespass only applies if the property owner files a complaint. It is a dubious application of the law to claim that the administration is like a private property owner vis-a-vis campus space, but in Windsor’s case the administration never made that move, so the encampment violated no law.

Moreover, the existence of the encampment in no way impeded critics from organizing counter-protests, criticizing the protestor’s claims, or even setting up their own encampments. Classes continued as usual, people came and went to their offices and the library, no buildings were occupied, campus life continued without interruption. The students behaved as students should behave: engaged, putting their learning to work in the “real world” that everyone loves to say university students ignore, trying to make a difference by demanding an end to a horrific conflict.

The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protests against the actions that “shocked the conscience of mankind” during the Second World War. The suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust was the centrepiece of a six year slaughter that killed 60 million people. The agreement that the University signed with the students includes a commitment to add a clause to their ethical investment policy that ensures that companies whose stock the University buys are not human rights violators. Is it contrary to the interests of the Jewish community, here, in Israel, or anywhere, to demand that corporations comply with human rights? The University also agreed not to enter into any partnerships with Israeli universities, unless the partnership was agreed to by the Senate. All major inter-university agreements have always been voted on at Senate, so there is really no departure from past practice here. Moreover, Senate has turned down partnerships before– most recently, with an Egyptian school, about 10 years ago, because there were concerns about the human rights situation and academic freedom. Viewed in light of the historical practice of the University, Israel is not being singled out. Finally, the agreement notes that individual academics remain free (as they must) to work with Israeli colleagues.

People who are committed to peaceful resolution of conflicts should celebrate the peaceful resolution of this conflict. Other universities have disgraced themselves by letting the police loose against peaceful protestors. The Windsor encampment was far less militant than the anti-Netanyahu protests organized by the families of hostages in Israel have been. Opposition to the policies of a particular government is not a racist attack on a whole people; defending the internationally recognized rights of Palestinians to national self-determination– the same right Jewish people acted on in 1948 to establish Israel– is not to support Hamas’s murderous methods. Political arguments are always polarizing. One cannot win an argument by deciding that the other side’s position is illegitimate from the get go. Educators must listen and respond to the reasons and evidence presented. The agreement that the University reached is in keeping with the vocation of members of an institution of “higher education.”

Instead of condemning the University and trying to mobilize the power of the federal and provincial governments to undermine it (would that not be a gross violation of the academic freedom critics claim to be upholding?) critics should demonstrate, carefully, and with evidence, not with sweeping dismissal, exactly what institutional principles the university has violated in the agreement. If there has been actual, illegal intimidation, there is a legal system to deal with such complaints. But mere feelings of discomfort cannot be grounds to silence campus movements. If discomfort were grounds for silencing, all universities would have to close, since where there is learning there is growth and where there is growth there are growing pains.

Sadly, this agreement will not solve the real problem, the war in Gaza. However, it should serve as a source of minor inspiration that argument and negotiation can produce agreements. The key is to talk, not fight.

When asked by a British journalist what he thought about Western Civilization, Gandhi responded “I think it would be a good idea.” Might we not say something analogous about the rule of law? It would be a good idea if societies really were governed by a set of universally agreed to, impersonal rules that defined a framework that “kept fair play” (William Blake, “Blindman’s Bluff”).

But that is just an idea: in reality law does not “keep fair play” but is a partisan tool to advance the interests of the groups with the power to write and enforce it. Ruling classes change as social systems change, different factions of the same ruling class assume power, through democratic or violent means, but the one constant, as Glaucon, developing Thrasymachus’ cynical conception of justice in The Republic, tells Socrates, is that justice (law) is just “the right of the stronger” dressed up in universal language.

The recent decision of the US Supreme Court that Presidents enjoy absolute legal immunity for actions undertaken as part of the official duties of the office seems to confirm the cynical view. Liberals have responded that the decision in effect makes the President an absolute monarch. The concern expressed by the dissent of the liberal judges and the commentocracy is understandable, but I think a better analogy would be with the Pope. Absolute monarchy was an attempt to identify the state with the body of the monarch (“L’etat, c’est moi,” said Louis XIV ). But the Supreme Court did not decide that Presidents have personal immunity for any act whatsoever, but only those undertaken as part of their official duties. The Pope is infallible in matters of theological dispute, but not absolutely infallible. The question that the decision poses is thus: what is the scope of the official duties of the President?

That is the problem posed in a rhetorically arresting way by Sonya Sotomayor’s argument that the decision opens the door for Presidents to order the assassination of their opponents by the military in their role as commander in chief of the armed forces. I am assuming that she intended the argument as a reductio ad absurdum to expose the problem that the scope of “official duties” is unclear. The President really is the commander in chief of the US armed forces, and thus, in principle, could issue commands which, while illegal in other respects, fall within the scope of official duties. I will leave it to experts in US constitutional law to parse the details of the decision. My interest lies in assessing its implications of for the interpretation of the value of the idea of the rule of law.

The nakedly partisan division in the current US supreme court supports the Marxist argument that behind the appearance of legal neutrality lies the reality of class power. Almost every decision that this court has made has split along conservative-liberal lines. But that division is only the surface expression of a deeper structural problem. Liberals and conservatives in the US and elsewhere represent two factions of the same ruling class: no matter which one exercises political power, they are both representatives of the class that owns and controls the resources and wealth that everyone needs to access in order to survive and live full, meaningful, valued and valuable lives. Law is thus– as Glaucon warned– class interest expressed in abstractly universal form.

Fair enough. It would be difficult to dispute that the ultimate power protected by law is private property. Think back a few summers to the Wet’suwet’en blockade against the passage of the Transmountain pipeline through their territory. Despite the fact that the Canadian Constitution recognizes the validity of Indigenous law, when push came to shove, and the exercise of Indigenous law was going to impede a project deemed of paramount economic significance, the courts sided with the Liberal government and helped force the pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory. But it was not “the law” that enforced itself, but the RCMP armed with military grade weapons. One could multiply examples but the point should be clear: historically, the idea of the rule of law was a progressive check against the ambitions of absolute monarchs, but in reality it only expressed in abstractly universal form the partial, private interest of the rising bourgeoisie.

As with so much of Marxism, one must grant that its criticisms expose real contradictions in capitalist society. The problem arises when one then asks: but what will you put in its place? Anarchists argue that human beings are capable of spontaneous self-organization and do not require the state form and its legal structures to govern their affairs. Marxists have been more ambivalent. Marx himself was brutal in his criticisms of Bakunin, but also taught that, under a fully developed capitalist society, that the state would “wither away.” Does that mean that law would wither away too? Marxists have been divided. In the early days of the Soviet Union the majority argued that bourgeois law would give way to proletarian law. Evgeny Pashukanis, the most important Soviet legal theorist, disagreed. He argued that law was by its nature capitalist and that it would eventually disappear once communism matured. There would be pragmatic regulations (like traffic conventions that enforce driving on the right or left side of the road) but no principles that claim the right to govern human affairs because they are abstractly rational and in everyone’s interests.

History was not kind to Pashukanis’ positive argument. Communism did not mature in the Soviet Union but rapidly degenerated into a totalitarian state. The abject failure to build a democratic socialist society has served liberal defences of the rule of law as the rule of abstract principles over private and partial interests well ever since. As E.P. Thompson noted wryly, the experience of Stalinist totalitarianism ought to make even the most committed Marxist wary of “cutting down the hedgerows” (Hobbes’ metaphor for the function of law) on the naive assumption that after the revolution we will all be equal as comrades. Historically speaking– and historical materialists should only ever speak historically– some animals have made themselves more equal than others.

True true. But but ….

it is clear that the actual function of law is to enforce the rule of capital over human life. We thus seem to be caught between two abstractions: the rule of law as the rule of abstractly rational principle over human partiality to their own case, a bulwark against totalitarianism and the guarantor of civic equality, and a promise of a future classless society in which laws will no longer be necessary because social institutions explicitly serve everyone’s material interests, ensure need-satisfaction, enable all-round capacity development, and provide fora for the democratic resolution of disputes. Were such a society to be constructed then of course we would no longer have to worry about the rule of law. But an idea for a perfect society is not a program to create one. The idea of fully developed communism undermines the idea of the rule of law by abstracting from the social conditions that make law necessary. But Marxism is not supposed to be abstract criticism but, as the young Marx said, practical criticism, criticism which immediately translates itself into practice.

Practically speaking, there are no revolutionary movements of any consequence. So the question is: what does one do right now: abstractly condemn the rule of law as a bourgeois subterfuge? Or criticise the reality of the exercise of law on the basis of a defence of the value of the idea of the rule of law and work to realise that idea as far as possible in a given moment, and then work to push it further the next?

If one rejects the value of the idea of the rule of law it seems to me that one cuts oneself off from being a participant in the actual political arguments of the day. It cannot be a matter of political indifference to democrats of any persuasion, liberal or socialist, whether officers of the government of a society of legal equals are granted immunity from the very laws they are supposed to serve. Whatever the constitutional realities of the United States, the idea of the rule of law surely counts against any immunity of government officers for the acts they commit in office. Political office in a liberal-capitalist society is not supposed to be a sinecure but a position conferred by consent of the governed. The historically progressive value of the rule of law was that it undermined the claims to natural superiority that feudal aristocracies and monarchs claimed. Henceforth the law, not the body of the monarch, would rule. Power could be criticised and controlled by objective standards that frame the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate behavior. Legal equals can look each other in the eye; no one is owed deferential treatment.

In this vision the law is not oppressive but the objective form that the human capacity for self-determination takes. To be autonomous is to be capable, literally, of giving oneself (auto) the law (nomos) that one willingly obeys. In the liberal tradition law is therefore freedom preserving– a principle that socialists should themselves preserve. The problem with the liberal rule of law is that it is not yet the law that rules, but ultimately the class interests of the owners and controllers of capital. But few could be so historically naive as to trust that a post-revolutionary society could rely on the commitments of its leaders to recognise and respect boundaries to their power. The idea of the rule of law cannot on its own constrain power, but the fact that it imposes regulatory principles whose validity does not depend upon their being recognized by governments of the day was a vital step towards democratic society.

The Conservative justices may not have transformed Donald Trump into Louis the XIV, but it is impossible to read their decision as anything but a step backward away from democracy and towards autocracy. But if we criticise the judgment because it re-introduces an aristocratic distinction between those subject to the law and those superior to it, it must be on the basis of accepting the value of the idea of the rule of law itself. How far the affairs of human beings can be determined by spontaneous deliberations is an open question. But as we work towards a more democratic future we must not trust anyone’s good political intentions. Anyone- business person or politician, state functionary or revolutionary– who argues that the law is superfluous because they can be trusted to govern themselves– absolutely should not be trusted.

I was not surprised, exactly, when a communique from the University of Windsor’s PR department arrived in my inbox informing the ‘community” that the administration had decided– without prior, public discussion or deliberation– that University Players (the student theatre group associated with the School of Dramatic Art) was closing and the EPICentre (a small business incubator) will “be reimagined to integrate and enhance our innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.” The Dean of my faculty telegraphed that cuts were coming, but she phrased it somewhat more eloquently than the biz-speak spoken by the Office of Public Affairs and Communication [emphasis added]. Communication involves a back and forth, an exchange of ideas and arguments that moves dialogue partners towards mutual understanding and agreement. There was no communication, no debate, no opportunity for the units and the staff affected by the decision (10 staff positions will be lost), to make their case and propose alternatives. Instead, a communique was issued, informing everyone of this latest fait accompli.

The more that faculty unions and their provincial and national organizations insist on collegial self-governance, the more university administrations become autocratic. At Windsor, the Bookstore has been privatised, unionised housekeeping and food services staff gradually being phased out in favour of private sector contractors, and our off-campus access to some campus computing services made contingent upon allowing the university to install corporate spyware on our home computers, all without even the pretext of democratic debate.

The tactic of making decisions behind closed doors has a certain tactical brilliance. Reversing decisions is much more difficult than pro-active organization to prevent a bad decision from being taken. One cannot oppose that which one does not know is coming. Once the decision has been made, reactive opposition is difficult to build. A certain number of people who could potentially be enlisted in a constructive project centred around finding creative alternatives to cuts will conclude that the die has been cast and nothing can be done to change the new reality. That already limits the pool from which an opposition could be recruited. A certain number of others will support the changes, and another subset– always the largest– will not care. Only a minority of a minority will publicly oppose the moves but– being on the back foot right from the beginning– anything that they might organize will be small and ineffective.

This weakness is a function of the very low level of political engagement on Canadian campuses. I read colleagues for whom I have immense respect (having worked with them more closely in an earlier era where I was more actively involved in political struggle) and cannot understand why they think that the student encampments against the Gaza War portend the re-birth of a vital student movement to rival the 1960’s youth rebellion. While the students are right to mobilise and the encampments should be defended on grounds of academic freedom, the actual numbers of students involved are vanishingly small. In Windsor, the numbers actively camped out in the quad number in the dozens, out of a student population of about 16 000. Even the biggest encampments have attracted no more than a couple of hundred protestors. The only resemblance to the 1960’s is a revolutionary rhetoric vastly at odds with the students’ power to effectively counter the political economic structures of contemporary capitalism.

Calls to divest from arms industries are all well and good, but the university has been integrated with the capitalist economy since the birth of its modern form in mid-nineteenth century Germany. Demands for more Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion that are banal components of every campus movement just echo the lingua franca of corporate leadership. The bosses are as committed to “diversity” as they are to the doublespeak that portrays cuts that weakening of the academic mission of the university as “ensuring continuity and innovating new approaches to enrich the student experience and strengthen community partnerships.” If Laurentian University could be gutted by a bankruptcy court with virtually no provincial mobilisation in support of our Sudbury colleagues, one can be certain that this round of cuts– and they will not be the last– will be implemented with no more resistance than tree leaves pose to a howling thunderstorm wind. That is not the fault of individuals grown indifferent and inured to cuts; individual indifference is a function of the low level of political mobilisation on campuses and in the wider society, which is in turn a function of decades of mostly defeat for the labour movement and other progressive forces. Corrosive and backward identity politics dominates the left, making the construction of the solidarity that would be required to rebuild effective political movements more difficult.

But there is another side to the particular issue of budget cuts that needs to be addressed. The political economic dimension of the problem is well-understood. The administration pointed to the need to solve a 5.6 million dollar budget deficit as the cause of the elimination of University Players and the EPICentre. They argued, correctly, that provincial funding policies are the root cause of that deficit. However, that is also a feint to distract attention from matters that they do control: how they allocate revenues. Across the last two administrations those priorities have been new building construction, expanding the size of the administration and support bureaucracy, and paying outside service providers. My own Faculty, (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) has been under a virtual hiring freeze for years because the budget model that the university has adopted puts FAHSS in a structural deficit impossible to cut our way out from under. This model makes absurd assumptions (for example, it ‘charges’ the faculty 10 000 dollars per office, as if we were renting space from a commercial landlord) and forces faculties and departments to compete for resources. While FAHSS departments in particular have been constrained by lack of hiring, the administration has continued to hire more administrators and ship money out the door by contracting out campus services. Only a few weeks ago, I received another email informing me that the university was spending something like 9 million dollars on new photocopiers and their accompanying software suite.

Photocopiers! Nine million dollars! What happened to the paperless office?

I hope whomever occupies the Philosophy Department’s offices after we are amalgamated with another department (as I fear is almost inevitable in the near future) enjoys it. Having lost 5 colleagues to retirements, resignations, and death over the past few years my department seems destined, in a best case scenario, to be forced into some sort federal arrangement with a larger unit.

Is this now the purpose of the university in the twenty-first century, to provide a home for photocopiers but not philosophers? Perhaps. But if philosophers want to prevail, we must ask ourselves some hard questions which– despite our vocation as gadflies– we are often loath to ask.

That question, the other side of the problem of cuts that philosophers and humanists are less inclined to want to consider is: if we are so important, why do our numbers continue to decline relative to the sciences and professional schools? Philosophers (and other humanists) know, or think they know, why philosophy and the humanities are important. But do students know or care? The numbers suggest that more and more that they do not.

The typical explanation of the decline of humanities and arts enrollments focuses on parents’ and students’ perceptions about post-graduation job prospects and the typical solution involves pointing out that statistics do not support the prevailing pessimistic assumption. But that solution has not arrested the decline. Could there not be, in addition to these practical concerns, a deeper crisis affecting humanities education, one that forces us to re-think what the purpose of a university in 2024 ought to be?

Academic departments are organized by academics who have devoted their working life to their chosen field of inquiry. Humanists love texts, we love to read, we love to write, argue, and reflect; we have organized our departments to impart that love of texts to new generations of students, and we tend to focus our attention on those who remind us of younger versions of ourselves, whom we nurture by mentoring them through their undergraduate degree and then sending them off– like proud parents– to graduate study elsewhere, hopefully to see them once again on the conference circuit as a newly minted PhDs. The problem is obvious: the vast majority of students will not become PhDs, not because they lack the intellectual chops, but because they are not interested in the life of the mind.

As I noted above, today’s university took on its contemporary structure in the 19th century, but its division into faculties and departments is literally medieval. Why do academics– especially academics who fancy themselves radical social critics– rise in defence of a 1000 year-old institutional structure? Relative to what pressing social problem: war, environmental crisis, poverty, the re-birth of the far-right– is growing the faculty complement of an academic department important? If–as all of us are quick to maintain– we play some sort of vital role in helping people understand those problems- what is it about any particular discipline that cultivates that understanding? What if what helps people understand problems is not anything specific about the historical content of different disciplines, but practices of thinking that would be better cultivated outside of existing departmental structures?

When we look out at half empty classrooms four weeks into the year we tend to blame students. They are lazy, distracted, immature. But we rarely ask if there is a problem with the way in which our programs and classes are organized. Maybe sitting in a classroom listening to someone talk at them from the front of the room about an historical era or a set of disembodied theories no longer speaks to them in the world that they inhabit, relative to the problems that they face.

The problems that the world faces are practical, but they cannot be solved unless they are understood in their complete reality. The university has always been a contradictory institution, devoted, on the one hand, to the production of people who will occupy positions of authority, but, on the other hand, to educating those same people. Thus, the university is part of the process by which societies reproduce themselves but also, in so far as it must educate, also a space in which critical perspectives on social institutions and value systems necessarily emerge. Even the medieval university in which faculty members always ran the risk of being charged with heresy, allowed a wider latitude than is sometimes thought for debate. Education demands a turning of the mind against the givenness of reality; a questioning attitude vis-a-vis the world as it present itself. Education begins when one asks how the world came to be the way the world is.

No discipline can answer this question on its own and recognizing that fact is perhaps the starting point for much needed thinking about how the educational purpose of the university can guide what I think is an increasingly urgent need to reform its structure and pedagogy. Let us reflect on that most basic question for a moment: how did the world come to be the way it is? What discipline does not make a contribution to the answer to that question? Cosmologists, chemists, evolutionary biologists explain how the universe has developed from a superhot plasma after the Big Bang to human societies in which intelligent people continue to work on refining those explanations. But people do not only work out empirical explanations, they also wonder. And so philosophers, theologians, and artists, those who, in different ways focus on the meaning of life in properly human experience, have as central a role to play in answering the question of how the world became the world that it is, because it has not simply evolved according to natural laws, it has been shaped by human wonder and creative activity. But it has not simply been shaped by wonder and activity: the existence of human beings presupposes their ability to satisfy their life-needs. People satisfy those needs through different forms of social organization. Hence historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists all have something essential to say about how societies have been organized to satisfy those needs, but so too health care professionals and psychologists about the scope and content of those needs. Moreover, since any historical inquiry into the institutions of any society will reveal inequalities in access to the resources, critical perspectives that look into the ways in which inequalities have been justified and how people have organized to overcome them are required.

The throughline connecting this way of seeing disciplinary diversity is the contribution each makes to understanding human society as it is at present. Each of those disciplines has its own history and everyone will situate themselves differently within that discipline, but that is of lesser importance when it comes to organizing the teaching mission of the university. What matters for the student– the person who is becoming educated (as opposed to becoming a philosopher, a psychologist, etc.,) — is what the way of thinking that distinguishes these different approaches contributes to the answer to the question as a whole. Instead of organizing education under the implicit assumption that its function is to produce philosophers, psychologists etc., the guiding principle might become the education of people capable of understanding, in a unified way, the different perspectives necessary to comprehend the full scope of pressing problems. Classes could then be organized around problems, not disciplinary histories, and taught by teams organizing students into active working groups, not individuals talking at them from the front of a classroom.

Let me take just one example: climate change. In order to understand climate change one must understand atmospheric chemistry, mathematical modelling, and probabilistic reasoning. But one must also understand the origins of the crisis, which means that one must understand economics. In order to understand economics, own must understand the forces that operate in a capitalist society, but also the value system that legitimates those forces. One must be able to trace the cumulative effects of those economic forces over time, and thus also the political institutions and events that have allowed those forces to grow (and get them under control). That is a very rough sketch, but one can see how it might inform course design. Students would work with atmospheric chemists, mathematicians, historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers to grasp the different dimensions of the problem. The focus would be on developing the cognitive and practical skills. Students and professors alike would have to learn to work collaboratively in teams and master and apply forms of thinking, not assimilate abstract discipline-specific content, in order to succeed. Professors would continue to pursue their own interests as researchers, but as educators they would have to invent new ways of working together to teach what their discipline can contribute to the synthetic understanding of the complex problems that life in 2024 poses.

This sketch is far from a plan and any attempt to institutionalise this approach would face significant hurdles. Inertial forces are very powerful in institutions, and the daunting problems of how workload would be calculated, how many teams a professors would expect to be part of , etc., are probably sufficient to prevent concrete steps towards making these sorts of changes being taken– until there is a system-wide crisis. At least in the humanities, I fear that the system-wide crisis is at the door. Will we solve it by being bold and creative or continue to lament program closures after the fact?

William Anders died on June 7th. On Christmas Eve, 1968 he was orbiting the moon as part of the Apollo 8 mission when he became the first human being to see the Earth rise. He snapped the photo that soon became an iconic symbol for the peace and environmental movements of the the unity and fragility of the only planet that we know of that can support life on its own. The pilot of the mission, James Lovell, stated with profound simplicity: “The vast loneliness is awe inspiring.” The half earth hangs in an empty field of perfect blackness. If we traveled along any vector from our planet out into that vast loneliness, it is probable that we would not encounter another living thing, even if we traveled forever.

Decades later an even more poetically evocative photo was taken by the Cassini spacecraft as it was orbiting Saturn. Looking back from 550 million miles away it captured earth, a “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan was moved to say. The picture enabled us to see ourselves as we typically see the other stars and planets: static, motionless, without structure or topography, just there.

Neither photo captured the face of God, just our home as it really is. A century before such pictures became possible, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that progress begins when we are confronted by and understand our real conditions of life. Here are the real conditions of life: We live on a spinning ball of iron that generates a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic radiation. A just-right mix of atmospheric gases allows plant and animal life to flourish. Liquid water was available as a solvent in which life evolved and provides to this day the means of hydration that complex life-forms require.

A few years ago, my partner bought me a telescope for my birthday. It immediately rekindled my childhood love of astronomy. I can still feel the overwhelming excitement of seeing the rings of Saturn– the same rings from which Cassini would look back almost a half century later– through the eye piece of my uncle Joe’s telescope. I compiled vast notebooks of astronomical terms and facts, but I realise now that it was not the facts that compelled my interest, not even the marvels that I saw, but an idea. I would never have been able to express it when I was 8 or 9 years old, but I understand now, thinking back, that what seized me on those cold nights in the little Northern Ontario mining town where I grew up was the idea that human existence is a paradox: we are, at the same time, and for the same reason, utterly insignificant and infinitely valuable and precious. We are alone in an entropic system of energy winding itself back to nothing. At some point in the future will we cease to exist and all records of our ever having existed will have been erased. So every value in the universe depends upon our existing right now. If there is such a thing as sin it is not violating the laws of the god that does not exist, it is failure to cherish every second of our lives that do.

Out of all the billions or trillions of solar systems, ours seems to be the only one in which life arose and lasted long enough to discover what it really is: a mathematical improbability so extreme that it forces even highly educated people to imagine that there must be some divine cause. But to fully feel the terrifying beauty of human existence we must resist the temptation to posit external causes. I don’t think that I ever, even as a kid going to Catholic school, seriously believed in God. My atheism has never been dogmatic but rather aesthetic: the absurd contingency of human life makes it ours alone, to fashion into a beautiful, open-ended creation, if only we make the right collective decisions.

But rather than create the social conditions for universal cooperation, we have spent millennia inventing distinctions that have no ultimate value but which function as justifications for depriving some groups of what they need and killing them if they are too insistent on resisting that deprivation. Looking back from Saturn we do not see any borders, nations, or people. We do not see any distinctions between “mine and not-yours.” We need to look at things from up high and far out in order to understand the proper value of those social distinctions that we create. As we spread out from our original home in the rift valley of East Africa our ancestors found themselves living in different material conditions. With the same brains and hands they worked to survive, and in the process developed different tools, different languages, different traditions, different forms of art and expression, different spiritual systems and mythologies, different types of architecture, structures of rule, and different philosophical explanations of what this all means and why it matters. We should celebrate the Tower of Babel which is the Earth.

But for different reasons in different historical epochs some groups want to silence the magnificent cacophony and make everyone speak the same language and sing the same song. But all cultures are variations on a theme of creative activity under survival pressure. One can do philosophy in any language. Science and philosophy are cross cultural and transhistorical efforts to understand the basic forces that shape our universe. Everyone has contributed in different ways. It is absurd to call natural science and philosophy “Western” or “Eastern” or whatever other qualifying adjective one wants to impose. There is no master race or one chosen people; no one is special, no way of life the only way. We have all been chosen– and not only us, but the millions of other life forms with whom we share the planet have been chosen too.

When we look at ourselves from space we can see that the only meaningful whole is the earth. The stillness and silence of the black ether in which our world orbits the sun should inspire stillness in ourselves: stop trying to force the future, stop lamenting the past, just stare into the sky, into the hopeful bright blue or the meditative dark of night, and be glad that you are here. And not only be glad that you are here, but be glad that you are here with plants and animals and others, all of us different, but all earth creatures who need to eat and breath and drink and be cared for and enjoy their brief moment under the sun and stars.

Years ago, I saw Laurie Anderson perform in Ann Arbor. She created a character who spoke in an unsettling, metallic, synthesised male voice. I cannot remember the main thrust of that part of the show, but I have never forgotten one thing that the persona said: “I love the stars, because we cannot harm them.” The phrase testifies to the magnificent untouchability of the stars, but also the cruel violence of human history: anything we can get our hands on, we can destroy.

For the past two years a plurality of my posts have focused on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. When I started this site thirteen years ago I did not see it primarily as a vehicle for commentary on international relations but as a free space in which I could develop my philosophical work more creatively and accessibly than in academic publications. I continue to try to do that, but I also find myself pulled by some inner necessity to shed what little light I can on the defining conflicts of our age. I wish I could let my thoughts meander freely, but since there is no other world to go to, we have to learn to care for this one, and those of us with the privilege to be able to think for a living have a duty to turn our thoughts to the hot zones where life is being needlessly destroyed. No thinker should elevate their thoughts so high above the bloody realities that they can no longer see the people who suffer within them. They should think as clearly as they can about the causes of those problems.

It has been along time since I was a part of any political movement and it will be an eternity before I ever join one again. My philosophical side has always won out over my political sympathies. As a philosopher, I value the independence of my own mind above everything else. I try to learn from everyone I read or listen to and every sound and sight that my senses take in, but I refuse to toe anyone’s line and have become allergic as I get older to the mindless chanting of simplifying slogans. If problems were simple, they would have been solved by now. Nothing that I write here is the final word; everything that I post is an honest thinking through and an invitation to you to think those same things through in your own way.

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As with previous years I have collected last year’s posts and published them here. I hope that you will continue to read and think along with me as year fourteen of the site begins.

Alex Callinicos is one of the most important Marxist philosophers and social critics of his age. I have long felt that he does not get enough attention in North America. While the shelves of academic departments groan under graduate theses devoted to prolix obscurantists like Zizek, Badiou, and Hardt and Negri, who have for some reason claimed the mantle of leading radical philosophers, Callinicos’s much more incisive and concretely radical historical materialist analyses of the dynamics of the contemporary world is ignored. He is much better known in England where he lives and works, but he should be a central part of the conversation in North America. He perhaps suffers from the academic vice of writing too clearly and worrying about such trivial matters as empirical-historical evidence. Callinicos is more concerned with the substance of social analysis than with pseudo-profundity and anachronistic system-building that shed little concrete light on the social and political-economic dynamics of contemporary capitalism.

Thus, it was with some disappointment that I worked through the arguments of his most recent (2023) book, The New Age of Catastrophe. It had a perfunctory air to it, almost like he wrote it because an editor at Polity Press asked him to write it and not because he had something novel to contribute to solving the problems the book examines. Perhaps I am wrong, but the whole exercise struck me as the work of a writer going through the motions, rehearsing/re-hashing the “socialism or barbarism” threat. By the end of the book I was wondering whether or not its formulaic mantra that only revolutionary socialism can solve the fundamental conflicts and challenges of our age speaks more deeply to the exhaustion of revolutionary Marxist politics. I have been thinking along those lines for a few years, and Callinicos’ book did little to dissuade me from my worries. Rather than engage with alternative perspectives on the multi-dimensional crises the globe faces and demonstrate, patiently and in detail, why the Marxist approach is superior, Callinicos avoids the crucial question: if revolutionary socialism is the answer, why has no one been able to make it work? And if the last 107 years of socialist revolutions have failed, what concrete, historically grounded reasons are there to believe that another attempt will succeed?

Callinicos would be well-situated to answer this question, having been a leading figure in the Socialist Workers Party for decades. He has thus not only interpreted the world, he has tried to change it. Unfortunately, there is little here to inform readers about what lessons he has drawn that could help revive mass working class struggle for socialism. There are excellent analyses of Trump, the European far right, and tips of the political hat to identity based-movements for trans inclusion and Black Lives Matter, but nothing concrete about how workers can be mobilised en masse. Moreover, he fails to confront the hard questions about the impact of the structural fragmentation of the working class will have on the sort of mobilizing that Callinicos’ understanding of revolutionary socialism would demand. The book provides a clear and systematic explanation of how environmental, economic, and geo-political crises are interlinked with capitalist growth dynamics and competitive forces, bur offers no structural account of why these interlinked crises have not generated the sort of class consciousness that Marx and early twentieth century revolutionaries expected it to generate. Could it be that Callinicos’ silence speaks loudly in favour of the conclusion that the classical Marxist conception of consciousness formation is wrong?

What I mean by the “classical Marxist conception of consciousness formation” is that escalating social crisis will produce social pressures that push workers, on a global scale, towards a clear understanding of their interests in a socialist alternative to capitalism. I think that the premise from which Callinicos proceeds- that we are in the midst of a unified civilizational crisis– an age of catastrophe- with ecological, economic, and geo-political dimensions. But I see no evidence that this unfolding catastrophe is producing globally unified expressions of working class consciousness. it produces a wide variety of fightbacks that are shaped by the immediate structure of the problem faced: Black Lives Matter protests erupted against shocking acts of police violence, environmental campaigners mobilize in support of an immediate transition away from fossil fuels. Some within these movements argue that the particular problem cannot be understood in isolation from the underlying dynamics and values of capitalist society– precisely Callinicos’ approach– but these voices are: a) always in the minority, and b) have not successfully connected their theoretical argument to a revitalized revolutionary socialist practice led by the working class. If it is true that we are living through an age of catastrophe but the looming disaster has not produced a class conscious revolutionary subject, it is fair to ask: “what will?” And it is fair to worry that the answer might be: “nothing.”

Callinicos could respond that pessimism is unwarranted because the future is open and cannot be predicted. True enough. But what then is the value of the totalizing method that he argues one needs to adopt from Marx in order to fully understand the causes of the crisis? “Conceptualizing capitalism as a developing totalization is therefore intimately connected with insisting that the world doesn’t have to be the way that it is, that there are other possible worlds.”(11) Well, in the abstract, of course there are other possible worlds, but Marxism did not rest its arguments about the future on vague hopes, but on a purportedly dispassionate and objective analysis of dominant global trends that were leading to confrontations in which workers would lead the struggle for socialism. Call it what one will, dialectical, totalizing, what have you, it has repeatedly failed in its global predictions. Those failures should not be surprising, because no social scientific method, totalizing or not, can make predictions because history is not a mechanical system. Astronomers can predict with absolute certainty and to the minute the date, time, and path of the next solar eclipse, because the orbital planes and periods of the sun moon and earth are known quantities. While we can know the value of an arbitrary number of socially relevant variables– the poll numbers of different political parties, the changing structure of the working class, the inflation rate and the level of government indebtedness, the amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere last year, the number of people killed in on-going conflicts, and so on, there is no way to synthesize all of these variables and predict what the state of class struggle will be one year from now. There is simply no theory– Marxism included– that can determine beforehand what effect the interaction of these variables will have in different countries and regions and on different classes and groups. What Callinicos calls totalization is really on going ex post facto integration of knowledge of whatever happens into a theoretical core of claims about how the accumulation of capital is the underlying driver of the relationships between human and nature, economic development, and geo-political conflict. There is much evidence to support that core claim, but on-going integration of new material is not at all the same as practical information about how to build and win a global class struggle.

To be fair, Callinicos does not argue that the totalizing method has predictive power. He admits that its totalizations are always after the fact connections between particular events (say, the war in Ukraine) and systemic forces (the geo-political drive of major powers to control spheres of influence, which in turn derive from the competitive drive of capital to expand). However, even if those connections are real, theoretical explanation of their operation is far to abstract to generate motivating political energy. To say that to end the war in Ukraine or Gaza we need a revolutionary socialist alternative is not a program of action. And if it should turn out that these local problems can be solved through local efforts short of revolution– and save lives and improve living conditions– then does not revolutionary socialism become like a mantra that gurus teach their disciples to chant but which changes nothing of importance in people’s day to day lives?

Callinicos’ political arguments suffer from a failure to attend to what I am increasingly coming to believe is the central practical contradiction that radical critiques of capitalism face. The demand for radical change is a demand about the future, but human decisions must be made in the present. The pressures of the immediate moment force vulnerable populations to opt for the choice that provides as much security as possible in the present, even if they understand: a) that the security it provides is tenuous, and b) might well perpetuate long term trends that will eventually undermine what little security the immediate choice provides. For example, workers in fossil fuel industries are not trying to destroy the world– they are just trying to make a living. But since the pressure to pay bills never goes away under capitalism, they are hardly going to be persuaded to become revolutionaries because they contribute (in a very small way, as individuals) to the climate crisis. Workers are not going to drop tools because Callinicos states that “the real solution” to climate change “is to get rid of fossil capitalism.” (60) Since bills must be paid tomorrow, workers will choose work under capitalist conditions over the mere promise of the benefits of workers’ control of production under socialism. Since life is typically more enjoyable with more money, workers will typically choose higher rather than lower paying work. On a global scale, workers in the Global South can hardly be expected to forego the benefits of higher standards of living today for the sake of an environmentally healthy world tomorrow.

Slogans do not pay the pills, and workers are unlikely to be persuaded to leave high paying (often unionized) work in the fossil fuel industry for promises of a socialist future. What might move them are serious just transition programs that allow workers to leave environmentally harmful industries to retrain and find equally well-paying work in a new field. Perhaps Callinicos would respond: but the capitalist state and the fossil fuel industry will never adequately fund just transition programs, because capitalism is not about just transitions but the exploitation of labour in industries where it is profitable to do so, under conditions of labour determined by the competitive dynamics operating at a global scale. Theoretically, he would be correct. But look at how that just throws workers back onto the first horn of the dilemma: unable to afford to leave the environmentally destructive industry they will almost certainly choose to stay if the only other alternative that socialists offer is a promissory note about how good the socialist future will be. And if governments offer something more concrete than a promissory note– an actual reform that can improve their lives right now– then what concrete role does the demand for revolution play?

An analogous concern can be raised with regard to his analysis of and solution to the economic crisis of capitalism. Callinicos’s argument proceeds from the premise that “the twenty-first century is exposing what Chris harman calles “the new limits of capital.”(61) Drawing on Marxist economist Michael Roberts’ argument that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 has never really ended, Callinicos shows that growth in the real economy continued to sputter despite the massive amounts of money pumped into the economy to save the banks and the historically low interest rates designed to foster investment and motivate consumer spending. The 2007-2008 crisis spelled the end of the fiscal policies associated with neo-liberal policy. They were supplanted by what Callinicos calls, following Klooster,” “technocratic Keynesianism:” top-down, central bank led fiscal stimulus directed to corporations and private banks, not ordinary people or social programs. (71-2) This trend was amplified by government’s economic response to the shut down of large sectors of the global economy during Covid. On the one hand, that governments could step in to save the global economy and working class living standards from total collapse puts paid to the myth that there is no alternative to the market.(80) On the other hand, given the fact that capitalism (as opposed to production, distribution, and appropriate of resources– the ‘economy’ as such) depends upon competitive market relationships, meant that the wholesale government intervention in the economy that Covid made necessary could only ever be a stop gap measure.

Massive government expenditures did allow capitalism to weather the Covid storm, but it did not re-start the engine of growth in the real economy. Instead, it set the stage for inflation and the tighter fiscal policies (higher interest rates) still hammering workers. Callinicos’s solution parallels his solution to the climate crisis: neither neo-liberalism, nor technocratic Keynsianism, nor any other policy of managing capitalism can solve its structural contradictions nor free it from its dependence on the exploitation of labour. Only “an upsurge from below” he argues, ‘will be needed to to break the back of neoliberalism and open the way to a different future.” (85). Once again, I agree, in the abstract, but note that Callinicos i silent about the structural impediments to a globally unified “upsurge from below.”

He does provide a sketch of what an alternative economic system would look like, referencing the pioneering work Pat Devine I agree that Devine’s model of a negotiated coordination economy (see Democracy and Economic Planning) is promising, but Callinicos (perhaps hamstrung by space constraints) simply asserts that it is a workable alternative to capitalist market relations.(165) Of course, there is no way to demonstrate on the pages of a book that an alternative economic reality can work, but I thought that the case for Devine’s model could have been strengthened had Callinicos compared it to better known alternatives (such as the model of democratic socialism that Thomas Piketty presents in his most recent book A Short History of Equality, or the position of egalitarian liberal American economists like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, or Joseph Stieglitz) and provided concrete arguments in support of the superiority of Devine’s model. Without such a comparison, Callinicos’ s economic arguments run the risk of falling victim to the same problem as his solution to climate change: however attractive a negotiated coordination economy might be in theory, it is not yet a reality, and therefore does not address the immediate, day to day dependence of workers’ lives on the existing economy. If Piketty’s revived social democracy, or the egalitarian Keynesianism of the Americans, produce policies that can be implemented right now, how does one motivate workers to struggle for a systematic alternative which would take years or decades to develop and which might not work in practice?

A third aspect of this underlying problem arises in regard to his analysis of the geo-political crisis of the post-war capitalist states system. Callinocs divided the geo-political history of the states system since the later 19th century into three phases: the age of classical imperialism and colonialism (1870-1945), the Cold War struggle for hegemony between the US and the Soviet Union (1945-1989) and the contemporary world, shaped by the struggle of the US to defend its status as global hegemon (1989-present). (88-89) As anyone can tell from even the most cursory glance at the news, our period is one of extreme instability and volatility. Callinicos maintains, correctly, I would argue, that the structure of geo-political conflict must be understood in terms of the structural dynamics of capitalism, but the way in which particular conflicts are handled (his main example is the Ukraine war and the rising tensions between the US and China) is not determined in any mechanical way by economic imperatives but allow for better or worse means of solving the conflicts. Once again, Callinicos is correct in the abstract to argue that until capitalist competition over resources, labour, and markets is overcome there will be no solution to military conflicts. At the same time, those being killed in wars, whether in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, or Ethiopia, need the killing to stop right now.

Both the Ukraine and Gaza wars offer abundant evidence that international law, at least as it is currently institutionalized, cannot stop states from resorting to war when they determine that it is in their interests to do so. First, international law is ambiguous on crucial questions of what constitutes aggression, what the scope of the right to self-defence allows, what the precise weight of “proportional response” means, and so on. Both Russia and Israel have exploited these ambiguities to continue their wars against intense international pressure to stop them. More deeply, the structure of the international states system as a network of sovereign entities arrayed in competition with each other for resources and markets ensures that conflicts will regularly arise. That these states are also organized into trade, political, and military blocs in no way prevents competition from becoming conflict. Callinicos’s analyses of the main fault lines of the international system are astute and free from the shocking naivete one finds in some quarters amongst the anti-imperialist left about Putin’s war in Ukraine, but he once again leaves unanswered what to my mind is the critical question: what is to be done today about the suffering that warfare causes, in Ukraine, in Gaza, but also in forgotten conflicts like Ethiopia, Sudan, or anywhere people are being exterminated by political forces pursuing their agenda by military means.

The contradiction between today and tomorrow, abstract and concrete, returns in its most exigent and heart-rending form. The people being incinerated by bombs cannot wait for the revolution, so what do Marxists say? “Ukrainians, Russians, you are brothers and comrades, throw down your arms, or better yet, turn them against your oppressors!” That was Lenin’s argument in World War One, and the Bolsheviks put it into practice by withdrawing Russia from the war. Today, there is no political party or movement that can organize classes across nationalist lines. And in Gaza: do Marxists content themselves with slogans (From the River to the Sea) or demand a ceasefire, the return of hostages, and support for whatever political pressure there is for negotiations towards a two state solution? At whatever point in history one wants to date the start of the conflict the reality of mass life-destruction, right now, for everyone on the ground in Gaza, makes a cessation of fighting the only imperative. The revolution, the one state solution, the two state solution, whatever the ultimate solution of the conflict is, it seems to me, that if Marxists are going to have anything at all meaningful to say, it has to be said not from the standpoint of the dialectics of class struggle, not form the imperious heights with which the global struggle against imperialism is waged, but from the standpoint of suffering humanity. Roberto Duran said it best: “No mas” No more! and he stopped punching and being punched by Sugar Ray Leonard and walked out of the ring.

The book was published before the Gaza conflict and, as I said, Callinicos’s reading of international relations is rooted in a structural critique of imperialism but is mercifully free from cheerleading and sloganeering about how Putin’s Russia is a bulwark against (rather than an element of) an imperialist system. However, while he argues that there are political as well as economic drivers of imperialism (states define their national interest in historical and cultural and not just economic turns, those interest exert inertial force such that conflicts continue even after the initial historical conditions that caused them change, military power operates according to its own logic, etc), he ignores the positive side of international politics. War is a reality, but so too is diplomacy, negotiations, and arbitrated settlement of disputes. As with climate change and the economy, Marxists have to do better than assert that until the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism humanity will face no end of trouble. That might be true, but the revolution is not going to save the babies of Gaza. War has to stop, negotiations not class struggle are the only way to stop it today, and that principle- weak-kneed and humanistic as it might be– has to be the starting point.

No more!

Callinicos undoubtedly understands these arguments. As I noted, he has been a leading member of the SWP for decades, deeply involved in the unsuccessful attempt to build a revolutionary party in Britain. I admire his fortitude and commitment– I left the Canadian section of the SWP after about a decade. I believe in a socialist future but have no idea how to concretely build a movement to realize that goal, and Callinicos’ final chapter did not convince me that he knows either. He provides an excellent analysis of the growth of right wing populist forces across the world, but especially in the United States. He considers, and does not dismiss, the possibility that the US, still the world’s leading economic and military power, however much its status as global hegemon has been weakened, is heading towards a low-intensity civil war.(144-148) That likelihood was increased, perhaps dramatically, by Trump’s felony conviction in New York. The Republican party is openly de-legitimating the American justice system as a tool of the Democratic party. Think about the implications of that attack: it is in effect to claim that elections are not about the peaceful transition of power between equally legitimate parties within a just democratic structure, but that legitimacy resides only in one party (the Republicans) who must use power the next time that they acquire it to permanently entrench themselves. They Republicans are not the Nazi’s that they are sometimes rhetorically portrayed to be, but they are certainly manifesting totalitarian tendencies.

The New York case was widely regarded as the weakest of the cases against him. If– as now seems almost certain– he is convicted in the election tampering, January 6th insurrection, and classified records cases, then jail time seems inevitable. Will the chaos surrounding Trump might help re-unify the Democratic Party behind Biden? Probably. But will it help turn the Democratic Socialists of America into a mass party? Probably not. Interestingly, Callinicos does not even mention the DSA, even though they contain the remnants of the International Socialist Organization, (ISO), the US member of the SWP tendency. Perhaps more importantly, it also counts sitting members of Congress amongst its members. If that fact is regarded as irrelevant, that tells us a great deal about what Callinicos thinks about the prospects of the US socialist movement.

Instead of the prospects of actual socialists, Callinicos chooses as his examples of mass fightbacks trans and queer resistence ot right wing attacks and the massive protests organzied by Black Lives Matter following the police murder of George Floyd. While the right has successfully exploited anxieties around gender identity to mobilize its forces (especially at the local and state level in the US), Callinicos’s response takes a detour through a supportive reading of Judith Butler’s influential critique of gender as a natural kind.(152-153) As Callinicos notes, the relationship between biology and social construction in human history is complex, and Butler’s work has the merit of bringing out the historical fluidity of gender identity. At the same time, I would argue that, from an historical materialist standpoint, Butler errs too much on the side of social construction. Human beings are playful and capable of identifying with and as anything at all: but identification alone does not transform material reality. Thus, while rigid and mechanical linkages between biological sex and gender identity are untenable (and a target of feminist criticism going back to Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges at the time of the French Revolution), the mere expression of an identity is not sufficient to change politically and medically salient biological facts. Callincos understands this point– he spends pages defending lockdowns against Covid on the grounds that they were necessary to save lives, thus proving that mere psychological disposition is not sufficient to transform material reality. One had to get vaccinated, not just identify as a vaccinated person. I thought his treatment of the biology-social construction relation in the final chapter far too breezy (not to mention politically dismissive of the concerns of some feminists, lesbians, and just ordinary women about the implications of some versions of trans ideology on their interests in maintaining hard fought gains of the women’s movement). Are women no longer oppressed in Callincos’ view? Doubtful. But if they are, then the full range of voices needs to be heard and political differences respectfully worked through.

The explosion of quite massive street protests following the George Floyd murder are a much clearer cut case of the power– but also the limits– of mass mobilization outside the workplace. Callinicos cites figures that suggest that as many as 26 million Americans (and millions more around the world) came into the streets to protest police violence and structural racism. Huge numbers. But then think (as analysts must): that still means that approximately 326 million Americans did not protest. While these demonstrations, protests and occupations prove that mass mobilization from a very low level of political consciousness are always possible, the BLM demonstrations also remind attentive social critics of the weakness- (remember how Occupy fizzled) — of a tactic that centres on demonstrations. Here we come back to the problem of the temporal contradictions of struggle again– most people cannot protest day after day after day, because they have to work. Even if the boss supports the movement, they still need workers to show up for work. The silent compulsion of having to pay the bills once again appears as the enemy of radicalizing and generalizing the struggle. Callinicos wisely warns against, on the one hand, coalitions with centrist parties and, on the other, the fetishization of violent struggle, but what he does not offer— perhaps no one can– is a concrete means of dealing with the immediate structural forces that keep workers tied to capitalist employment day after day.

The book thus concludes with unsatisfying generalities. The fault here lies not with Callinicos, but, I think, first with the social forces that have fragmented the working class, and second, with the temporal contradiction between the immediacy of material needs and the idealism (in the colloquial sense) of the future. if the situation is as dire on all fronts as Callinicos maintains, then what real alternative do people have other than to struggle for what they can get today in ways that hopefully open space for more structurally transformative demands tomorrow. If this is the age of catastrophe then the world does not need prophets invoking the name of a future universal revolutionary subject. It needs boring problems solvers, today, right now.

I have made my living as a social philosopher, influenced above all by Marx, Marcuse, and John McMurtry. The thread that connects them and which I have used to stitch my own thoughts together is the unique value of human life. All the arguments that I have directed against the social, economic, political, and cultural structures of capitalist society have been developed from the principle that they are unnecessarily constraining of human sensibility, relationship, and creativity. Where I differ from those three influences is that I have also always been haunted by the existential problem of the consequences of a materialist understanding of human origins. If the universe began from nothing and will eventually decay back into nothing, if all matter and energy will run down in the heat death of the universe and we are matter and energy, then at the end of time human history will have amounted to nothing. Once the last proton decays and Being returns to the absolute silence of empty space from whence it came there will be no one to tally up the score to determine ultimate winners and losers. But if there are no ultimate winners and losers, if there is no cosmic purpose and no divinity to shepherd us to salvation, then does it not follow that our being here is meaningless, absurd, as Camus argued? And if life is meaningless and absurd then does it not follow, as Dostoevsky worried, “that nothing is true and everything is permitted?”

These questions press themselves upon my mind with the same urgency and intensity today as they did as a teenager when I was first struck by the implications of my own mortality. Trying to imagine one’s own not-being inspires a “special kind of being afraid,” as Philip Larkin says in his unforgettable “Aubade.” But one cannot live inside one’s own skull: the fear of death is ultimately a spur to living, as Camus also argued. The essence of nihilism is not the belief that life is without meaning or value. Rather, I think that nihilism forces us to value our real life, this one we have right now, as ultimate. The universe exploded into being from nothing and will return to nothing, but at this moment in time everyone alive is very much something. The honest admission that life is, biologically considered, contingent and finite, can lead to despair, can lead to a flight into comforting illusion, but it can also be the first step towards a re-valuation of life. If this one life is all that anyone has then every other value must serve it rather than, as most political ideologies maintain, life serving it. Nihilism need not lead to the immoralism that Dostoevsky was keen to pin on it. It can equally well expose the immorality at the heart of the religious or political instrumentalization of life-value. If life is a singularity then it is of infinite value. People cannot be substituted for one another: one generation’s pain is not made good by a future generation’s joy and what one believes does not elevate one’s importance over others who believe differently. Everyone is on the same plane: no one is chosen, no one matters to the stars, no one will be saved, but also no one will be damned. All that matters is the quality of this moment.

E.M. Cioran was a Romanian nihilist — what? philosopher?, poet? provocateur sui generis like Nietzsche? Whatever one wants to call him, his aphorisms, like Nietzsche’s before him, expose the abyss on which human thinking constructs the foundations on which it builds its systems. No one in the twentieth century has tried to actively affirm the nothingness and meaninglessness of our existence with more honesty. Although he extols the courage of the suicide on almost every page, he does not– like Kirilov in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, go through with it himself. Kirilov wanted to prove by his suicide that human beings are absolutely free– that we have the power of the gods over life and death. Dostoevsky presents him as a reductio ad absurdum of nihilism: he kills himself, and nothing changes. Cioran’s inability to remove himself from the life that he claims is meaningless proves something else– that life does not have to have an ultimate purpose in order to be meaningful and valuable.

Marx said that thinking has to be radical, has to get to the root of the problem, and the root of the problem for human beings are human beings themselves (i.e., we have the power to change our societies). I think the root lies one layer of soil deeper: the problem for human beings is that we can trace the history of being back to non-being, and thus contemplate the contingency and finitude of everything. But once we have confronted ourselves with the reality that we could just as easily not have been as been, and that one day we will no longer be no matter how we organize our societies, we should rejoice that we are here right now. Nihilism could produce despair, but it can equally well spur us to cherish life as the precious accident that it is. if we cherish life we must also cherish the material conditions that sustain it. So nihilism would also be a spur towards grounding production and distribution in life-need, not capital accumulation. Everyone is in the same boat, remember, and everyone therefore has the same legitimate claim on the resources that will keep them going. People do not need food because they are Catholics, or Buddhists, or atheist materialists. We need food because our organism requires energy. Start from that precious and fragile nature of life and not the specialness of some one form of life and universal sharing follows.

That which is invulnerable does not require care. People do not pray to their gods so that the gods are kept safe; they prey to the gods to keep their communities safe from the dangers that mortals face. But if there are no gods why live? Because this one life is all that we have. If we choose life we might choose to care only for ourselves, or for a subset of human beings. But we might also become capable of valuing everyone equally as a fellow sufferer.

I submit that it is impossible to strictly speaking care only for oneself. Donne is correct: no one is an island, and trying to live as if one were would lead to self-destruction. Plato laid bare the self-undermining logic of the pure egoism of the tyrant who destroys himself because he makes enemies of everyone else. The second possibility structures human history. To this point history has been the story of what happens when we care for only a subset of other human beings: some groups have developed at the expense of others and warfare has been a near constant. Universalist philosophies and religions have arisen to combat this division. Stoicism, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism all stake their claim on the priority of human sameness over difference, but they mediate human identity through the particularity of their singular interpretation. They argue that the world will be one, once everyone has become Christian (or the right sect of Christianity), or Muslim (or the right sect of Islam), or after the revolution (led by the right sect of Marxism). What is left but to start from the value of life as an unrepeatable gift of the evolution of matter and energy, equally valuable to everyone lucky enough to be thrown in to being (Heidegger)? Nihilism, calumnied as a license for murder and mayhem, might actually be the disposition best attuned to the real value of life.

The infinite value of human life is implicit in Marx’s belief that in a socialist society everyone will be exactly what they reveal themselves to be through their own activity. Money and the symbolic capital it can purchase will no longer be meaningful: if you want friends you will have to be friendly, if you want resources for your own projects you will have to contribute. And people will contribute, Marx believes because, once they see their efforts realized in the enjoyment of others’ lives, work will become “life’s primary need.” (Critique of the Gotha Program). But neither Marx nor subsequent generations of less philosophical Marxists examined politics through the lens of the infinite value of life. Instead, they viewed the infinite value of life through the lens of political struggle, and concluded that life will have infinite value under socialism, but at present has only instrumental value as a resource for the struggle. But once political struggle becomes a matter of redemption it is too easy to adopt violent strategies that are excused by the future dividends that they will eventually pay. As of yet, the account is still outstanding. Does not critical theory insist on the need for a radical break with the thinking that has underlined the failed politics of our own and all previous ages?

Nihilism is the most radical break with the structure of thought that underlies the politics of sacrificing the present for the future. Nihilism turns Macbeth’s lament against itself. Life “signifies nothing” but the “sound and fury” with which it is filled is the substance of the tale, and we are idiots only if we misunderstand the temporal dynamics of valuation. Life is not a sign of some deeper reality; it does not point beyond itself to some transcendent template that allows us to decode its meaning. It has no meaning in that sense. But the sound and fury is real, it impresses itself on us whether we want it to or not, and it forces us to respond. Transcendent purposes are nothing, they do not exist, but our sensuous relationship to the universe and to each other is real and– so long as we choose life– valuable.

Cioran is unconcerned with the political implications of his arguments, but he is– perhaps despite his intentions– a profound advocate for the supreme value of life as it really is. “It is because it rests on nothing, because it lacks even the shadow of an argument that we preserve life … We cling to days because the desire to die is too logical…. Give life a specific goal and it immediately loses its attraction. The inexactitude of its ends makes life superior to death.” (A Short History of Decay, 10-11). Every day brings us one step closer to death. But so long as we are stepping we are not dead and because there is no omniscience that already knows where the path we are creating by walking will lead, it is worth staying alive if for no other reason than to see what lies around the bend. The nothingness in which we move is the condition of our freedom, as Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir argued. Would you really want to be a marionette in a divine puppet show with God pulling the strings? If that were so, then human life would have no value. The same holds true if we replace God with History.

Marx believed that we are the root of our own problem because we only had to recognize our ability to change our societies in order to “solve the riddle of history.” Marx was correct. But the means by which subsequent Marxists and other liberation movements have pursued this goal has only ever led to ironic results. Cioran lays bear the irony: “Truths begin by a conflict with the police and end by calling them in, for each absurdity we have suffered for degenerates into a legality, as every martyrdom ends in the paragraphs of the Law.” (74) Dogmatism is the slayer of dreams of liberation, because dogmatism is about truth while liberation is about life-activity. Forms of life are not true or false, they are modes of activity. Doctrines are true or false– or their adherents insist that they are true and false. As soon as someone becomes convinced that their doctrine is absolutely true they are not only willing to kill for it, they feel themselves obligated to kill for it. To allow others to wallow in darkness when one has the truth is sin. Better to be burned in an auto da fe than to live as a heretic. So the dogmatist lights the match that sets the stake ablaze. We may posit as a basic condition of the goodness of a form of activity that it does not depend upon the killing of others. As a corollary we may infer that no form of life should be imposed through violence on other people.

Dostoevsky worried that if there were no God everything would be permitted, but (as Camus pointed out) people also conclude that if God is on their side then everything is permitted to them. But if we think of truth in human terms only, as a shared resource for living, then the question of killing for the truth becomes a contradiction in terms. We need to understand the world so that we can produce and use the resources that we require in a materially rational way. We cannot survive and continually mistake toxins for nutrients, or produce beyond the carrying capacities of the natural world. But taxonomy and ecology are not principles to go to the wall for: only a completely irrational zealot would go to war against scientific generalizations that prove themselves in practice everyday. Joseph Conrad exposes the idiocy of the anarchists at the centre of his novel The Secret Agent by having them declare war on geography by trying to blow up the Greenwich observatory.

The human form of truth is an open weave. The dogmatist, the zealot, do not want inquiry but finality. “The mistake of every doctrine of deliverance is to suppress poetry, climate of the incomplete. The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song; the negation of art and mind.” (28) To be incomplete is to be open, but also to suffer: “We exist only in so far as we suffer.” (28) But suffering is the world coursing through us every moment. To suffer means to undergo, to be subject to: to suffer is therefore synonymous with receptivity as the origin of all human thinking and action. Suffering as receptivity is thus also, as Feuerbach argued, the mother of poetry (and death the mother of beauty, as Wallace Stevens added). We might therefore think of poetry not as a species of literature but more broadly as as philosophy that invokes rather than argues, suggests, points to, opens up, illuminates self-consciously from one perspective only, deliberately leaving open the possibility of others adopting other perspectives. Nihilism is the supreme life-value of this moment, the invitation to savour the magnificent surface of things.

It is easy enough to dismiss the response of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh to Israel’s assassination of his three sons as the words of a deranged fanatic. Upon being informed that Israeli missiles had killed them, Haniyeh thanked God that they had been martyred. Whatever one might think about Haniyeh at a personal level, philosophy has to try to understand the logic at work in any expressed position and not indulge in dismissive ad hominem. Haniyeh’s response is important because it lays bear the moral structure of fundamentalist thinking. Note that I say “fundamentalist” and not “religious fundamentalist.” I leave out that qualifier deliberately because I want to focus on the genus and not the species. While Haniyeh’s brand of religious fundamentalism situates human history as a minor drama in an unfolding divine narrative, the secret to understanding fundamentalism and its moral irrationality is to tease out the way in which it absolutizes the purposes that orient it.

All political struggles are contests over the way in which institutions organize and govern human social life, determine resource distributions, set the relationship between public and private spheres, legitimize the division of labour, and set general boundaries to the formation and pursuit of individual goals. Fundamentalists, whether religious or secular, abstract the end– their preferred configuration of social institutions– from the well-being of people living here and now. Hence fundamentalism always coincides with maximalist and perfectionist programs that value the purity of the goal over the actual well-being of the people that the goal is supposed to serve. To paraphrase Jesus’ critique of the rabbis, the fundamentalist forgets that principles are made for human beings, not human beings for principles.

Because the principle is everything for the fundamentalist, the loss of life in pursuit of the complete realization of the principle is not only a necessary sacrifice, it is a supreme value. Haniyeh gives us a particularly vivid example of this form of thinking, but its is only an example, not an archetype. The real problem is the absolutism of the goal, its elevation above the maintenance and improvement of life–the only ultimately coherent goal of political struggle because life is the material condition of all enjoyment.

The question of whether social institutions are or good or bad can only be answered by examining the quality of life of the people whose lives are shaped by the norms the institutions impose. One cannot abstract the institutions from the practical matter of how people govern or are governed, work, relate, reproduce, and shape their individual life-horizons. The fundamentalist does just that: they abstract the goal– national independence, socialism, the glory of the motherland, whatever– from the lives of the people whose existence is a material presupposition of that goal’s goodness. Lying at the root of fundamentalist thought therefore is not god but the abstraction of regulating values as ends in themselves from the lives of human beings that give those values material substance and meaning.

Dying for the cause is never good for the person who dies, because they can never experience the better state of affairs for which they struggled. If individuals have only instrumental value as objects of sacrifice for the cause, then loss of life not only does not equal loss of value, loss of life would be gain of value as the number of martyrs soars. Haniyeh implies as much when he thanked God for the honour of having his children martyred. But Haniyeh forgets the most important question: what good does their martyrdom do them? Their life-value is reduced to a mere instrument of the lives of future people who will enjoy what they can no longer experience. “Their pure blood is for the liberation of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, and we will continue to march on our road, and will not hesitate and will not falter. With their blood, we bring about hope, a future and freedom for our people and our cause.” But dead people have no future on earth, which is the stage on which political struggles play out. If real value exists only in the other world– in eternal life with the Divine– then struggle for something as comparatively ephemeral as a nation-state is pointless. Political values can only be realized in secular time frames.

Religious fundamentalist thought is always incoherent as a basis for social criticism and justification for political struggle because it locates true value in the eternal. Secular fundamentalist thought is incoherent as a basis for social criticism and justification for political struggle because it demands the perfect realization of ideals. The absolutization of the value of either version’s principles reduces people to tools of the ideals. For the fundamentalist, therefore, not the heavens, but everyone alive may perish unless justice is done. But unwillingness to compromise, refusal to consider the interests of the other side, and insistence on a struggle to death in pursuit of a perfectionist version of a maximalist agenda ensures only on-going sacrifice of life, not the concrete improvements in its lived reality which alone explain the purposes of political struggle. Conflicts between two fundamentalist movements such as we see between Israelis and Palestinians today cannot be resolved: either side’s maximalist agenda could only be realized through the complete defeat or destruction of the other sides, but the numbers are too evenly matched to allow total victory.

Even if Hamas in its present form is thoroughly routed (which I still think is the most likely scenario, especially now that Iran has undermined the baby steps that Biden had been taking to reign in Israel’s onslaught in Gaza) new movements will arise until some form of Palestinian nation state has been created. But that will not be a single secular state encompassing all the lands of historical Palestine, because Jewish Israelis are not going anywhere, international law recognizes the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders, there is no serious movement within Israel in support of a one-state solution, and there is no scenario concretely politically and militarily imaginable in which such a solution could be forced on them. The only way forward is some sort of compromise.

Compromise is anathema to fundamentalists, tantamount to failure, and thus never willingly entertained. Thus Iran, after committing what seems to me to be a colossal tactical and strategic mistake in attacking Israel in response to Israel’s strike on its generals in Syria, warns of an even more “devastating” response if– as is almost certain, given the adolescent posturing that passes for foreign policy today– Israel responds to the response. Immediately after the attack Ben Gvir was arguing that Israel should “go crazy” (exactly what it has been doing in Gaza). A strategically rational reaction would be to use the political capital Iran handed back to an Israel that was politically weakened on the international stage by doing nothing. But such is the nature of the “leaders” of existing nation states that the current Israeli government will most likely mindlessly enact the typical schoolboy script and feel the need to punch back.

On and on and on it goes, people dying, infrastructure destroyed, intellect wasted in the production of weapons systems, everyone chanting death until victory– but no one can win, because winning means concrete improvement in life conditions, a goal which can only be achieved when the value of political principles and goals is interpreted in concrete, life-valuable terms. A principled goal is good to the extent that its realization improves the lives of the people who will live under it, by: a) increasing access to the resources, relationships, and institutions that satisfy fundamental natural and social needs, and b) thereby allowing individuals and self-organizing collectivities to more widely and deeply develop, express, and enjoy their life-capacities for experience, imagination, scientific understanding, productive and creative work, mutualistic relationship, meaningful connection to the wider world, and all-round enjoyment of our finite time on the planet.

Since we are all crowded together but still divided into nation-states and would-be nation states, the realization of these generic goals requires mutual understanding and accommodation between peoples not just people. Real leadership understands the need for mutual accommodation and compromise, both for the sake of solving immediate conflicts and as a step towards a future world in which, perhaps, the narrow horizons of national identity are transcended.

But in order to take that step we must not abstract our principles from lived time. Our feet must be anchored on the ground where our lives play out, not in a fantasy of eternal life or the unsullied perfection of a mere idea. Religion is the heart of a heartless world, true, and principle can expose the contradictions of practice but value, as Nietzsche knew, must be lived here and now or not at all.

“It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatiences, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life here every moment. And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people … How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all about the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.” (The Thought of Death, Book Four, Aphorism 278, The Gay Science)

Chuffed by his role in forcing former Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign, Christopher Rufo has just penned a call to arms to “new right activists” to “win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.” He does not tell us what “rightful ends” the state should serve or what those who disagree with them whatever they turn out to be should do. As a manifesto, it lacks the poetry of Marx and Engels. Its fussing over the capture of American institutions by the “far left” is derivative of the anxieties of late 60s and early 1970’s conservatives worried about the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist youth. And its plea that the right emulate the political left’s strategy of capturing the leadership of major social institutions is ironic, given that many leftists (Srnicek and Williams, for example) have argued that leftists need to take a page from the way the right recovered from their defeats in the 1960 to dominate the 70s and 80s.

In short, the content and tone is predictable and superficial, but Rufo does raise important questions about the purpose of public institutions that are worth thinking through.

Rufo’s screed begins by telling his fellow travellers that both the old (nineteenth century) liberalism and conservatism are dead. Warming the right-wing heart with memories of Reagan will not work; the new right needs a new action plan for new times. He does not mention Trump and I do not know what his position is on MAGA Republicans (they certainly have organizing power, but Rufo is perhaps too much of an intellectual to go in for their manifold absurdities). Rufo focuses on stopping “establishment conservatives” from retreating any further from the core values of the “political tradition of the west– republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia.”

I found the inclusion of eudaimonia next to ‘shared moral standards’ in a conservative argument odd. Without saying anything more about what ‘shared moral standards’ he has in mind (Judeo-Christian morality, I presume) the value of flourishing (eudaimonia) pulls in the direction of individual difference and self-creation, not shared substantive values. Aristotle could assume shared moral principles, but in a pluralist country like the United States, shared moral standards are the problem, not the solution. Individual flourishing presupposes access to resources and, therefore, (if you ask me) any society that prioritises flourishing must institutionalise the principle (common to socialism and egalitarian liberalism but foreign to the classical liberalism or libertarianism) that everyone should be able to access the basic resources, relationships, and institutions that the flourishing of their lives requires. But as for religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and the content of the lives people choose to pursue, those would necessarily differ. Without further unpacking his thought, Rufo leaves his position open to questions about its normative and political coherence.

However, as I noted, the essay is a short call to arms and not a political philosophy paper. “The Right doesn’t need a white paper,” he argues, it needs activists willing to go to battle– as he did in the Harvard plagiarism scandal– to take back institutions. Unless the right takes back control of schools and statehouses, all talk of ‘righteous ends’ is just academic hot air.

But a battle against what forces? Rufo provides further support for an argument that I have made for decades concerning the connection between postmodern critiques of objective truth and the right-wing. Rufo argues that “while postmodern theorists who reduced politics to “language games” may have overstated the case, … they were right in one respect: language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society: in law, arts, rhetoric, and common speech.” Rufo (and the postmodernists) are correct that language is the operative element of human society, but they are wrong to infer that political power is a function of control over language. Power does not stem from control over the OED or the barrel of a gun (Mao), but from control over the resources (natural, technological) upon which everyone’s lives and livelihood depends. Control over the language is often used in a purely ideological way make it seem as though substantive social changes have been made when in reality the class dimensions of political and economic power have not been changed at all.

Such is the case with the language of ‘Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” that drives Rufo so crazy. Let us confine our attention to the universities for a moment. Rufo believes that the leadership of universities has been seized by a far left cabal bent on destroying academic standards and turning America’s halls of academia into madrassas of political correctness. I have worked in universities for thirty years and can assure everyone who is worried that they are not led by far left activists and that the biggest threat to academic freedom is the role of private money (as l’affaire Harvard also proved) and the ubiquitous demand made by public funders that university curricula serve the interests of business by producing “job ready” applicants that can be fed into the most dynamic sectors of the economy.

Anyone concerned with academic standards and freedom should be concerned when any extraneous political agenda is imposed upon academics and students, whichever side of the political aisle it claims to serve. Curricula needs to be determined by the state of the art in the field and not preachy administrators hoping to cure the ills of the world through changed reading lists. At the same time– as Rufo’s own arguments admit– the world has changed. The most important change– in the humanities at least– is the emergence of long silenced voices that demand– rightly– to be heard. The state of the art in the field should determine the curricula in all disciplines, but certainly in the humanities the state of the art means including the works of historically colonised people, critical race theorists, and others who have been demonstrably oppressed by the dominant structures of power and wealth. Including those voices does not mean that they should dominate the conversation to the exclusion of older perspectives, but it does mean that they have to be heard.

Rufo’s intervention does not go into details about how he would reform institutions in general or universities in particular, but the general arguments he does make contradict themselves. He calls out the left for its “euphemistic rule,” but then concludes that the new right must “replace contemporary ideological language with new, persuasive language that points towards clear principles.” Two points are in order: first, persuasive language need not be true, and second, clear principles can be ideological. Rufo intends his readers to conclude that his feet are planted in the soil of objective truth, but he himself admits that he is mobilizing power to prosecute a political– ideologically partisan– agenda.

Rufo’s penchant for making bald faced contradictions perhaps explains why works for a think tank and not an academic institution. If he worked as an academic, he would have to defend his arguments from critics who would expose his contradictions. As a private researcher, he is free to deal in platitudes about the superiority of passion to reason and re-setting the public agenda on the basis of “clear principles.” (He also does not have to fend off charges of plagiarism, which is good for him, because he flat out plagiarises Hume’s argument, from Essay on Human Nature, that reason is the slave of the passions. Maybe Claudine Gay should expose him).

In any case, the problem with Rufo’s criticisms of the “euphemistic left” is that he wants his readers to think that his “clear principles’ are objectively true, while at the same time arguing that all principles are political and that public life is really a Nietzschean battle to impose one’s own preferred ‘truths’ on everyone else. He writes that “no institution can be neutral– and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology.” If true, it follows that this argument applies to Rufo as well, and that, consequently, his real agenda is not to protect objective truth from the infamies of the ‘far left,’ but just to impose his ideology on everyone else.

But institutions can be neutral, in the partisan political sense, and yet passionately commit themselves to fulfilling their purpose. To speak again only of the universities, the belief that they must serve a cliched left or right wing agenda is simply false. Faculty and students have political positions, which they must be free to defend (not impose) in the context of academic argument, but the university itself, if it is to function as a space for open, free, intellectual inquiry, criticism, and debate, cannot serve any political master. There have been egregious cases of faculty being hounded out of their positions, not had their contracts renewed, or fired, for running afoul of EDI platitudes. I have criticized these violations of academic freedom and integrity and will continue to do so. But the solution is not a “new right” take over of the universities (as has happened at New College in Florida), but a recommitment of all members of the university institution to the discipline and courage of argument. The purpose of the university is not to spread any particular group’s “truth” but to expose every truth-claim to the test of open examination and criticism. The truth will out, but not because one group is more committed to its partisan principles than another. The truth is what survives contestation and criticism. If Rufo is serious about returning institutions to their purposes, he needs to stand on the side of critical engagement and not on the side of forcibly silencing opponents who annoy him.

My winters were spent in unbordered bush n snow drifts

n on The Hill

behind the school

where everyone would

slide.

A city of children, classless, kinda

cause no one had fancier coats

or thought they were better than anyone else

cause they weren’t:

everyone’s dad worked in the mines

n their moms at shops in town

or cut hair in their living rooms

to earn a few extra bucks.

Day n night the Hill would draw us

together on toboggans

or solo on a Krazy Karpet

n if you didn’t have either

you could use some cardboard

or even old

boots whose treads had worn out

(but not a sled: sleds were snow machines

in case ya didn’t know).

Maybe some bigger kids would push us smaller ones back down the hill

before we had scrambled back to the top

but ya just had to take it

you couldn’t be a suck in those days.

Later, when we had become jaded teenagers

we would still go sliding

drinking rye from the bottle

on the lip of the scary steep slopes of the gravel pit.

It was like falling over a cliff

drunk as hell.

Everyone crashed before the bottom

but that’s what made it fun

n the bottle waiting for us

back at the top

promised the illusion of warmth, even when it was wicked cold.

I never thought about it then

but I did the other day, that

probably there are classless cities of children

in the desert

n maybe they go sliding down sand dunes,

(but not in boots, obviously, but Krazy Karpets would work).

It’s probably hard to find a 40 pounder of CC

in the desert

but maybe they have other stuff to drink

but whether they do or not

I bet

if they are alone in their city of children

doing whatever kids do in the desert

they smile

cause they feel safe

n together

n even if the bigger kids push the little ones around

its all in fun

n you can’t be a suck

in the desert either, but ya learn to

laugh n take it

just like on our Hill.

I haven’t gone sliding in decades

but I can still feel

the dirty February snow spraying my cheeks

and freezing to my toque.

When I think now about what I have been doing

I guess I’ve mostly read:

philosophers n poets n novelists n historians n economists n political scientists,

I have thought up n down

over, under, n sideways,

in straight lines n spirals n circles,

even dialectically.

I have thought long, and I have thought hard

n me n all the serious people I have read

think we know what’s what

but whatever we think we know

it’s not been enough

to stop the same shit from happening

over n over n over.

Today I can’t say

that I know anything much fer sure,

so I could be wrong

but this much seems clear:

that babies who need to be in incubators

should not have to be wrapped in tin foil

because they had the misfortune

to be born into somebody’s war.

I really don’t know much for certain anymore,

so I could be wrong

but it seems clear to me

that if the price of whatever

is that tiny creatures

who don’t want anything except to be warm

have to be wrapped in tin foil

to survive the night

then that price is too high

and whatever it is

that caused people to destroy

the cocoon that those babies needed

is not worth it.

One more thing seems clear to me,

but I could be wrong,

still, I think that anybody

who– every cell vibrating with terror-

doesn’t run away

cause babies can’t wrap themselves in tin foil,

those people who stay behind and maybe tell those babies stories

about how they used to go sliding– on icy hills or sandy dunes

or whatever–

who stay close and promise them that they will get through the night

and grow up and go sliding

or whatever the citizens of the city of children will do in the future,

I think maybe those people should be leaders,

cause they don’t read and write about what should be done

in the future

but do what must be done.

right now.

On my trips home to visit my mom in Sudbury, I always stop on the side of the road to collect rocks for the garden. Most of them are Cambrian Shield granite, but I have a few pieces of the nickle ore that still forms the basis of the local economy. The ore was formed in a magma lake created 1.8 billion years ago when a meteorite slammed into the region.

Last week I was sitting in the garden with Josie when I brought her over to a piece of the ore and told her to put her hand on it. I do not remember exactly what we had been discussing, but I wanted to illustrate a point about the relativity of time, about how what seems agonizingly long from a human perspective is nothing from geological point of view. If the ore could sense and think, would it even be able to register the 80 or so years of a human’s life? It would be the briefest flash of light, gone before the rock could even concentrate its attention to see if something worth investigating had happened. Even the whole history of the human lineage, a couple million years, would not be to it as an afternoon is to us.

I made a point to find some ore because it reminds me of who I am and how I got here. Had the meteorite not slammed into primeval Sudbury, there would have been no nickle-copper ore, and therefore no mines, no smelter where my father worked, and so maybe no father, no mother, no me. My sitting in the garden with Josie is one act in a cosmic drama billions of years old. And so is your sitting wherever you are sitting. And the causal connections that led to my or your being here and there, and one person’s doing one thing and another person another, and people meeting and becoming friends and colleagues are so innumerable, so improbable, that thinking about them sends a shudder through me. Had any one thing been even a little different, I would not have been born, or I would have become something else, and made different friends, or not made any at all, and would have had to sit alone in my garden rather than with Josie.

But however improbable a life is, if you are living it, then the whole 14 billion year history of the universe has worked out in your favour. Whatever you achieve or do not achieve, your life is of singular value. Once you are gone nothing ever, no matter how many trillions of years the universe will last, will be you again. And that is why we feel such pain at the death of our friends.

Although our lives are near miraculous singularities and the rocks will long outlast us, we are conscious of the passing of our days. And yet, how many days do we waste, wishing we were doing something other than we are doing, or fidgeting, restless and bored?

No mortal creature should ever be bored because no one knows for certain which moment will be one’s last. As has happened too frequently over the past three years, I was brutally reminded again yesterday of this hard truth– harder even than the ore in my garden– when I learned of the death of my friend and colleague Cate Hundleby. I was working upstairs when Josie called for me to come down, a quiver in her voice told me that something was seriously wrong. A tree had fallen in our back yard the day before and taken down the power line. I was worried that it had begun to spark or started something on fire.

But the news was far worse.

Our friends Tory and Len were in the yard, telling us that Cate had died earlier that day.

One goes numb, not quite capable of feeling the meaning of that news. One’s mind immediately goes back to the last time one saw the person, the vividness of the memory resists the thought that one will never see them again.

I called Cate ‘Big Cat’ because of her Chesire cat-like grin. I gave her the nickname very soon after she came to Windsor. I was on the committee that hired her and we were friends from the moment that she started working and living here. She lived on the same street as Josie and I, only half a block away. We would see her walking her dogs, first Abbie, then Chloe, and now, never again. Like the Chesire Cat, she has disappeared, leaving only the memory of that grin.

Cate was a transformative addition to the department, not the first woman in its history but the first feminist philosopher. When she started working here she had made a name for herself as a feminist philosopher of science. As her worked developed, it turned towards argumentation theory, where she made original contributions to a feminist theory of argumentation. She authored the Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on feminism and argumentation, edited an important collection of essays on the work of Trudy Govier, and was instrumental in founding Canada’s first PhD Program in Argumentation. She was a loud and effective voice for change within the department, the university, and the philosophical community generally. Her arguments were not always easily received in the department, but we are the better for her efforts and contributions.

These are facts, but people are not just facts. We cannot capture the texture of a life, how they interweave with the lives of others and things, by saying what people did and what they were like. Life is experience and activity; our contributions have helped make things the way they are, but the person cannot be recreated from the traces that they left behind. Only memory can preserve the Élan vital.

Josie and I sat somberly in the garden yesterday, remembering our friend and toasting her. As we sat there, a hummingbird began to feed from a flower of a late blooming hosta. Neither of us could remember ever seeing a hummingbird in twenty years of living here.

I am a man of reason and science. I know that rocks do not experience that passage of time and that hummingbirds are just hummingbirds.

But our superiority over the rocks is that we can imagine, and pretend, and project meanings, and act as if.

And so we looked at the hummingbird and said good bye to our friend.

A few seconds later, it rose from the hosta and flew away.