Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Anthropocentric Idealism of Judith Butler

Those who, with Judith Butler, deny a distinction between sex and gender, however they may think of themselves, are either classical philosophical idealists, or they are anthropocentrist human-exceptionalists, and thus heirs to the legacy of the Christian theological model of the human being.

Consider this from a recent online ‘syllabus’: "Butler proves that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold. A sexed body cannot signal itself as different sexually without cultural gender categories, and the idea that sex comes before cultural factors (which are believed to be only overlaid on top of sex), is disproven in this book. Gender is performance, there’s no solid universal gender basis beneath these always creative performances. There is no concrete sexed body without constructed human categories to interpret it."

At least since Fichte dispensed with the Kantian thing-in-itself, we have been aware of the possibility that there is no concrete external world without human categories to interpret it. That is, if we acknowledge that the world beyond our experience is entirely inaccessible to us by definition, then there are good arguments to the effect that we should not believe it exists at all.

But the philosophical possibility of absolute idealism in no way prevents us from continuing on with our research programmes in, say, fluid dynamics or vulcanology. What makes the human body so different?

The concrete sexed human body is, alongside volcanoes, worms, etc., a thing of nature-- unless, that is, you are an idealist and you think there is no such thing as nature at all. But in any case, the sexed human body, the volcano, and the worms, whether ‘constructs’ or natural objects, can only have the same ontological status-- unless, that is, you are a human exceptionalist.

Which brings us to our second point. Let’s take a purportedly natural object that is somewhat closer to a human, in the classical scale of being, than it is to a volcano: the male of some species of anglerfish (e.g., Haplophryne mollis). It is several times smaller and vastly weaker than its female counterpart. In order to mate, the only option it has is to bite into the side of the female’s body, to pass its seminal material into her blood stream, and then slowly to wither away, eventually becoming a tiny appendage of its polyandrous spouse.

Now, is there anything ‘constructed’ about this? Anglerfish sexual dimorphism is extreme, but it is not different in principle from that of mammals. And if we insist that anglerfish reproduction is just a natural fact, while human sex and sex difference is ‘constructed’, then we are more or less explicitly claiming that human beings are not animals alongside others, but that their essence is non-natural in origin. 

This is a fundamentally conservative stance to take, and Butlerites share it with traditional Christian theology, among other currents of thought. Butlerism buys its sex constructionism by means of a deepened commitment to species essentialism-- and at a terrible exchange rate.

I am not saying this view is wrong, or right. I enjoy reading both Thomas Aquinas and Charles Darwin. But to the extent that I take up positive stances on substantive philosophical issues, I do like to be clear on who my associates are.

I know Butler has distanced herself from the more simplistic versions of her own theory, and in one interview I have seen her affirming the truth of Darwinian evolution, and of human kinship with apes. But this only sharpens the question: is sex difference in apes constructed? If it is not in apes, yet is in humans, what happened in the past five million years to make humans such exceptional creatures? No defender of the basic thesis of Gender Trouble has ever coherently addressed these questions. 

I have been going back to this book periodically for twenty years now, to see whether there is something I've missed. The problem seems too glaring to go unadressed. But Butler's critics are for their part generally too scoffing and dismissive to address particular problems of her work at all, while her supporters probably assume that such a big problem must have been taken up somewhere or other.

Butler herself has, since the late 1980s, matured into a towering and authoritative intellectual, but this doesn't mean that all who invoke her are in a position to share that authority, and it remains reasonable to ask them for clarification.

Look at that syllabus again. It says that Butler has proven that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold, while gender, in turn, is constructed. Therefore, sex is constructed. But again, does this include ape sex, anglerfish sex, etc., or only human sex? And if only human sex, does it follow that human beings are not part of the same natural order that includes apes and anglerfish?

None of these questions are meant to suggest that sexual dimorphism in the animal world is simple, obvious, or universal. We know there is tremendous variety out there, and this variety is frequently invoked by neo-Butlerites as biological evidence for the constructedness of human sexual binarism. But invoking this evidence, they only complicate matters. If it is true that a number of species of lizards can switch from sexual reproduction to asexual parthenogenesis in the absence of suitable mates, then there is at least some natural fact about lizards and sex. But the neo-Butlerite claim is that there is no natural fact about humans and sex ('there is no concrete sexed body'). What is the difference between humans and lizards that justifies this distinction?

Orangutans show not so much a high degree of sexual dimorphism within the species, between male and female, as a dimorphism between males: some mature males get 'flanges', that strange condition that makes their faces into enormous discs, while others remain as they all had looked in adolescence, which is also the way female orangutans look across the life-cycle. Look at a flanged male orangutan and tell me there is something performative about that. You'll know I know you know you're bullshitting. The flanges are there. They are there, that is, unless nothing is really there, including also volcanoes, galaxies, &c. 

In the history of hominid evolution, dimorphism is clearly diminishing. Males of the Australopithecus genus were on average around 50% larger than females. In modern Homo sapiens, the disparity is closer to 15%. That is still not insignificant. (It is, for one thing, enough to yield the physical difference that gets translated into social reality as patriarchy.) A moderately well-trained physical anthropologist can look at the pelvis of a human skeleton and tell you instantly whether it belonged to a man or a woman. The pelvis, like the living male orangutan's flanges, is a plain giveaway.

Let us grant that all of the social and symbolic dimensions of womanhood that have been assigned to bearers of the one sort of pelvis throughout history have been completely and utterly arbitrary. It cannot follow from this that the perception of an anatomical difference so deep as to be immediately evident in the skeleton is nothing more than an illusion. 

Perhaps in contemporary reflection on sex and gender there is a dim awareness of the past few million years of evolution, of the progress we have made from 50% to 15%, and a sense that this trend towards non-dimorphism can be hastened by collective political will. Perhaps it can be. Still, flat denial of dimorphism is an expression of how one would like things to be, not a description of how things are. And when dimorphism is finally reduced to 0%, and reproduction is taken care of by technicians in laboratories, and patriarchy is banished to the past, the claim that there is now no sex difference will still be a factual claim about certain entities in nature (entities that have arrived in their present condition by a combination of evolution and technocultural innovation). 

Imagine that our species had developed in such a way that males were not on average 15% larger than females, but, like the Lamprologus callipterus species of fish, 60 times or so larger. Suppose that nonetheless we managed to develop into a technologically complex, liberal-democratic society that put a high premium on individual thriving, on freedom and equality. Suppose that within that society a school of thought and a political movement emerged that held that, even though men are 60 times larger than women, both sexes nonetheless have the same basic neural equipment to thrive, to the extent that their physical dimensions permit, in more or less the same way.

But suppose then another school of thought emerged, which said that this first one did not go far enough, and insisted that men are not actually 60 times larger than women, and that it is only a result of ideological indoctrination that we have believed they are up until now. "But my mate can only fit a single tip of an antenna into our home," some traditionalist woman might protest, "while I can swim around inside freely. He keeps accidentally eating me and having to spit me back out because I’m literally too small for him to detect, while when I’m with him he literally obstructs everything else from my field of vision. I think he's gaining weight-- at this point it takes me more than a day just to circumnavigate him. Surely I’m not imagining that." And then of course she would be mobbed on Twitter for these heresies.

The thought experiment starts to founder when we note that such a species would never have ‘homes’, and almost certainly not monogamous mates either, while our species in turn never would have developed into a complex, liberal-democratic, egalitarian society if males had been, or had remained, 60 times larger than females. Culture, with the innovative technological work-arounds that it has come up with to break the stranglehold of the sexual division of labor, and all the other ways it has been able to some degree to assure that biology, for men and women alike, is not destiny, has been the principal motor of our motion towards non-dimorphism over the past few million years. Behind a veil of ignorance, you could surely know in advance that a species in which the males are 60 times larger than the females is not a species with automated payroll systems, cosmetic surgery, Twitter, or its own version of Judith Butler.

Again, it is likely that some dim awareness that this is the direction culture is pushing quite unsurprisingly leads some to suppose that culture must be pushed in turn, and we must eradicate whatever similarities remain to the L. callipterus. This is an understandable desire, but one also feels the need to warn against undue rashness. Biology may not be exclusive destiny, but it does dictate the terms under which the will is free to do its work. Will is not exclusive destiny either, and you are setting yourself up for ideological extremism, followed by disappointment, if you pretend that it is.

But forget about sex and gender for a second and focus on the more general question: What is a human being?

For Thomas Aquinas, even though we are contingently lodged in a mortal corruptible animal body, our true nature is eternal, and comes from the divine order of things, not the natural one. Later German idealism may be seen in important respects as the project of preserving the non-natural character of human geistlich existence, while removing its theological underpinning. French poststructuralism inherits this project, willy-nilly, as you will surely know if you ever, say, go to a fine restaurant with a high-mandarin Parisian philosophy professor and ask him what he thinks about the moral implications of eating meat. And posturing American radicalism, with its roots in French poststructuralism, inherits these conceits in turn, but with an ever decreasing level of historical self-consciousness, of appreciation of the millennia-old ideas blowing through it like a wind-sock.

William H. Gass, Philosopher (1924-2017)

I wrote a commemoration of William H. Gass for n+1, focusing in particular on his training as a philosopher and on the significance of this training for his life's work. To read the whole thing, go here. 

William Howard Gass, who died on December 6 at the age of 93, is one of the very few philosophers of the 20th century to transcend the essential boringness of that social identity. What university committees did he serve on? What was his teaching load? What was the “impact factor” of the journals he published in? Who cares. Gass, who completed his dissertation under the supervision of the analytic philosopher Max Black at Cornell University in 1954, and who worked for a short time with (to the extent that one could work with) Ludwig Wittgenstein, also wrote what is perhaps the greatest, bleakest, most rigorous, and finely calibrated American novel of his era, 1995’s The Tunnel. Impact factor: either “incalculable,” or “n/a,” depending on your view of disciplinary boundaries.

Yet his literary output must not be seen as an abandonment of his earlier trajectory. Idiosyncrasy is the integrity of genius, it is sometimes said. Gass was writing philosophy the only way he could. His principal preoccupation in philosophy was with metaphor, which you might think is a perfect point at which to bring philosophy and literature into conversation. You might think this, until you read Black on the subject, writing around the same time Gass was completing his graduate work under him: “To draw attention to a philosopher’s metaphors,” Black observes, “is to belittle him—like praising a logician for his beautiful handwriting.” He concludes that while metaphors are unavoidable and might sometimes be harnessed for salutary ends, they are, in general, dangerous, “and perhaps especially in philosophy.”

It is not hard to imagine young Gass chafing at the bit that midcentury analytic philosophy had sought to place in his mouth...

Continued here.

Notes on Social Media and Autocracy

[To appear, in some modified version, in my forthcoming book, Irrationality: A History (Princeton University Press, 2018)]

Over the last few weeks we have learned that part of Russia's intervention in the 2016 US election included placing ads on Facebook that spanned the political spectrum: some were in support of Black Lives Matter against police brutality, others were in support of 'Blue Lives Matter', defending the bravery of police officers who put themselves in harm's way. Some were in support of crackdowns on illegal immigration, while others promoted LGBT rights. Some pretended to be pro-Sanders, and others pro-Trump. None, however, were straightforwardly pro-Clinton.

What exactly was the strategy here? Some people have taken this willingness to play both sides as evidence that the Russian regime could not have been straightforwardly pro-Trump. But it seems to miss the point to suggest that that regime's responsibility in Trump's victory must have had anything straightforward about it, or that its support of Trump must have been in the same spirit as the support expressed by a misguided but nevertheless sincere American voter. The purpose of the Russian operation was to sow disorder and to weaken the American political establishment, and its agents understood that supporting left causes at the same time as they supported Trump was the best way to do this. In this far Russia was following the exact strategy already worked out during the Greek crisis, in which its agents supported both the far-left Syriza party and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. They didn't want the Republicans to triumph as an end in itself; they wanted chaos to triumph, and here they clearly succeeded. Unlike misguided American voters, they understood that Trump is not in any meaningful sense a Republican, but rather an agent of chaos.

And so the Russian intelligence agents took to social media, or, more precisely, they paid young Russian college graduates to work for their cause by farming 'likes' from a troll farm in St. Petersburg. And soon enough Russian trolls were successfully goading Americans on Twitter and Facebook into debating, sharing, liking, content on all manner of distractious hot-button issues. At least one social-media user by the name of Jenna Abrams turned out not to exist at all, but to have been invented as a false identity for one or several Russian trolls. Before being exposed she had succeeded in riling Americans into engaging with her on the meaning of the Confederate flag, on Rachel Dolezal, and on 'manspreading', the recently concocted transgression by men on public transportation who do not hold their legs sufficiently close together.

Social pressure, largely generated by social media, had by 2015 pushed New York City to make sitting with your legs too far apart an arrest-worthy offence, and that same year the Police Reform Organizing Project released compelling data showing that arrests for this new crime overwhelmingly swept up black and Latino men. Yet in social media, any acknowledgment of anything that looks like an objective dilemma is more or less impossible, as for example that there might be a conflict between the imperative to eliminate patriarchy as manifested in the microagressions of male fellow citizens, on the one hand, and the imperative to combat police persecution of marginalized communities on the other. Acknowledgment of the complexities of reality is impossible, and so the social-media-based left came down decisively in favor of wiping manspreading from the face of the earth, and doing its best not to see the downside of this campaign.

A society that spends its time talking about manspreading cannot be doing well. Jenna Abrams' role in keeping that particular conversation going was part of a broader campaign to ensure that public discourse not improve, at least long enough to whisk into office a new American president who is himself the personification of this sickness, whose own orally produced speech sounds, in style and grammar and syntax, more or less like his textual interventions in social media. The intelligence operation did not require any ingenious back-channel maneuvering, or any intelligence at all of the sort that we have traditionally expected spy agencies to excel in. In order to do their part in making a social-media celebrity the president of the United States, foreign intelligence operatives had only to get into the spirit of social media itself, to master the English lingo, become fluent in meme-making, and in general to adopt and promote the norms of discourse that in any case had already triumphed in the United States. Russian intelligence agents did not invent manspreading-- on the Moscow metro in fact a man is much more likely to be confronted for the opposite transgression of crossing his legs, which is perceived as feminine (I should know: I myself have been assaulted in Moscow for this very thing). But they did understand how to weaponize this American invention and use it for the further corrosion of public discourse.

Nor, of course, did Russian intelligence come up with the new economy of 'likes', but this did not prevent its agents from incentivizing the work of its trolls by measuring their success in this new quasi-currency. As one troll told an interviewer about their work: "You should always write that sodomy is a sin, and that will bring you a couple dozen 'likes'." This economy was devised in the United States (the inventor of the 'like' button, Justin Rosenstein, born in 1983, has deleted his own Facebook account out of concerns about its addictive power). But unlike the attempts in the 1990s of Jeffrey Sachs and others to export economic expertise to a system that did not wish to receive it, like-seeking, though of course only in its early stages, appears ideally poised to take over the world. It is particularly well-suited to regimes, and to those sectors of society that serve them, that are intent on fostering chaos, precisely because, where likes are being sought, the goal of tolerance and understanding has almost certainly already been abandoned. In online discourse, to cite a well-known critic, "measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you towards content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended." To certain hold-outs from the old world, these punishments might seem to have to do only with such relatively unserious matters as our circles of friends and our self-esteem. But the emerging reality, a reality the trolls knew how to exploit, is one in which what gets liked, and what gets flamed or trolled, is not just a concern that we have in our personal lives and that we leave behind when we move to think about political and economic matters. What gets liked or clicked or trolled, rather, is now, suddenly, at the very heart of politics and economics.

The internet is destroying everything. In the aftermath of its Shiva-like arrival, the rest of the world, all that was here before, can easily appear as a ruin. It has destroyed or is in the process of destroying long-familiar objects: televisions, newspapers, musical instruments, clocks, books. It is also destroying institutions: stores, universities, banks, happy hours, movie theaters, democracy. Some findings indicate that it is even bringing down teen-pregnancy rates and, in Japan, fertility rates in general. Shiva, traditionally called 'the destroyer', is not for that reason an entirely negative force. It is good and natural to raze down the old, to slough off what is no longer vital or useful, as hunter-gatherer cultures understood already in deep pre-history when they mastered the practice of controlled burning. Fire, in fact, seems like the most suitable comparison in the prior history of technology: when our hominid ancestors learned to use it at least 400,000 years ago, the suite of changes they initiated was immense. It brought cooking and heating, and it also brought countless deaths and immeasurable environmental destruction. It made us what we are, and the internet is already in the course of making us what we will be.

If we think this is unjust, this cannot be because it does not continue the general course of human history since the Paleolithic, but rather because it is a sudden transformation that has taken place without any collective decision having been made about it, in an era in which we had come to believe that great transformations required, and deserved, collective rational deliberation, followed by a vote, followed by citizen oversight. The fact that there has never been any question of such a procedure for determining the way the internet is to be incorporated into our lives, is in itself a clear indication of how much more powerful it is than liberal democracy. The internet trumps liberal democracy, as fire surely burned right through the myths and practices of hominid groups that had previously got by without it.

This in turn helps to explain why, even though it was still being heralded just a decade ago as the bringer of a new liberal-democratic utopia in the very near future, when Twitter was still winning awards for its role in bringing the Arab Spring, it nevertheless could reveal itself to be doing exactly the opposite in such a short period of time. After all, its destructiveness has consisted largely in amplifying the very powers that had long been taken to be the bedrock of liberal democracy-- most notably free speech. Billions of people now have a sort of free speech, in the sense that they have the power to say more or less whatever they think they want to say, and generally to get at least a few likes for it.

But they have this power in a new and mutated form, where it is disconnected from any obviously binding standard of truth, or any expectation that it will be deployed for the purpose of sincere communication, that computers, in sum, will be used in anything like the spirit Leibniz had in mind with his irenic-rationalist hortation, "Let us compute!" The new free speech is only free, moreover, in that it seems to flow directly from the desire of the speaker (or writer, or tweeter), yet once it is released it is channeled by secret algorithms (on which, again, we have made no collective decision and in relation to which we have no oversight) along pathways where it is practically guaranteed not to bring any more light to anyone regarding the subject of interest, but only to reinforce group solidarity in an online community, or to accost and attack an outsider to that group, usually by means of ad hominems and in total ignorance of the past few millennia's hard-won effort to lay down rules for the avoidance of informal fallacies.

Online discourse feels free, to the extent that it is pleasing to the individual who puts it out there, but it is more or less always channeled either down the path of like-seeking, or down the path of trolling. This pseudo-freedom affords authoritarian leaders, in turn, the appearance of at least a vestigial concern to protect the core values of liberal democracy. As long as individual citizens continue to believe that democratic citizenship has attained its full realization in an unending online argument about manspreading, the autocrats, as they say, have won.

Nor is it the case that within a bubble, that is, within an algorithmically generated imagined community, all is peaceful and stable. Bubbles are fragile, and soap gets in your mouth. This is particularly so when other members of the community are constantly seeking to wash the mouths of those whose speech they deem insufficiently pure. This dynamic seems to be intrinsic to left-wing debate online, to the so-called 'call-out culture' that reigns there. As the critic Mark Fisher wrote, this culture is "driven by a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd." Thus, to return to the issue of manspreading, it is not just that the left is exhausting itself arguing with Russian trolls pretending to be American conservatives who think it is a man's right and an anatomical necessity that he spread his legs as widely as he wishes; but the left is also exhausting itself, and needlessly and destructively hardening itself where obviously some flexibility is in order, to the extent that its members are perpetually seeking out and condemning any hesitation, uncertainty, recognition that sometimes legitimate desiderata are mutually exclusive.

When expressions of such things are essayed online, the enforcers of the community are ready to pounce, and to make the doubter know he is not in the in-crowd. This may be a small punishment, compared to public stockades or flogging, but it adds up to real-world effects. It is not the Cultural Revolution, but that does not mean that its spirit is not fundamentally Maoist. The fact that Maoism can thrive at a sub-state level, and have real political consequences, even in a world that is governed by right-wing populism, is a significant lesson, and one Mao himself surely could not have predicted. In the UK police forces are now sending out officers who are purportedly specialized in LGBT issues to exert pressure on supermarkets that guide customers towards products using language that is deemed too gender-specific, and thus 'transphobic'-- for example, associating tampons with women. Thus the state apparatus of a country now governed by craven populists who have come to power by exploiting ethnonationalist ressentiment and fear of immigrants is also using its power to impose norms of language that are, first of all, patently against the will, the sensibility, and the understanding of the vast majority of citizens, and, moreover, that have emerged out of the online activity of a small minority.

Meanwhile, back online, it is typically the most cut-throat and unflinching personalities who thrive, the Robespierres and the Berias. Virtually no one whose public reputation was built up entirely in social media can be said to be noteworthy rather than notorious. It is an ugly dystopia, and has utterly failed to deliver on its promised goods.

Le Naturel et l'inné

Résumé d'une conférence donnée au colloque de rentrée du Collège de France, le 20 octobre 2017. Pour voir le programme du colloque, cliquez ici.

Jusqu’à présent, la collision de la philosophie européenne avec des systèmes de savoir indigènes à l’âge classique a été peu étudiée. Je propose ici d’examiner la philosophie de Leibniz comme chapitre particulièrement important dans l’histoire de l’échange épistémique globale qui est l’histoire cachée de la philosophie européenne moderne.

En 1695, la même année où G. W. Leibniz introduit son système d’harmonie préétablie, le philosophe allemand consacre la plupart de ses efforts intellectuels à étudier les vertus de la racine d’ipecacuanha, ramenée du Brésil quelques décennies auparavant par Wilhelm Piso. Leibniz veut extraire de cette plante, non seulement des remèdes médicinaux, mais également, dans la mesure du possible, des savoirs indigènes brésiliens. Il rejette l’opinion de certains autres qui « condamnent tout ce qui est exotique comme inutile pour nos corps [européens] ».

Sur ce point, Leibniz peut être caractérisé comme naturaliste dans le sens de Philippe Descola : la conformation externe des Brésiliens et des Européens est la même. Mais où en est-il en ce qui concerne l’intériorité des uns et des autres ? Déjà au XVIIe siècle, en Europe, les systèmes de savoirs indigènes du monde extra-européen représentaient une sorte de tertium quid entre l’a priori et l’empirique. Il s’agissait de la connaissance des faits singuliers qui porte sur le monde naturel – les propriétés médicinales de telle ou telle racine ou les puissances du vénin de tel ou tel serpent – mais cette connaissance n’était pas apprise, au moins pas dans la même façon qu’un Européen décide de se mettre à apprendre la science chimique ou botanique. Elle était plutôt censée naître ensemble avec l’individu, simplement en vertu de son intégration dans une société qui était, elle, intégrée dans la nature.

Une telle société était supposément sans connaissance des vérités éternelles et inchangeables – l’existence de Dieu notamment – mais en même temps ses membres avaient ce que la plupart des philosophes européens ont considéré comme une contradiction en termes : la connaissance innée des faits singuliers et contingents. L’une des innovations les plus étonnantes de la philosophie radicalement rationaliste de Leibniz a été de montrer comment ce genre de connaissance est possible, et même nécessaire, pour tous les êtres humains en tant que humains. Même si cela prendra quelques siècles encore pour se développer en programme de recherche mûr, à la fin du XVIIe siècle, donc, les systèmes de savoir indigènes offraient déjà un modèle pour étudier l’esprit comme essentiellement enraciné dans l’environnement naturel.

Si cette innovation deviendra plus tard le fondement des approches théoriques en anthropologies structuraliste et cognitive, en philosophie de l’esprit enactiviste ainsi qu’en d’autres champs de recherche semblables, dont tous présupposent l’égalité absolue de tous les êtres humains, à l’âge classique elle servait souvent (si non pas pour Leibniz lui-même) comme critère épistémique pour déterminer la frontière dans le grand partage entre eux et nous, entre les « naturels » et les rationnels. Avant qu’il y eut des catégories raciales ancrées dans des traits physiques observables, interprétés comme signes externes de différences essentielles internes, il y avait une distinction peut être plus fondamentale encore entre deux « espèces d’esprit » : les uns qui se sont pour ainsi dire figés de la terre ; les autres qui dérivent leur nature des cieux, c’est à dire d’une source divine ou externe au monde naturel. Leibniz, même s’il n’en était pas pleinement conscient, nous offre un modèle de l’esprit humain dans lequel tout esprit participe dans les deux espèces, dans la mesure où le savoir naturel est inné en lui, sans être fondamentalement différent de la connaissance de Dieu et d’autres vérités a priori non-naturelles.

Notes on ъ

In Old Church Slavonic there were two letters representing short vowels. These were called ‘yer’, and there were two species of them: the ‘front yer’, ‘ь’, and the ‘back yer’, ‘ъ’

These were reduced into ultra-short vowels in the modern Slavic languages, and eventually into signs that can’t really be called vowels at all. In Russian the ь became a мягкий знак or ‘soft sign’; while the ъ became a твёрдый знак or ‘hard sign’.

The soft sign is generally transliterated into the Latin alphabet with a single apostrophe: ’. It tells you more about how to pronounce the consonant that precedes it, than about a further distinct sound that needs to be made. When in The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann drops in a few Russian phrases, he prefers to use a ‘j’ for the soft sign: potselovatj rather than potselovat’ (infinitive of ’to kiss’). I like the ‘j’; it is, after all, an orthographic variant of ‘i’, just as the soft sign is a descendant of it. And indeed, historically, at least into the early 18th century, it would have been an ‘i’: potselovati. The letter ‘i’ continues to play a role in Romanian similar to the soft sign, e.g., the local name for Bucharest, București, or for the Moldavian cities of Huși or Iași (pronounced, roughly, ‘Hush’ and ‘Yash’, with a little hint of a vowel at the end).

There are not a few jokes about the soft sign, as of the Soviet tour guide who is walking under a massive sequence of iron letters bearing the name of the city of Tver’ (Tverj, Тверь). A letter falls and hits him on the head. Was he injured? No, it was a soft sign. (There is a variant of this joke, told by my friend Abbas, in which his wife throws a can of Coke at his head. Was he hurt? No, it was a soft drink.)

It is a different story all together with the hard sign (ordinarily transliterated by two apostrophes), at least in the East Slavic languages. It went from being a generic back vowel in Old Church Slavonic, to being an ultra-short vowel in early Russian, to simply ceasing to do anything at all by the time of the Bolshevik (Bol’shevik, Boljshevik, Большевик) Revolution. It was, accordingly, purged in an early Soviet spelling reform. Now, as it had previously stood by convention at the end of every word that did not otherwise terminate in a vowel or in a soft sign, this made many, many words at least one sign shorter. It is said that the post-reform editions of War and Peace were 100 pages shorter than the original as a result of the loss of the hard sign, but this is an exaggeration.

Or rather it is not that it was there as a mere convention, and the Bolsheviks were not entirely fair in judging it by the principle of ‘From each according to his work’. It was there as a reminder of an earlier stage in the history of the Slavic languages when every consonant had to have a vowel following it, and so, if there was to be any exception to this, it had to be marked. Languages that place vowels by default after consonants are numerous (after all, what it is to be a consonant is to be with-sound), including, familiarly, Spanish and Italian. In Sanskrit a consonant standing alone is presumed to be followed by a generic vowel, unless another vowel is explicitly indicated or unless one puts down a so-called foot: thus त is ta while त् is simply t. What the Russians realised is that the absence of a sign can in some cases do the job just as well as its presence: if nothing explicitly tells you that a word ends in a consonant, then you can simply take the consonant at the end as, well, the end. 

But what I really wanted to talk about is the fate of these signs in Bulgarian, and how this can shine some light on the character of the Balkan Sprachbund, a beautiful example of the common linguistic phenomenon in which unrelated languages that overlap in a geographical region come to have significant syntactic and grammatical similarities. Bulgarian (along with Macedonian, which is often classified as on a dialect continuum with Bulgarian) is the only Slavic language with definite articles; as in Romanian and in Albanian, they are suffixed to the noun. Bulgarian is the only Slavic language to have entirely lost its nominal declensions; while Romanian is the only Romance language to have preserved cases, they are significantly reduced and, existing alongside a modern-Romance prepositional system, appear vestigial.

In phonetics, too, there is important cross-Danube influence of Romanian on Bulgarian, and vice versa. In Bulgarian the hard sign, curiously, evolved in exactly the opposite direction than in Russian: rather than withering into non-existence, it grew into a full-fledged, healthy vowel. It is not called a hard sign at all, but rather a ер голям or ‘big sign’. It is as it were the most basic vowel sound possible: just what you get when you open your mouth and make sound, something between an ‘u’ and an ‘a’, or, more precisely, an ‘ə’. It is the first vowel in the word for ‘Bulgaria’ itself: България. When I come across it in Bulgarian I tend to read it as if it were Russian, I see it as a sort of blank or interruption in a word, as if България were ‘Bxlgaria’ or ‘B-lgaria’. But it’s not, of course, and my mistake is to take Russian as the model of all Slavic languages.

Romanian was commonly written in Cyrillic into the late 19th century (Moldovan still is), and when it was the Romanian vowel ă, the so called ‘A-breve’, was rendered as ъ. Moldovan preserves Cyrillic because of its historical-cultural contact with the Russian and Soviet world, and thus linguistically with the East Slavic world. But the historical contact with Cyrillic of the Romanian written in, say, Giurgiu, is trans-Danubian, linguistically South Slavic, and culturally Orthodox. The ə is a Romano-Bulgarian vowel, and the evolution of the ъ to accommodate it has much more to do with the soundscape of the Balkans than with any distinctly or narrowly Slavic legacy.

I would like to go on and discuss the yat' (ѣ), the yus, both little (Ѧ) and big (Ѫ), and so many other transitional fossils from the history of Slavic phonetics and of the always imperfect effort to render traces of sound by visible inscription, but this will be for another day.

--Ruse (Русе, Russe, Rousse, Rusciuc, Русчук), Bulgaria, 26 August 2017.

(The image is from the typography studio of Artem Lebedev, and is a tribute to all of the Russian letters that fell victim to the 1918 purge.)

A Conversation With Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, The Nation's New Poetry Editors

Originally posted at 3 Quarks Daily.

On August 7, The Nation announced the appointment of Steph Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith as its new poetry editors. Beginning in the Fall, they will be soliciting and commissioning a wide range of American and international poetry, and will begin accepting submissions on September 15.

Steph Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University, and the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including The Poem Is You (Harvard University Press, 2016). 

Carmen Giménez Smith is Professor of English at Virginia Tech, a CantoMundo fellow, and the author of a memoir and four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

On August 15, Carmen and Steph joined Justin E. H. Smith by Skype to talk about their work to come at The Nation, and about poetry in America. 

* * *

Justin E. H. Smith: What is poetry doing in The Nation? Does it fit within a unified mission that the magazine has, or is it something more like a breath of fresh air that one can take while absorbing all the difficult news? How do you see it?

Steph Burt: That's a good question. There are a couple of answers I'd want to give to that. The first is that different poems do different things. Carmen and I are only going to print poems we like a lot. But we're not going to like them all for the same reasons. I assume that you like more than one kind of food and my guess is that you listen to more than one kind of music, and that you like different foods and different kinds of music for different reasons. This is sort of the argument of the book about how to read poetry that I'm working on now, so we're talking about that at the same time as we're talking about poetry at The Nation. Different poems do different things. We might print a poem that is a breath of fresh air and a break from thinking abut the struggle against white supremacy; and then we might print a poem whose subtle, careful way of examining language and history shows us how complicated the roots of the problem of white supremacy are; and then we might print a third poem that is a turning-it-up-to-eleven, articulate expression of the need to stay outraged. Those are three good kinds of poem. Three poems in one issue might be a bit much, though if they're short we could do that. Take another urgent problem of politics and culture that The Nation frequently addresses: we might print a poem about the delights of a fruit orchard; we might then print another poem that is a very cold, scientific look at how the earth has changed; and we might print another poem whose emotional undercurrent is, Holy cow! Miami's going to be underwater really soon. Those are three poems that all address the same urgent issue, that's a political issue, but in three different ways, one of which might seem non-political if you're looking at it in a certain way. It is true that in some sense everything is political. It is true in another sense that if the only question you ask about something in your life is, How can I address this as a matter of public policy? Or, How can I address this as a community activist? that's not a life, as someone who is concerned with public policy and with communities, that I want anyone in my community to have to live. So poetry in general can speak to what we need to do together, and it can speak to the lives and the experiences that it is the job of politics to make possible.

Carmen Giménez Smith: I think poetry has always had a role in social-justice movements, and I think rhetorically that there is a way in which theoretical approaches and descriptions, and reportage-based work is vital to changing the world. But I also think that there's a kind of new world-building, a kind of optimistic possibility that gets expressed in art that sometimes can't get expressed in journalism. I also think, again rhetorically --and I think of all writing as having a rhetorical purpose--, that art can say a lot of things and have a tone that cannot be expressed in journalism. So my goal as an editor is to bring works that complement the rigorous journalistic work in the same pages, that add nuance to it, that deepen it, that humanize it. That's how I imagine the curatorial work that Steph and I will be doing for The Nation. I wouldn't necessarily dichotomize poetry into political and apolitical, because in some countries merely expressing the gaze is transgressive, writing a poem is transgressive. I think that having the liberty to look into the world and describe it in itself can be a highly transgressive mode. Having subjectivity isn't a guarantee, no one is guaranteed a subjectivity, and so any kind of expression in art, I think, is implicitly resistant. It's not the way we talk, it's not the way we think, yet we're still moved to be in the world in that way. So I do think that there's a kind of political charge in every expression of poetry, whether it's about just the changing of the seasons or, whether it's about the change of seasons representing the coming of the apocalypse. Which it sure feels like these days.

Punching Down

From the most recent issue of The Point Magazine. To read the whole piece, go here. 

I recently found myself at an academic conference that featured a presentation by graduate students on “combating racism with humor.” We were made to watch a video clip of a theater piece they had performed in connection with an anti-racism event. The skit depicted corporate executives planning an ad campaign associating the efficacy of soap products with their power to make people of color white. I found myself pitying the students. They had obviously overestimated their ability to change the world. But they were also, it seemed to me, tragically unaware of what humor is. They were mistaking it for a tool to be deployed in the pursuit of real-world ends: closing the gap between the powerful and the powerless, ensuring payback time for the fat cats, sticking it to the man.

It is hard to blame them. They were under the grip of a widespread illusion, expressed by Garry Trudeau along with countless others after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in 2015, that humor only achieves its highest purpose when it “punches up”—that is, when it involves the powerless kicking back against the powerful. But to insist that a joke is not funny because it punches down is a category mistake. It is to deploy standards of justice where justice is not at issue. We see an analogous mistake when philistines judge that, say, a crucifix photographed in a jar of urine is, to the extent that it is offensive, not art. “That’s not funny” is the comedic equivalent of “that’s not art”—both are statements that can be made only by people who don’t understand the thing they are talking about.

I am entering the silverback stage of life, and at this point it is surely a variety of punching down—or, as we used to say, it is undignified—to berate graduate students. It is getting to be time for me to cede my place to them, I know, and to acknowledge that other meaning of “humor,” according to which young people’s internal passages are coursing with fluids, while the old, as Robert Burton said in The Anatomy of Melancholy, are quite dry. We have different humoral constitutions than the young, and so it is fitting that we should also have a different sense of humor. I happen to be dessicating moreover in a critical moment of history that has compelled me to rethink everything I long took for granted about humor: what it is, what it is for and whom it should target...

Continued here. 

The Stockholm Conspiracy

(A translation of Gabriel Daniel, Histoire de la conjuration faite à Stokolm contre Mr. Descartes, Amsterdam, 1696).

While Monsieur Descartes was living peacefully at the Court of Sweden, whither his virtue, his dedication to the truth, his great genius in the sciences, and the high reputation that he had acquired, had caused him to be called by Queen Christina, there formed against him one of the most dangerous conspiracies of which we have, perhaps, ever heard spoken.

As he rejected from his philosophy several Qualities and Accidents, of the existence of which no one had been accustomed to doubt, the Cold and the Dry, two of the four Primary Qualities, outraged with pain by the fact that he had made them out to be chimerical beings, resolved to take revenge for this affront, and to make their power felt by this proud philosopher (this is how they called M. Descartes). But before executing their plan, these Qualities deemed it appropriate to confer on the subject with all of those who, having been outraged by M. Descartes, were riled up against him.

The Substantial Forms of all kinds belonging to this group, as well as the Accidents, along with the Virtues and Occult Qualities, were called upon by Heat, who took the trouble to propose to them a conference, in order to deliberate on the way to retaliate against the audacity of their enemy, and in order to take the right measures in such an important affair. All of them promised to show up; they settled on a date, and chose a suitable place for this famous assembly, so that what had at the outset been nothing more than a little plot among a couple of Qualities, transformed into a general conspiracy.

They were so agitated against M. Descartes, that not one of them failed to show up to the meeting. However, as not all of them had been able to find a comfortable spot, in view of the darkness of the place, there was at first a great confusion. And several beings that have an antipathy the ones for the others, having unfortunately encountered each other, fell into furious combat, which seemed that it could only finish with the total destruction of the party who turned out to be the weakest. Already the Form of Fire, stern enemy of the other Forms, had reduced several of them to howling. Already sundry Accidents were feeling the effects of his violence, and there was only the Form of Water that dared to oppose him. Regrettably the whole place had been closed up, for fear that Sound, who has trouble keeping a secret, might escape, and tell the first person he might encounter what had happened at the conference. But as someone had opened the windows, Light entered, who by her agreeable aspect and brilliant shine brought joy to the whole assembly, and brought out what there was of beauty in that place. The combattants were separated, and each was put in the place that was suitable for him.

Everyone was not yet in his place when Heat declared to the whole company, with much vehemence, that no one knew any longer what to hold to since M. Descartes had published his Roman de la Nature, and had dared to remove from the categories virtually all beings that had been present there; that it was a shameful thing that they had suffered for such a long time, since a new philosopher, disdainful of the whole of wise antiquity, had the resolve to treat as chimerical everything that had been believed up until then about their being and their functions; that it would be necessary to punish this foolhardy man as soon as possible, who had called for their ruin, and to give him to know not only that they existed, but that they had the power to make him perish himself.

The assembly was applauding this plan, when Cold said, with a trembling voice, that we should not move so fast; that M. Descartes had not treated them as badly as they thought; that he had let all of them go on with the same privileges as before; that he was only trying to explain their nature in a more simple and easy manner than those who had preceded him; that he therefore did not understand what this philosopher was guilty of.

Barely had Cold finished speaking, when Heat, his mortal enemy, exposed his error. She maintained that, seeing the matter clearly, M. Descartes was absolutely destroying all the beings that constituted the assembly. For he did not give them any other existence than that of Modified Matter, and of Local Motion, while other philosophers granted truth to Substantial Forms and to the Accidents of material entities, even though they were distinct from Matter and Motion.

As this reasoning appeared decisive, the Occult Qualities stood up in turn, and complained that this new philosophy deprived them of their principal privilege, which consisted in being unknown by learned men. They said that they had always peaceably enjoyed this, and that the great men had never dared to examine the secret channels by which they produced so many wonders; that on the contrary they admitted their ignorance on this subject; that however M. Descartes, being more reckless, or rather less wise than his masters, pretended to discover what had been hidden for so long, and wished to make known and easy to understand everything that was most surprising in the actions of the Occult Qualities: which was properly to deprive them of the admiration that they had won for themselves.

As each one had their reasons for favoring the Occult Qualities, their complaint seemed just. But the one made by Light was judged to be more reasonable still. Who would have thought, she said, that a philosopher would dare to take me on, to deny my existence; can we open our eyes without recognising that I exist? And is it not surprising that there are men who are so ungrateful as to work towards destroying me, even as they are taking advantage of my benefits?

Interrupting Light, Darkness said to her: Descartes never doubted your existence. How could he deny it, since it is about you that he composed his most beautiful Traités de Physique? How then can you then be so indignant against him?

Light replied: It must be that you are very little enlightened, not to see that my complaint is just. I acknowledge that M. Descartes agrees that I exist. He also recognises how useful I am to men and to the other animals. But please, ask him what he thinks of me, and he'll boldly tell you that I am nothing other than an inclination to motion, or an effort that is made, in order to move, by certain little balls that he imagines are spread around the sun, and in the whole vortex of which this star occupies the center. Is it not, I ask you, to banish me from the universe, when he has me exercise my functions by means of these little bodies, which only subsist in the brain of M. Descartes? Do I not have a being distinct from Matter, and from Motion? And of all the Qualities, is there one that could be compared to me? It is thus with reason that I complain of this new physicist, who does not see as clearly as he thinks, since his eyes are so bad as to attribute to Modified Matter what arises from a Quality as noble and indeed illustrious as I am.

The Colours, those lovable daughters of Light, which derive from their brilliant mother everything they have of radiance and beauty, joined their complaints to hers. They inveighed against M. Descartes for daring to exclude them from the society of beings, and even tried to turn his opinion into something ridiculous. He wishes, they said, that the grass of the fields should be green only during the day, and that the enamel of flowers no longer survive once the night has come. He imagines that the shine of gold, of diamonds, and other precious stones, and every individual colour, is nothing other than a certain sentiment caused by the stronger or weaker reflection of the matter of the second element, and a thousand other similar chimeras that this great philosopher spouts, as so many truths that he pretends to have thoroughly proven. It is in this way that the Colours rejoiced, at the expense of M. Descartes, and it is also here that they were able to turn the entire assembly to their favour, not so much by their reasons as by their liveliness and their agreement.

It was at this point in the conference that there suddenly arose a confused noise, which left everyone stunned. It was Sound, who, wishing to make his own complaint, was only able to groan. They asked him to speak more clearly; and then he said angrily that M. Descartes had caused him to lose his reputation with the philosophers; that among practically no one spoke any more of Sound as a Real Accident; that they attributed all of his actions to certain undulations of the air, or rather to the direct motion of its parts, caused by the agitation of the insensible particles of resonant bodies; and, finally, that everywhere he had been placed at the level of the useless things of nature.

With these words, the Smells, the Tastes, Lightness, Heaviness, and many other Virtues, Qualities, and Accidents rose up; and after having affirmed Sound's complaint, one of them, speaking in the name of all the others, related the affront that had been done to them in several schools in which the new philosophy had been introduced, where, after having expelled them from among the categories, the philosophers dared to boast about it in their public declarations. He added that these continual encroachments upon their rights was leading to their total ruin, and that such a rebellion against the opinions of the ancients would undoubtedly have dangerous consequences if it was not repressed soon.

The Forms of the Elements, and those of the Mixtures, said that recently they had been treated with the deepest contempt, to the point where they had been relegated to imaginary spaces; that a defender of the ancient doctrine had well said, that what it is that brings it about that each thing resists its contrary, tends to maintain itself in its natural state, and to conserve the qualities that are proper to it, is the Substantial Form; that the others had paid no attention to his reasons, and had asked him, laughing, whether the Form of the magnet had been well instructed as to what it should do in order to conserve its admirable virtue; and that this philosopher, having responded that it knows very well, was asked to consult with it, in order to clarify a number of difficulties concerning this stone that they had proposed to him, and which he had never been able to explain adequately. As the Forms, who were speaking in this way, do not always agree amongst themselves when they meet in the same subject, they thought they might be falling out with one another once again, for the disgrace that they had endured had unconsciously induced them to argue over their privileges. But after a certain number of contestations they came together, and resolved to relinquish their particular interests to the good of the common cause.

The Vegetative Souls, whose party was very considerable, did not content themselves with complaining in their turn; they sought to prove their existence. How, they said, could one explain how a tree or a flower produces a being that is like it, without us? Imagine so many fibres in a plant, or tubes if that pleases you, for the circulation of the juices that ascend in it, you will never be able to conceive how, by this circulation, such a plant could be formed from a seed, if the Vegetative Soul had not taken care of this. This reasoning was found to be solid. And indeed, what could be said in response?

But of all the complaints that had been made up until then against M. Descartes, and against his doctrine, there was none that seemed better founded than that of the Substantial Forms of animals, which are commonly called Sensitive Souls. After these Forms had let loose against the philosopher, without sparing him insults, they mocked his opinion that animals are only machines: as if, they said, nature had made of the bodies of every animal so many marionettes, only moving about by springs. They made use of the reasoning that the Vegetative Souls had brought to bear, and maintined that a horse, for example, could not produce a being that is like it without the aid of the Form. They dilated next upon the industry of birds in making their nest, of the spider in making its web, on the skill of the hare in avoiding the hunter, of the cat in catching the mouse; on the faithfulness of the dog, on the generosity of the lion, and on a thousand other similar examples. Whence they concluded that so many marvellous actions could have no other principle than instinct, or the Substantial and Material Form of these animals.

This discourse was widely applauded. They spoke in the assembly only of the blindness of M. Descartes, and of his stubbornness in holding, with regard to the soul of beasts, to a paradox that is contrary to experience, and to the common view of all times and places. They regarded him as an enemy of the public good, who, in following only his own ideas, had contempt for those great philosophers whose authority alone was of equal weight to the best reasons, and they were on the point of taking up some violent resolution against him.

But Motion --who had been called to that assembly, since nothing could be done without him--, breaking the silence, felt it necessary to oppose the injustice they were about to commit. He said, to begin, that he had no interest in defending the doctrine of M. Descartes; that in any case all of his opinions would be rejected, as philosophy cannot do without Motion; that there was thus room to hope that they would listen to him the more favorably, as he had taken no side; that, moreover, as they were the judges and victims at once, their judgment would appear to have been delivered against all of the rules, if there was no one who had spoken for the accused; that, finally, they should not be offended by what he might say to them, since he was only attempting to give the reasons that had been alleged against their existence, in order to explain the truth. Next he took up in detail what diverse beings of the assembly had put forward in defense of their rights:

If men, he said, were obliged to attach themselves to the opinions of the ancients, it would be impossible for them to perfect the arts and sciences. As they are able every day to make new discoveries, nothing is more advantageous to them than to leave it to the liberty of each person to embellish or correct what their fathers left to them. Thus however guilty M. Descartes is of having abandoned the ancients when he believed them to be in error, he is to be praised, on the contrary, for having set out to scrutinise his reason in the aim of establishing philosophy on solid foundations. He appears to have had no other plan than to lead men to knowledge of the truth, and to provide them the means of finding it.

In this way he showed them the path of his method, and he then proposed an ingenious system for explaining all the phenomena of nature. It is without doubt by this means, and by the experiences that it would be necessary to do every day, as he did, that there are things we may be certain of in physics. And the Occult Qualities make fun, finding it bad that he wished to penetrate into the principles of natural things, without stopping at confused ideas or at the obscure terms that people were in the habit of using.

Why, this philosopher asks, should beings be admitted into the world of which we have no idea, and without which we can do perfectly well? Why do we bother with the Hot, the Cold, the Dry, and the Humid; with Light, Colours, Sound, Odors, Liquidity, Fluidity, Lightness, Heaviness, and an infinite number of other Qualities and Accidents, if all of the actions that we attribute to them can be explained, as it is easy to show, by the various movements and the different figures of the parts of Matter? Moreover who has ever conceived of the nature of these Qualities? What produces them in the body in which they had previously not been? What do they become when this same body acquires the contrary qualities, or is reduced to ashes?

It is a Form that gives rise to them, someone replies; it is another Form that causes them to die.

But what is this Form itself? Motion interjects. Is it a Substance? Is it an Accident? Is it a Mind? Is it a Body? Is it produced anew? What is it composed of? What is it to become? Let us extract ourselves from these difficulties, if we can. And if we cannot, let us admit that these Qualities, and these Forms of Elements, of Mixtures, and of Vegetables, such as they are ordinarily conceived, are fictions and chimeras.

Judging from the air of confidence with which you speak, replied Heat, we see very well that you are persuaded that we have nothing solid to reply to you in favour of Form. Know however that it is better known than you believe. And if you find obscurity in the definitions that are ordinarily given of it, you have only yourself to blame. Form, speaking in general, is the first act of the body that it informs; it is an imperfect substantial act; it is an incomplete substance drawn out of matter by eduction, maintained by this same matter, and essentially destined to constitute a substantial whole with it. The action of another Form brings about this incomplete substance in matter, where it previously was not in actu, but only in potentia. The matter that contained it in potency, received it in actuality, and conserves it after having received it, not by giving it being at each moment, as the First Cause does, but rather in sustaining and conserving the being that it already has. I do not know what happens to it when the composite is destroyed; one could say however that it goes to look for a place in some other portion of matter; or that it dissipates, that it evaporates, that it... in a word, that it ceases to be, since the whole of which it was a part no longer exists.

What light this explanation brings to the mind! shouted Motion. How clear and intelligible these terms are: first act of the body, imperfect substantial act, incomplete substance drawn from matter by eduction, etc. Of course one would be wrong to say that this doctrine of Forms, as well as that of Qualities, is pure gibberish, and a shadowy chaos in which one cannot make anything out.

It is true, Heat interrupted, that the defenders of the three elements, of vortices, of indefinite extension, and of automata, have the right to reject obscure and uncertain principles, those of which the hypothesis is so clear and so solidly established. Whatever the case may be, when we do not know the Form in itself, it is nevertheless plain that it exists. For, again, how do you want a tree to produce another tree if the Form, or the Vegetative Soul, is not involved?

And how is it that you yourself, Motion replied, want such an effect to be able to come from this pretended Soul? Does it know the disposition or the arrangement of the vesicles, the fibres, and the other little vessels of which the body of a plant is composed? Does it know the figure and the motion of the insensible parts of the juices that circulate there in order to nourish it? And if it should know this, does it have the power to move the body, and to arrange the parts as it finds pleasing? And do you take it to be so industrious as to wish to attribute to it the beauty and the inimitable artifice that we notice in the composition of certain flowers?

Do not tell me that one must at least have recourse to a Sensitive Soul in order to explain the propagation of species among animals, the conformation of their organs, and the various motions that they make with so much skill and subtlety. For do you not know that the body of man is formed in its mother, and he believes that it gains strength there, and becomes as perfect as it is when we see it, without the soul contributing anything, at least not directly, and without even knowing its secret springs, its proportions, or its symmetry?

I admit however, without going into any detail, that there is much wisdom and reason to be found in the admirable structure of the bodies of animals, and in many of the actions that they undertake to conserve themselves. But it is this very thing that, proving too much for you, does not prove anything: for it proves that if the Form is the principle that makes the bodies move, it must be reasonable, which the defenders of the Sensitive Soul would not dare, I believe, to maintain. The Form that you suppose is in animals is thus not the cause of their motions. One must agree that this can only be an intelligence that acts in them; I mean that it is the Author of Nature who has disposed the bodies of animals with such a marvelous artifice, that they execute, by the action of exterior objects and according to the laws of mechanics, these motions that are so correct and so ordered that one attributes them to an imaginary Form.

Motion wanted to continue, when someone of the company, outraged with anger from seeing him maintain with so much force the position of M. Descartes, replied that the philosopher, taking his imaginings for certain knowledge, promised more than he could give; that after having made us hope that he would explain everything in a simple and natural manner, he gave an account of physical effects only by certain elements, a certain assemblage of parts, certain motions and certain figures; that this was hardly different from certain Entities, certain Forms, certain Virtues, and certain Qualities. And that after all, by the right of seniority, the Scholastic je-ne-sais-quoi should win out over the Cartesian one.

What? replied Motion. Did M. Descartes not indicate in his system what the figure, the motion, and the order of the three elements is, the first being of which formed the universe? And would it not be better to explain the phenomena of Nature by the situation, the figure, the order, and the motion of the parts of matter, than to take recourse to unknown beings, which would never have had a name, nor a place in the categories, if the ignorance of the philosophers had not taken care to give them one? In the same way, he added, that he who does not know the springs of a watch nevertheless does not believe that there is in this little machine some other thing besides Matter and Motion, similarly one should not look for a principle of many surprising effects other than matter that is figured and disposed in a certain fashion. If we do not know the cause of the actions of animals as perfectly as we know the motions of a watch, this is because these natural machines are moved by a matter so subtle and so agitated that it escapes from the view of even the sharpest eyes; and moreover these machines are made by a hand that is infinitely more excellent than that of the artisan who is most able to make his skill and his invention the object of admiration in artifical machines.

All of Motion's responses displeased the assembly very much. They could not stand the zeal with which he defended opinions that were so insulting to them. But in order to make him change his view, and to draw him to their side, they made the case to him that he did not know his true interests; that M. Descartes had spared him no more than the others; that he maintained that Motion was not a being distinct from Matter, but only a Mode that was accidental to it; that this was one of the principal points of his system, and that he would never change his view on this matter.

Motion was shaken by this objection that touched him so closely; he tried at first to elude it, but after arguing for a while, finding himself enthusiastically pressed by the others, he admitted that he indeed felt that M. Descartes's great reputation had blinded him; that he had never really thought about the insult that he had received from this philosopher; that he finally understood the consequences of his doctrine; and that he did not claim to support it in public, nor to approve it in private.

Now that M. Descartes had no more defenders, his defeat was assured. And with their voices gathered together, this unfortunate philosopher was declared the founder and head of a sect in rebellion against the laws of the ancient and true philosophy; a disturber of the order of the Categories; an enemy of the Virtues and Occult Faculties, of Absolute and Non-Absolute Accidents; of Primary and Secondary Qualities; of the Forms of Elements and of Mixtures; of Material Souls either Vegetative or Sensitive, of the Instincts, Incomplete Substances, and in general of all of the Forms both Substantial and Accidental. And as such, he was condemned to endure the punishment that the assembly was to judge appropriate to impose upon him.

With this judgment solemnly pronounced, the only question that remained was the choice of the punishment that the criminal should undergo. The Forms of the most ferocious beasts in the land at first offered to tear M. Descartes to pieces, and to go and rip into him right inside the palace of the queen. But as this approach could have spun out of control, and proved fatal to the conspirators, they rejected this proposition, and resolved to avenge themselves in such a hidden manner that no one would be able to impute the deed to them.

It was at this point that Sound said that if Light wanted to work together with him, the two of them could easily bring it about that the so-called philosopher no longer be seen nor heard, and that he himself could no longer see nor hear.

But Heat did not go in for this idea, and in her impatience to appease her hate and her vengeance, she said to the conspirators: If you wish to permit me, I will act upon the body of M. Descartes with so much violence, and I will bring about such a disorder in his humours, through the combat that I will excite in him between contrary Qualities, that in no time I will be able to liberate you from this formidable enemy.

This was approved by the entire assembly, and it was decided that they would stick with this proposition. They asked Heat to execute this plan as soon as possible, after which each left in turn, according to his rank, and in careful order, so as to avoid further conflicts.

Heat could not have been more diligent. It was soon reported that M. Descartes had a high fever, with inflammation of the brain. And some hours later it was reported that he had died, and all the knowledge that he believed himself to have acquired was unable to prolong his life.

A terrible example, Monsieur, that should make you fear for yourself, if you dare to entertain any longer opinions for which their author paid such a high price. I hope that the story of this fatal conspiracy, about which you wished to learn in detail, has made an impression on your mind, and that it compels you to recognise that it is better to follow safely upon the path that the Ancients have carved out, than to expose ourselves to a thousand dangers in going down new roads.

More on the Search for Intelligent Life

It is hard to read about SETI and more recent related projects looking for intelligent life in the stars without discerning in them certain silent presuppositions about what counts or should count as intelligent life on earth. In particular, the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life is almost always taken to be the same thing as the search for technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. The search for other life that is intelligent in this respect is, in turn, almost always conceived as a search for any other intelligent life whatever, since it takes for granted that the search on earth has been exhaustive, and it has turned up no other species that are intelligent in any truly noteworthy way. The best candidates for intelligence among terrestrial species are taken to be the ones that have mastered some sort of modest technology: chimpanzees putting sticks down ant holes for example. On this scale, all other terrestrial species are bound to come in a distant second to homo sapiens. They use sticks, we use iPhones, etc., and thus no real comparison is possible.

Two considerations however compel us to question this approach to establishing a hierarchy.

First, it is not at all clear that tool-use, or a fortiori complex-tool-use, pertains to my own species essence in a significantly different way than it pertains to a chimpanzee’s species essence. If a chimpanzee and I were stranded on a desert island with only our wits to help us survive, I would not myself be able to build any tools, from available raw materials, that would be significantly more sophisticated than what the chimpanzee would come up with. I would however continue to use other truly species-specific advantages, such as bipedalism, to the best of my ability, towards my own survival.

In this connection, we also know that for a considerable portion, indeed the majority, of the history of anatomically modern humans (recently dated back to 300,000 ybp) there was virtually no material culture to distinguish homo sapiens from other primates. This began only roughly 50,000 ybp, around the period of what Colin Renfrew calls 'the human revolution'. This strongly suggests that our own technological advances over the past several tens of thousands of years might have more to do with coming to occupy a particular ecological niche, which cannot be occupied by more than one species, than it does with any particular species-specific capacities common to all humans qua humans, and foreign to all non-human animals.

In other words it is at least possible that technological advancement in other animal species might require not so much radical developments in their evolution as individual creatures, as simply cumulative effects in their shared species history, to come up with what might impress human beings as ‘technology’. But they are blocked from doing that, for now, for something like the reasons the urban poor are blocked from building great shiny skyscrapers or Mars shuttles: not because they are different in essence from, say, Frank Gehry or Elon Musk, but because they are crowded out of the real estate and high-tech scenes. The only other mammalian species that are remotely comparable to homo sapiens in terms of population and biomass are domestic food animals, particularly cattle. But they live out their lives under total domination and enforced impoverishment of the life-world, circumstances in which it is inconceivable that there might ever be any thriving that might lead to innovations over the course of the species history. They, too, are crowded out. 

Most other mammals, in turn, such as elephants and indeed chimpanzees, living in the wild, have been reduced to mere pockets, or dots, within their former habitats, too sparse and precaritised to thrive and innovate.

And then there are the animals that have been implicated in human history since the beginning of our quickened material innovations with the first urban settlements towards the end of the last Ice Age: the mice and rats, and then the dogs and cats, and other members of what James C. Scott has called ‘Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps’. Why haven’t they innovated? Arguably, they have, in the sense that human technological innovation has been a multispecies collaboration all along: some beings were constructing yokes and carts, other beings were grinding grains, other beings were pulling carts beneath their yokes, others were raising children, others were cleaning up food scraps that would otherwise turn into vectors of disease. Some of these beings were human, some were bovine, some canine, some feline, but they were all implicated in the common project that yielded up what we now think of as an exclusively human technological civilisation.

The second consideration has to do with the arbitrary limitation of the notion of the technological, or the technical, to the domain of tools. In its original scope ‘tekhne’ included any activity that involves the application of a skill, not just in the building and operation of tools, but also, for example, in wrestling, dancing, hunting, or storytelling. And we are only just now beginning to learn how to detect the ubiquity of tekhne of this sort throughout living nature. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been based on the generally unargued-for presupposition that intelligence, plus time, will always lead to complex, tool-using civilisations: it is this presumption that is at the basis of Drake's equation, and of all attempts to statistically model the likelihood of finding intelligent --i.e., technological trace-leaving-- civilisations, based on the number of known galaxies and stars, and the inferred estimate for the number of exoplanets, and, from there, the number of exoplanets capable of supporting life. But this reasoning excludes the possibility of the development of tekhnes within a given species’ history that leave no material trace, or that leave a material trace that we are not in a position to interpret as the intended outcome of intelligent activity. 

Of course, material traces are crucial if we are scanning the heavens hoping to find Dyson spheres and like massive structures. But as Aristotle said, the celestial beings are divine, yet further away and difficult of access, while terrestrial living beings are perhaps less divine, yet all around us and ready to be studied. There is growing interest in recent years in animal communication, as one species after another —bats, prairie dogs—, previously thought lowly and dumb, turn out to have complex systems of social exchange of meaning. Whether this involves recursion or any of the other standard shibboleths that are set up to distinguish true language from mere language-like communication, is not of interest here. What is of interest, and what so far does not seem to have been considered by even the most enthusiastic defenders of animal language, is the possibility that these practices in various animal species, of which we presumably know only the tiniest part, involve innovation, refinement over time, and thus have what appears as a history to their practitioners. Thus, perhaps, there are master practitioners, who refine a call or a click in an original way, such that they are perceived by their conspecifics as something comparable to geniuses or visionaries. Thus, perhaps, too, there are young ones who strive to get the calls or clicks just right, and in their repetitions they discern a new way of doing it slightly differently, which excites them, and fills them with a sense of hope and promise about the future of their group and about their own place in it. There could be poets, bards, bodies of literature, transmitted orally or by electrical signal or some other means we haven’t considered.

There is no reason why, if such practices exist, they should be easily detectable by us, or even in principle detectable. We know that sperm whales transmit clicking routines from one pod to the other, and that these can quickly spread around the entire global ocean. It is not unreasonable to suppose that these new routines are perceived as technical innovations by the sperm whales themselves, and that some innovations might be received as particular works of genius or inspiration. There is no reason to suppose that if this is true of sperm whales, it should not be true of a vast number of other species whose distinctive practices fall outside of our notice. Some of these practices might be significantly older than human technology, and than human language, with significantly more time for the cumulative effects of refinement to turn the practice into something experienced from within as an ‘art’ in the fullest sense: dating back millions of years rather than hundreds of thousands as we can suppose is the case for the development of ‘proto-language’ in our hominid ancestors. But since it leaves no material trace, it is excluded from consideration in the search for signs of non-human intelligence.

This is, as far as I can tell, an arbitrary exclusion, based on the conflation of what are in fact two distinct questions: on the one hand, transformation of the material environment for prosthetic assistance in the pursuit of species-specific ends, which no species is doing nearly as intensively as human beings at present; and, on the other hand, refinement and innovation within a practice that is experienced by members of a species as a marker of that species’ own excellence.

On Plants / De Stirpibus

Wolfenbüttel, 27 May, 2017. How many beings are in this picture?

Imagine you are in an urban park. Look around. How many animals do you see? I’d imagine you see a few birds, a dog or two, perhaps some insects, and a dozen or so humans. Now how many plants do you see? You could not even begin to count, nor to say where one leaves off and another begins.

I am standing in the train station in Karlsuhe, on my way back to Paris from Wolfenbüttel. Even here I see: a few dozen humans, about as many pigeons, a good deal of concrete and iron. And off in the distance I see, again, countless trees, defining, in more ways than one, the horizon of my perception. I see grass pushing up through the gravel between the tracks. Over a stone wall bounding the station to one side an ivy or vine plant of some sort tumbles: it is not moving, visibly, but one might easily imagine it striving, grasping its way toward our platform. And this is a completely dominated space, this is nearly as close as we can get to the longed-for suppression of the vegetal.

We passively suppose that plants and animals are the two equal parts of living nature, the two kingdoms, two moieties each taking half the territory. Of course this does not stand up to scrutiny. I read somewhere that in terms of biomass Earth’s aquatic life is around 90% animal (and this mostly krill), and 10% vegetal, while among the terrestrials it is roughly the reverse. But this seems to give far too great a share to land animals.

Wherever there is a portion of the Earth’s surface that is covered predominantly with animals, there is a problem, an ecological anomaly. Even pods of gregarious walruses need to clear off the beach before too long, lest they destroy whatever balance was there before them. And this is not to mention factory farms with their billions of cows, or cities with their billions of people. Yet wherever there is a portion of the Earth’s surface that is covered predominantly with plants, there is, simply, nature.

Plant life is the paradigm and the general rule of life itself; animal life is the exception.

Aristotle thought animals are more perfect than plants, because they are capable of locomotion, and so form is able to separate from matter in them to a certain degree. He left it to his disciple Theophrastus to do the systematic botanical work that he himself had neglected for zoology. In 1699 Edward Tyson complained that Europeans were now ransacking 'both the Indies' in search of medicinal plants to feed the nascent pharmaceutical industry, rather than paying attention to nature’s most excellent productions, the animals. We’ve shifted to plants as the primary focus of our interest, perhaps, Tyson complains, but only in view of what we can get out of them, not in view of what they are. Aristotle said in defense of his researches in marine biology: ‘Here too dwell gods’. No one who descends from him has yet said such a thing about plants.

What is ontologically distinctive about plants is that they can be cut up in all kinds of ways without thereby ceasing to exist. If you cut off my arm, I am not 10% less the person I was before, and in that respect I am ontologically quite distinct from a sack of flour or any other aggregate; but if you cut off my head, I am 100% less the person I was before. A branch is not analogous to an arm, and there is nothing in a plant that even suggests itself for analogy to the head. Evolutionary theory suggests that this diffuseness, and this full perfection of the pars pro toto principle, whereby any part is as useful as any other for yielding up a complete and perfect representative of the kind, is simply an adaptation to what would otherwise be the disadvantages of sessility: plants have no brain or central nervous system, or any absolutely crucial organs of higher functioning at all, but this saves them the trouble of having to run away from predators without end, protecting their precious jewels. They can stay where they are, be chewed down to a mere sliver of what they were before, and go right on living and growing.

Plants do not have nerve ganglia. But whatever it is about nerve ganglia that makes us sentient is underlain by chemical activity. There is no reason in principle why the chemical transmissions in plants could not be their own neurophysiology.

But, some will insist, it is willed motion, going this way rather than that, that makes a being a being of moral interest, and plants, as we’ve noted, just stay where they are. Well, the boundary between locomotion and change of quantity is not so clear. Plants do get around. Just make a quick biodiversity survey, again, of your local park.

We can’t individuate them, and that troubles us, causes us to look away, or to filter them out. Plants do not so much outnumber animals, as outspread them. The dramatis personae of nature are the animals — this lion, that peccary — and plants are only the stage-setting. Sometimes we can make out what look like individual trees (we even call them ‘proud’), but that’s just a stroke of ecological luck for us, and it hides what is really going on. We know that individuality is not what is really going on with animals either — we are not individuals, but biomes —, yet our ability to move around as one, our ‘proportion of rest and motion’, gives us a sort of unity that makes our talk of this lion, that peccary, seem to reflect the true order of things.

But look around the park again. How can the true order of things be represented by such a vanishingly small share of living nature?

We force plants into the background, pretend not to notice them, because we have no clear way, yet, of speaking about a morally relevant nature except as an assemblage of morally relevant individuals, moving around on their own and pursuing their own interests: earthly gods. If we were to say, of plants, ‘Here too dwell gods’, this could only be in the spirit of pantheism: ‘Here too dwells of god’, in the partitive genitive sense in which one can say, in French, du thé, de la boue, des fleurs.

Plants are there for their own sake, though in recent evolutionary history they have made some overtures to animals, to appeal to animals on terms that animals, whether bees or humans, seem to get. For 400 million years or so there were animals, but still no flowers. And now today we can say: ‘Look at that beautiful rose!’, ‘What a lovely tulip!’

Most of us are not ready for pantheism. We are prepared to see God in a rose, but really would rather not experience the god of the rainforest, of the whole great thing. We rationalise this avoidance as if it were a particular fear of particular dangers, of spiders or snakes. We turn ecology into a practical concern to keep the planet in a condition that can continue to sustain us, and in order to convince others of the importance of plants in this balance we transform them rhetorically into animal organs: the ‘lungs’ of the Earth.

It is reasonable to suppose that the ransacking will go on for as long as plants are conceptualised only as the life-support system of animals, whether this is in terms of pharmacology or of ecology. Somewhat more speculatively, it does not seem implausible that evolution should have contrived a way for them to derive something like joy from the chemical transmissions that keep them doing what they do: putting out their pollen and their roots, absorbing the light of the sun and transforming it into what makes up their own nature: eating light, as has been said.

It seems phenomenologically undeniable, if you will just stop and look, that this planet is theirs.

What I am saying can only come across as foolish, like the effusions of an investment banker just returned from an ayahuasca retreat, or the small-talk of a 1970s suburbanite who has just read The Secret Life of Plants; like the philosophers who are bracketed by many as fun or zany, who speak of 'rhizomes', and who in the end turn out to be interested in plants more as metaphors for something else than in plants as plants. Is this not always how it is with the fun and zany philosophers? Just when you think they are talking about something that interests you, it turns out they were only riffing on it, on the way to talking about something altogether different; well, me, I want to talk about plants. Deleuze speaks of rhizomes and wants to tell us that society is like a field of grass, but in the end this is not so different from a medieval courtier who might have declared that the sovereign, the embodiment of political power, is mighty like a lion. We would be mistaken to take this as a lesson in zoology.

Kant said that there would never be a Newton for the blade of grass, and a strong case can be made that this point was not simply an expression of the relative primitiveness of the life sciences in the late 18th century (he speaks as though what interests him are 'organised beings' in general, yet whenever he goes in search of an example of what it is that makes these so unfathomable, it is the blade of grass or the tree --and not the parrot or the crustacean, which he treats rather as irreducible 'works' of nature than as representatives of life as such-- that comes to mind). It may be that he meant that, even when we understand the nature and causes of grass, thanks to Darwin and Mendel and Watson and Crick and all the other successors, we will still feel certain that we have not really comprehended the thing in question. Philosophy since Kant has had trouble knowing what to do with those things for which there can be no Newton. I take it that Kant's general line, though, was that it is a tremendous mistake to leave what cannot be comprehended to those who don't understand or respect the limits of comprehension.

I am aware that to insist on the importance of plants is a species of Schwärmerei. But that something that is patently true, phenomenologically and scientifically, can only sound foolish when it is made explicit, is itself a measure of the impoverishment of what I might dare to call our natural philosophy, not a judgment of the quality of the observation. Plants would be at the center of any adequate natural philosophy, not off on the fringes with the stoners and the enthusiasts. And natural philosophy would be at the center of any adequate philosophy: an analysis of what earthly existence is really like for us, and of what is to count as ‘us’.

*

Further reading, strongly recommended: Emanuele Coccia, La vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Éditions Payot & Rivage, 2016.

A Cold Take on Comey's Firing

Until the American media and public stop simply lurching from one outrage to the next, with apparently no cumulative wisdom or even memory, we will continue to live in an outrageous political reality. In this respect Donald Trump is the president that the culture of non-stop social-media outrage deserves, of hot takes and instantly dropped potatoes. Viral videos of Stephen Colbert never in fact destroy Trump, as they are announced to do, each and every time. The waves of people declaring that they simply cannot believe what the president just said, that they are speechless, that ‘OMG. No. He. Didn’t.’, really in fact ought to be able to believe it, because it never differs substantially from what he has been saying now for a very long time, what it is simply in his nature to say, given the species of evil being he plainly is and plainly always has been.

The essentially reactive character of anti-Trump sentiment in the United States sustains him more than it challenges him. This is why I, for one, have come to feel that it is not only not helpful, but probably harmful, to participate in the call-and-response culture of constant commentary. Trump is a rotten, dangerous, unredeemable wretch. I have known this since 1987, when I was a teenager on an isolated rural route in the western US, and I didn’t know much of anything about anything. One glimpse of him on the nightly news, vindictively and obviously lying about the Central Park Five, was enough for me to make an essentially accurate judgment of character that would not change in the slightest over the following thirty years.

This latent bit of a priori knowledge became, in turn, a salient fact about our political reality in 2011, when he made his grand entry into the political arena by means of a patent lie concerning Barack Obama’s place of birth. But this was already far too late in his career for any lucid person to suppose that he was revealing anything new about himself. Trump has never been capable of operating in any way outside of the mode of kayfabe. Nothing that has happened over the past few days should be cause for surprise, let alone for wishful thinking: if it has been perfectly obvious all along what sort of creature he is, and how he operates, and nonetheless he managed to be elected president, why on earth should we suppose that the latest demonstration of his essential nature is going to be the thing that does him in?

If you want to bring him down, then stop lurching. We are, now, a few days past the ‘unbelievable’ firing of James Comey. This topic is no longer trending on Twitter. The crowds have moved on to smaller questions. They’ve followed out the rivulets —will Comey’s permanent replacement be the sycophant Trump desires? Was Sean Spicer ‘in’ or merely ‘among’ the bushes?— only to find themselves in still and shallow water, practically praying for a new deluge.

This is in part because social media transform all of us into self-styled investigative reporters, and there is a constant, driving incentive to find the new twist to a story that no one has yet considered. The result is a Heraclitean media landscape, where there never really is a story at all: forget about dipping into the same matter twice, if all is flux you can’t even do it once. The real investigative journalists are generally ahead of the curve, but they are being goaded on by the same pressures as the masses pretending to be of their ranks: the pressures are in fact worse, as they must remain ahead of the curve in order to justify getting paid for what others energetically do for free. So they too tweet out half-cocked and ill-informed new twists that it would have taken fourteen more seconds for someone somewhere else to have thought up, and nothing, ever, sticks.

Trump is a dangerous fraud and he needs to be impeached. But this is not going to happen as a result of some new story. The story of the past few years is that no story has any staying power, but all is flux. If he is impeached, it will be because the resistance moves out of the medium and the rhythm that Trump himself prefers, and that he has chosen as the most vital tool for maintaining power. It will happen when we deny the legitimacy of this call-and-response madness; when we allow investigative journalists to do what they ought to be doing, rather than dragging them down with us into the moment-by-moment chatter; and when we stop treating the kayfabe spectacle as if it were a true contest among legitimate agonists.

The Art of Moulting

(Forthcoming in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics)

Can we easily distinguish between what the scorpion does when it moults, and what we human beings do when we, say, sculpt the human form in stone?

The most common means of distinguishing between the two sorts of production is that the human sculptings are representations of human forms, whereas moulted exoskeletons or shells are not representations, but rather the things themselves, or at least vestiges of the things. We all know that in fact the scorpion looks on its moulted exoskeleton with neither admiration nor disgust; it is in no sense a ‘work’ of the scorpion, any more than the shorn hair or nails of an artist are part of his or her oeuvre. The fact that the discarded shell retains the shape of the creature, while the discarded toenails do not, is irrelevant: it is bio-waste, chaff, slough. Nothing more.

Or is it? ...

A Theft

Your heart burns for me so
and your body and your soul
burn with desire for me
and for my body and my face.
Here is what I am referring to:
Selivanko and Mikheiko and Yakovets Boldykin
took my three-ruble horse,
and the leather saddle of a ruble and a half,
and this took place in the forest on such and such day
between the mountains and the hills.
My heart burns for you so
and my body and my soul
burn with desire for you
and for your body and your face.

(Freely translated from birch-bark manuscript No. 521, in the Древнерусские Берестяные Грамоты database. The text was composed in Novgorod c. 1400-1410.)

Liberal Alarmism

The liberal center-left in the US has never been more alarmed. The antiliberal left has never been cooler. By ‘cool’ here I mean that its members have honed a mocking and casual disdain of the center-left’s alarmism, with a massive proliferation of memes and jokes about the illusory character of the evidence for Russian interference in the US elections, for example. It is an affected coolness that seems to belong to the same genus as Vladimir Putin’s own sweat-free and poker-faced public appearances, as for example in the disgraceful image of him sitting with Angela Merkel, allowing his large dog to wander freely around the dog-phobic German chancellor, as she sits in evident discomfort. This very image was recently posted on social media by the prominent Clinton critic Doug Henwood. The reaction among his followers was overwhelmingly one of gleeful mockery of Merkel, for being afraid.

Is there anything progressive about this stance? Anything liberatory? It is such a common attitude among the social-media-based left it would be hard to know how to go about cataloguing all its expressions. There are certainly more extreme expressions of it than Henwood’s. I have seen one German man’s social media profile, consisting in a long stream of hammers-and-sickles, Lenin, Putin, and doctored images of Hillary Clinton making her out as a malign demon. He has written in favour of Trump’s exclusion of the New York Times from White House press conferences. The American ‘legacy press’ is clearly biased, he thinks, against Russia in particular, and its implication in the capitalist system, its need to turn a profit, prevents it from ever telling the truth. We may legitimately agree that the profit system corrupts the media, and that neoliberalism is not the best humanity can do. But when we detect our interlocutor understands ‘neoliberal’ as having significant semantic overlap with ‘globalist’, we might start to worry, as I have, that the antiliberal left has absorbed some of the tropes of Trumpism. It is considered the height of naïveté to defend what is often called the ‘horseshoe’ view of political ideology, the idea that at its extremes the left and the right ends of the political spectrum begin to approach one another. But honestly, how else are we supposed to make sense of the far-left memes revelling in ironic beheadings, ironic Soviet tanks, ironic gulags, as anything other than the mirror image of the alt-right’s Pepe-with-swastika-armband? How else are we to make sense of the situation in which a tweet from Trump himself perfectly sums up what our friends on the antiliberal left are saying?

There are calmer expressions than Henwood’s, too, of the cool admonition to the liberal center-left not to panic. For example, while I admire Keith Gessen very much, I just don’t understand this recent article of his in The Guardian. He delineates seven purported ‘myths’ about Vladimir Putin, only then to end up confirming that many of these myths are at least largely true. In what sense then are they myths? Is it just that we shouldn’t be reciting them even though they are largely true? Or rather that we should be refining our versions of them to eliminate the mythical elements? I’m certainly not going to let up on myths 4 (that he is a KGB agent), 5 (a kleptocrat), and 6 (a killer). As for 7 (is named ‘Vladimir’), of course the claim that this is a myth has to be retracted right away, in order to offer a more careful version of it: that it is a myth that this name has any symbolic importance. I don’t know. My friend Vladimir Tismaneanu has spun some fairly profound observations out of this shared onomastic destiny.

Keith’s main concern is that the hack Putinology he’s describing “seeks solace in the undeniable but faraway badness of Putin at the expense of confronting the far more uncomfortable badness in front of one’s face.” I don’t know. I’m sitting in France right now, and in my face are reports of the National Front’s increasingly plausible rise to power, and also reports of Russia’s keen interest in helping this happen. Are reports of the second sort ‘far away’ while those of the first sort are ‘in front of my face’? That’s a meaningless distinction to me. The Putin regime plainly is interested in destabilising Western European electoral politics, and this interest looks remarkably continuous with the destabilisation that has already occurred in the United States. Should I pretend that France is some self-contained, monadic monde à part? That’s just not how I understand politics, even electoral politics within a single state. I don’t see how the United States is essentially different from France in this regard. I don’t see how Putin’s regime is any less in my face than, say, Hillary Clinton’s or Emmanuel Macron’s policy weaknesses.

The liberals are in alarm mode, declaring that ‘this is not normal’. The anti-liberal left is experiencing a new golden age for the projection of its own coolness. Their message is that in fact this is normal, that Trump is the fulfilment of a long process whose way has been paved by liberals and conservatives alike. Liberals are making a mistake, the anti-liberal left thinks, in taking Trump’s odious personality as any sort of fundamental shift in the basic and chronic odium of American politics domestic and foreign.

‘Cool’ is said both of people who are able to keep their heads in stressful situations, and of people who have access to deeper subterranean trends of which the mainstream remains ignorant. Both senses seem to be in play in most of the left’s dismissals of liberal panic: they are like the aficionados lurking in any musical subculture, who will tell you where the currently popular band got its sound from. Don’t listen to the Rolling Stones, listen to Robert Johnson. Don’t bother with Trump’s over-amped threats to dismantle welfare, go back to Bill Clinton’s lo-fi original. If we protest that we really just happen to enjoy listening to the Stones, or that we are aware of Clinton’s classic austerity hits yet can’t help now but to be preoccupied with the president who is in office, we seem uncool. We seem, if I may borrow some language from the right, positively beta: followers, late-comers, and suckers. We are the Midwestern rubes whose mom has just bought us a Debbie Gibson cassette when our cousins in the big cities are already going to Black Flag shows.

The left is cool, and that’s how many people end up there in the first place. Richard Spencer’s recent declaration of his own fan-boy love for Depeche Mode reminds us how limited the musical-subcultural resources have always been on the other side of the political spectrum. If his knowledge were more encyclopaedic, he probably would have been able to understand that while he is in an a certain sense right — Depeche Mode is ‘white music’, in that it is pop music largely gutted of African influences — this musical purity may be seen more as an experimental and critical response to the music industry’s demand for a distinction between black and white musics, than a celebration of the latter. If we look for example at Depeche Mode’s predecessors in musical whiteness, Kraftwerk, it is hard not to sense that their genius lies in satire: “You want white music?” they seem to be saying. “Well, here you go.” And what you get is a monotonous metronomic beat and a melody that is generated ‘by pressing down a little key’. For the alt-right to miss this satirical dimension of ‘white’ electronic music (even in its derivative expressions in which the satire is unconscious), is, once again, to put its utter ignorance, and indeed uncoolness, on display. It’s all reminiscent of that awful American high school experience with the clueless dorks who think Nietzsche was a Nazi. Some of us move beyond that phase, and it is troubling to say the least to see those who haven’t enjoying significantly greater proximity to political power.

The left is cool, both in the sense of not lapsing into liberal panic, and in the sense of cultivating the political equivalent of disdain for derivative pop music. But politics is not in all respects like music and other fashions. One big difference of course is that what happens in politics matters whether it resonates with us or not. We cannot afford to sit back and mock political developments we don’t like, since these developments are not just styles, but reality. If there is overwhelming evidence that Russia is waging a disinformation campaign to destabilise electoral politics in the US and elsewhere, then it is not the political equivalent of listening to top-40 to acknowledge as much.

There are some social functions, such as wedding parties, where we leave off our ordinary high standards and we dance with abandon to the least cool music in the world: to the Pointer Sisters singing about how excited they are, for example. The only people who refuse, typically, are the most taciturn and defiant teenagers who, in the name of a purist ideal of coolness that they have not yet fully understood let alone mastered, affect an above-it-all air from the sidelines. Anti-Trumpism, I believe, should be the political equivalent of such a social function: in order to defeat the ogre without speech, stalking his subjugated plain, we must be ready to mingle on the dance floor in a way that mixes generations, inclinations, styles, and the widest range of competing visions of what an ideal future would look like. Sitting on the sidelines and mocking the purported ‘alarmism’ of liberals, even when it is grounded in solid evidence, is, wittingly or unwittingly, a species of left Trumpism.

Embodiment: A History

This book is now available for order from Oxford University Press. I would add it to the sidebar to the right of this page, along with the Italian translation of The Philosopher, if I knew how. This task would involve some fairly complex html coding, which I always left to my father, who died in September of last year. Death is a mystery, and understanding it in the negative is inseparable from reflection on the problem of embodiment (in Homer, the word we translate as 'body' in fact only means 'corpse'). But where death's true nature comes through most sharply is in small things like this: the impossibility of further routine website maintenance. 

Louis Riel, "Dissertation on Monads" (1885)

Signed “Louis ‘David’ Riel,” this short text, titled “Mémoire sur les Monades,” was written when Riel was in prison awaiting execution in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1885. Translation originally published in Cabinet Magazine, Issue 49.

What is there? There is God. What else is there? There are the things that God created.

The essences of created and possible things have always been.

Essences are composed of “Monads.” “Monads” are of such a fineness that they are imperceptible to our senses.

“Monads” are tender, soft, and polished. These three qualities, combined in “Monads,” are the principle of sensibility.

“Monads” are of two genders; some are male, and others female.

For each male monad, there is a female monad. That is to say that there are in these essences as many males as there are females.

A monad is an electricity. Certain monads are certain electricities. Monads are electricities.

A male monad is a positive electricity.

A female monad is a negative electricity.

Male monads are more firm. When they touch, their firmness even causes them to repel one another. This is what science discovered when it established that elec- tricities of the same name repel one another.

Female monads are softer, more polished, and more tender. When they come into contact with others, their sensibility is affected to such a degree that at first they experience a quiver that soon transforms into a stirring. When it is prolonged, this stirring itself becomes intolerable. In this way repulsion occurs between female monads.

This is what science found when through experimentation it saw that negative electricities repel one another.

Male monads and female monads attract one another.

Because male monads are less soft, less polished, less tender, they do not offend the sensibility of female monads when they encounter them. Female monads are at ease in their presence. It is for this reason that they seek out male monads.

Because female monads are less firm, they do not push the firmness of male monads to the limit when they touch them. Thus male monads conserve a surfeit of energy in their contact with female monads. This surfeit of energy or of firmness is the cause of their well-being. This is what makes male monads seek out female monads.

The male monad experiences an initial affection in touching the female monad, and a second affection in being touched by it. But between these two affections, there is a difference. Sensibility causes it to grasp this difference. Here lies the principle of pleasure between male and female monads.

The male monad experiences an initial affection in touching another male monad; and it experiences a second one in being touched by it. Now between these two affections, there is no difference. Sensibility causes it to grasp this absence of difference. And as in this case the sensation received does not differ from its own per- ception, the male monad does not find any additional pleasure in its relations with the monad of its gender; it does not seek it out.

Monads are luminous. This is the principle of intelligence.

The fineness of monads is the principle of their extreme mobility . Their mobility is itself the principle of their will.

Monads are of the same size. This is the principle of their liberty.

Monads are tenacious with respect to impressions; this is what constitutes in them the principle of memory.

Monads are of two sorts. Some are active and the others passive.

Passive monads have all the properties of active monads, but at a much lower level.

Every active monad has a passive monad that belongs to it. And with which it does what it pleases.

Active monads constitute active essences. Active essences are of an infinite number. The active monads that compose each essence are themselves infinitely numerous.

Every monad has its splendor as well as the splendor it receives from another monad. Now between these two brightnesses, there is a difference that sensibility makes them grasp. This is the principle of vision

Every monad vibrates when acting. Now between its own vibration and that which happens to it there is a difference. Sensibility makes it grasp this difference. This is the principle of touch.

Every monad that is in contact with another makes a noise; now between the noise that it makes and the one it receives, there is a difference that sensibility makes it grasp. This is the principle of hearing.

Every monad has a scent. Between its own scent and that which it encounters there is a difference that sensibility makes it grasp. This is the principle of smell.

Every monad has a taste. Now between its own taste and the one it encounters, there is a difference that sensibility makes it grasp. This is the principle of taste.

Monads have an affinity for each other. This is the principle of love.

Essences feel for each other an attraction, whose force is beyond all other forces; this is indivisibility.

Essences are married together in a very intimate way and in perfect proportion. This is what causes them to be one, but their unity is infinite.

I’m only touching here, so to speak, on the subject of primordial essences. I would like to be able to lay out this revelation in all its beauty!! If God, whose power is infinite, deigns to come miraculously to my aid ... as I have the undying confidence he will do; and if our holy Father the Pope, to whom I submit everything I write through the intervention of the Monseigneur, allows me to continue; then I will attempt to realize this with his holy benediction. For my mission is also to explain the existence of God, creation, and the plan of creation itself, but since obedience to the authority of the church has a continual relation to my sanctification, my mission consists above all in obeying.

The Philosophy Medal

(From The Philosopher: A History in Six Types)

I recall trembling with excitement that first day last February, as I ran down the icy sidewalk toward the General Secretary’s apartments. It’s hard to believe, this sudden turn of events. There I was, a few months ago, the author of a single monograph on the sources of Klopp’s doctoral dissertation on the concept of inertia. And now, here I am, the homeland's most renowned expert on Kloppism-Noginism, called by the GenSek himself to serve as his loyal tutor! After he was humiliated at the Security Council meeting when the ambassador from the United Provinces of C**** dropped that unscripted question about Klopp’s debt to Epicurus, the GenSek's councillors decided it was time for a crash-course in Kloppist-Noginist philosophy. As if that had anything to do with revolution and state-building!

You have to understand, the GenSek is a fine Kloppist-Noginist, but books just aren’t his forté: he was too busy making revolution back when others were preparing for their exams. His first exposure to Klopp was in prison, where he wound up in the aftermath of some low-level, hunger-driven chicken thievery. He never got his Klopp from a leather-bound volume in the collected works at the Philosophy Faculty. No, that was a luxury reserved to me, and others of my class. The GenSek got it from poverty, from life, from the dank prison air. Now it’s time for me to give him what I can from my world, so that I may thrive in his world. Because it is his world now.

At our first lesson we talked about Epicurus, and atoms: not the kind you can harness, so the scientists now say, to make apocalyptic weapons, but the kind that exist only as concepts, the kind that must be posited, some thought, so I tell the GenSek, in order to avoid logical pitfalls, such as, that bodies having dimension could be composed out of constituents lacking dimension. The GenSek interrupted, said that whatever only exists as a concept doesn’t exist at all, and so there’s no use talking about it. He said this with an intentional exaggeration of that folksy South-Eastern accent of his, and I couldn’t help find it endearing, even as it caused me to worry that he was really not catching on to the spirit of our lessons. I will have to try, I thought, to make it more relevant to the GenSek’s life and concerns.

At our next meeting the following week I told him to review Klopp’s 1857 manifesto, and to learn by heart the basic principles of Kloppist diacritics: that the basis of reality is body, which contains the principles of life and change; that the survival of the self does not depend on memory, and therefore each self is immortal simply in the constant permutations of body; and so on. There are four principles in all, the ‘Core Four’ we’re all supposed to know by heart, these days, by the end of primary school. What ten-year-old does not dream of being selected to recite the Core Four, green bandanna around his little neck, before a committee of local party functionaries, to display his perfect diction and to be crowned by a fully costumed Madame Elektrika, if he is lucky, with a wreath of yew leaves? The GenSek never went to primary school, and even if he had gone, that was before the revolution, and he would have heard nothing but stale old doctrine about the finiteness of the soul, the singular importance of what happens over the course of our mortal life, and the ultimate ground of all reality not in body, nor yet in matter or in spirit, but rather in various combinations of light and water. Reactionaries!

When we next meet he is beaming with self-contentment. He tells me he has mastered the Core Four. “See,” he says in an uncharacteristically playful tone, “it’s never too late to learn.” He recites them to me a couple of times, One through Four, and then announces that this will be enough as a lesson for today. I had intended to introduce some new material on Chesterville’s three laws of inertia, but the GenSek is in charge, of course. He asks me about my childhood. I tell him the truth. My political record is solid and I’ve got nothing to hide. I tell him all about my French nanny and my disciplinary problems when Mum sent me away to boarding school at Le Rosey: it was, I explain, my delinquency in that staid environment that helped me to convince the nomination commission at the university of M**** that, in spite of my privileged background and my bookish habits, I had my share of revolutionary spirit too. The GenSek was silent, reflective, and so I kept on talking. I told him of how I eventually earned my degree in philosophy in the provincial University of G**** way out east of the Y**** Mountains where it’s always frozen. I told him my first intellectual love was the work of Rabelais, in which I admired the unabashed celebration of freedom and excess, but that I matured quickly when I took my first course on diacritics under the renowned Academician Korff. The GenSek had never heard of Academician Korff. Enough for today, he said.

When I next see him I come prepared with an elaborate lesson on Nogin’s 1907 ‘Letter from the Corn Exchange’, but the GenSek has other ideas. “I will give a speech on philosophy,” he announces. “It will be a grand speech, with electronic amplification, and it will be recorded on the best spools. I will speak of the Core Four, and inertia, and atoms. All the men of the Academy will be in attendance, especially this Korff.” Korff died some years ago, I tell him. “Well then whoever replaced him,” the GenSek continues, “and it will be made known that philosophy is a great priority in the construction of our Kloppist-Noginist society, and there will be much applause.”

The lessons continue, officially. Once a week I go the GenSek’s apartments to tutor him in philosophy. But most often I just sit there drinking strong black tea straight from the saucer as he paces back and forth, regaling me with disjointed stories about the revolution, or about the growth of industry in the next five years, all peppered here and there with allusions to atoms, or Chesterville’s three laws, or Klopp’s four principles. One grey afternoon as I was sitting in the GenSek’s favourite divan, dipping a beignet in clotted cream, he paced back and forth and blurted out to me, suddenly: “You know I’ve done away with Korg, don’t you?” ‘Done away’, Mister Secretary? I squeaked. “That’s right. I disassembled the atoms that once constituted that grovelling traitor.”

I can’t complain, I tell myself. I’m still alive.

He really surprises me sometimes. Just this last week he interrupted some tale of derring-do, how he and his comrades dynamited the railroad tracks outside of T**** or some such thing, in order to tell me of his plan to establish, at the end of his upcoming speech, a ‘philosophy medal’, to be handed out annually by the GenSek himself, in honor of philosophical contributions to the glory of our great revolutionary Kloppist-Noginist homeland. And do you know who is going to be the first recipient of said medal? You guessed right.

But there’s still more work to be done, if this is not to be a total wash. For one thing, I must see to it that the audience knows when to applaud, and more importantly when to stop applauding. It would be a disaster if the academicians failed to detect a profound philosophical observation the GenSek had just made, especially if this is an observation he associates with the lessons he has had from me. I would therefore like very much to rehearse with him, but he is intent on lecturing me, now, about the boons of automated sheep-shearing.

I place a sugarcube between my front teeth and allow the black tea to filter right through it. I really should try to get through to him somehow. There is much more than my philosophy medal on the line. I crunch the cube between my teeth and I replace it with a new one.

Things could be worse, and they may get worse soon. But I’ve made it this far. I’m being fed sugarcubes by the Basilisk (as he’s called in the streets). Hah! ‘The philosopher is an ass’, as that example from my logic textbook had it, so long ago. But what can I do? There is so much that is beyond my power.

Everything I've Said about Trump since Last May, In One Convenient Post

May 26: 

For the past year or so I have been exercising what I have thought of as principled quietism regarding the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Until today I have not written his name in any public forum, or even mentioned him anywhere other than in the most personal conversations with friends and family. I reasoned that if this quietism had been widely practiced, most importantly by the mass media, we never would have arrived at this disgraceful point. The feigned shock acted out daily on TV and in newspapers at Trump's scandalizing statements has itself been a crucial part of the normalization process. The negative coverage has still been coverage, and Trump understood this, and rode on a wave of craven media complicity to where he is now. But I am not Rupert Murdoch or Les Moonves, and my quiet now has a different meaning than theirs could have had earlier on. Speaking seems futile, and a sort of caving to the idiocy and barbarism of the present moment; silence weighs heavier and heavier as the months go by, and starts to feel like cowardice. So eventually one gives in, and speaks, and joins the present, without omniscience about unintended effects, without any real wisdom, but with massive reserves, stored up during the silent months, of pure moral outrage.

It is too late for the media to rewind and to undue the damage of their profit-driven legitimation of the impostor. We are now left with the fact of Trump as someone who will not go away if we simply conduct our lives as if it were beneath our dignity to mention him, but might yet be driven away if we succeed in driving home to our fellow Americans how extremely dangerous he is. I do not want to find myself a member of the Free American Resistance in exile a few years from now, fighting to bring down a despotic regime that has supplanted American democracy. The emergence of such group is not such an unlikely scenario, should Trump become president. He presents, as Andrew Sullivan has rightly said, an extinction-level threat to American democracy.

He represents not the least prospect of making America great again, but rather the prospect of making America part of the same global order of post-democratic authoritarianism that already includes many of the United States' traditional geopolitical adversaries. The result of a power-grab in the United States by a Eurasian-style despot, with bodyguards playing the role of boyars, could be an ignominious peace forged with these regimes with which Trump's America would indeed have a fundamental kinship; or it could be total war, triggered by what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences: when two parties are so alike that they can't stand the existence of the other. But either way it is a capitulation, and a definitive end to the role that the United States has sought to play in the world.

I know many of my friends on the left will say: "Fine then, good riddance to that order that has brought so much pain to the world," and it is this sentiment that has many of them asking, at present, whether, once Sanders is out of the picture, Trump might in fact be preferable to Hillary Clinton. I am witnessing in real time, and finally understanding, the historical process by which, for example, the French National Front has won crossover voters from the Communist Party when the former makes a few promises about improved material well-being and also promises, like the latter, to make those at the center of power --the Establishment-- pay for their greed and indifference. In France, as earlier in Germany, and as in the United States now, what the crossovers from the left are leaving out, or preferring to overlook, is that when these promises of improved well-being are made by the far right they come at the expense of, and with the express intention of hurting, not only representatives of the Establishment, but also anyone who is not a member of our 'nation': a loose category that can be defined not only in terms of citizenship, but in terms of race, ethnicity, or religion. So overt fascism is not just a 'more honest' version of the neoliberal oligarchist politics of the Establishment. Hillary Clinton will not place Muslim-American in camps. She will not 'close the borders'. She will not dismantle the free press or seek to radically change the powers of the executive office. She will continue American foreign policy as usual, which includes the deaths of a lot of innocent people, but she will not needlessly provoke new wars simply as a consequence of a slighted ego or as a distraction from failed domestic policies. It is a profoundly flippant and en-bubbled gesture on the part of members of the American intellectual left to say that Trump could not be worse than Clinton. It is a betrayal of all of those people who, in addition to the innocent targets of American drones, would be directly made to suffer as a result of a Trump presidency, often simply in virtue of the contingencies of their birth.

I think two things must be done in the coming months. First, just like in the defeat of fascism seven decades ago, socialists, communists, and anarchists need to recognize in this case that they do have common cause with the Establishment, including with the Establishment right. I have been extremely impressed with the clarity of vision, and the understanding of the seriousness of the present moment, expressed by the editorial staff of the National Review. I find that I can appreciate these virtues, without falling into doubt and worry about the entirety of my political commitments, most of which do not overlap with theirs. What overlaps is the sheer horror at the thought of the rise to power of a fascist usurper in the United States. I think it is important for Americans, whatever their political commitments, to find this common ground and to stay on it and fight from it into November.

Second, I think it is crucial to engage with Trump supporters and with those who might cross over to Trump (some from among Sanders's disaffected followers) without condescension and by patiently highlighting the multiple respects in which Trump in fact does not represent their interests, the multiple respects in which he is a betrayer, and, if it helps, the multiple respects in which he is not, at all, what might be called a patriot. As to the last of these, I think it is important to emphasize --and I think Trump supporters are certainly intelligent enough to follow this line of reasoning-- that what Trump represents is not anything distinctly American, but rather is only the local variation on a political ideology that is currently recrudescing throughout the world, that this ideology is incompatible with American patriotism, and that it is now and in the past most closely associated with regimes that are hostile to the United States. Again, a Trump presidency would amount to a capitulation to these regimes.

We must fight Trump and everything he stands for. We will fight him until November, so that we do not have to fight him afterwards. He is already a blight on American history, and this is what he will be no matter what his legacy is from here on. But to minimize suffering, both in the US and beyond, he needs to be defeated early and decisively.

I will support Bernie Sanders' campaign for as long as it useful in pushing the Democratic party towards important progressive goals; and I will support Hillary Clinton when the time comes, faute de mieux, in order to prevent the rise of a fascist regime and the end not so much of democracy in America --for there is plenty of argument as to whether true democracy has ever been achieved-- but even of the ideal of democracy. However much we've failed to realize it, this ideal has at least helped us to prevent far worse forms of government from moving in. Anyone who does not see this, who thinks that the existing order is really the worst thing there is, simply does not know enough history, or does not take seriously enough the lives of Muslim and Latin American immigrants, to understand just how bad things can really get.

May 29: 

It is impossible to know at present whether a Trump presidency would bring with it worsening relations with the despotries of Eurasia-- those of Putin, Erdogan, Modi, and the Chinese single-party regime in particular, and most importantly with the first of these, since this is the one that still has its entire nuclear arsenal from the Cold War and that is currently threatening neighbouring NATO members with its revanchist ambitions. A Trump regime could just as well bring improved relations with these leaders, in view of his fundamental likeness to them. It could also bring nuclear war. Either way, though, it will be a capitulation to them. This, I think, is more than anything the message that needs urgently to be conveyed to nativists in the United States who are rallying behind Trump: he is not an American phenomenon, but only one head --still in bud-- of the great global Hydra of post-democratic authoritarianism.

This movement's founding fathers are principally concerned with strategies for regional hegemony in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is thus a strategic mistake and a sign of severe degeneracy for Americans to rally behind a leader who is shaped in this movement's mould. And yet at present Trump is taking advice from Paul Manafort, former advisor to the disgraced Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych, who slinked back to Putin's Russia, where he belonged, after the Ukrainian uprising of 2014. And when we see street art riffing on the famous 'socialist fraternal kiss' between Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, with the two embracing parties now transformed into Putin and Trump, we immediately understand what it means: Trump is taking his ideological lead from the principal regional hegemon of Eurasia. He, like Erdogan or Viktor Orbán, is a lesser, derivative Putin. If the Eurasianist movement continues to grow, if the United States falls to it in electing Trump, this will most certainly bring about the end of the Atlantic order on which American global power was built over the course of the 20th century.

I am not saying anything about whether I think this power is good or not-- not here. I am only saying that a Trump presidency would spell the end of it, again, either through total war or ignominious peace.

June 4 (from the New York Times):

We are supposed to find some solace these days in the assurance that Donald Trump is “not Hitler.” One reasonable response is this: Of course he isn’t. Only Hitler is Hitler, and he died in a bunker in 1945. There is no such thing as reincarnation, and history is nothing more than a long, linear series of individual people and events that come and go. It is, as the saying goes, “just one damn thing after another.”

This quip is in part a rejection of the idea that history is, or might someday be, a sort of science in which we subsume particular events under general laws. This idea motivated Hegel to conceptualize human history as a law-governed dialectical process of the “unfolding of absolute Spirit.”

Marx in turn eliminated the ghost from Hegel’s system, and conceived the process of history as one of material relations between classes. But it, too, remained bound by general laws, so that when any historical actors did this or that (crossed the Rubicon, repealed the Edict of Nantes, etc.), they did so not so much as individuals, but as vessels of a historical process that would be unfolding even if they had never existed.

Even when Marx facetiously riffs on Hegel’s claim that historical facts and personages always appear twice — by adding that they do so the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce — he is still perpetuating the very serious idea that individual people and happenings in history are instances of something more general.

But what would it mean for the “same event” to happen again? What are the criteria of sameness? How alike do two individuals have to be in order to be paired? How much does this repetition depend on the individuals themselves, and how much on the similarity of external circumstances? Can we really compare the United States at present to the late Roman Empire or to the Hittites just before their collapse, given how much we know to have changed in human societies since antiquity?

With the depressing confirmations of Godwin’s Law that can be found every day in the comments sections of news outlets (surely, this article will be no exception), one often senses that “Hitler” is not so much a historical figure as a mythological one, that the war of 70-some years ago has already become something like the Trojan War had been for the Homeric bards: a major event in the mythic past that gives structure and sense to our present reality. As in myth, that great event’s personages can appear and reappear not in the exact form they took back then, but as avatars, in new forms, under new names.

History seems to present us with a choice between two undesirable options: If it is just one singular thing after another, then we can derive no general laws or regularities from it, and so we would seem to have no hope of learning from it; but when we do try to draw lessons from it, we lapse all too easily into such a simplified version of the past, with a handful of stock types and paradigm events, that we may as well just have made it up. History seems to be a pointless parade of insignificant events until we shape it into something that has significance for us, until we build myths out of it, until we begin using it to make up stories.

This is what makes it so easy and tempting to weaponize history, to forgo any interest in “how it actually was” — to use the 19th-century historian Leopold von Ranke’s definition of the true goal of the study of history — and to bend it toward our own present ends.

Today Donald Trump excels at treating the past as raw material to be sculpted into whatever claims serve his interests — for example, when he shifts President Obama’s birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya. But the idea that history is infinitely malleable is by no means the exclusive property of xenophobic populists. Until very recently it was common to hear from skeptics (in academia and elsewhere) that history is a “narrative,” and that we must not expect the facts themselves to dictate to us what version of history we ought to adopt. The facts are inaccessible, it was said, so let us tell stories, and create our reality.

By the early 2000s, as announced in an influential article by the French theorist Bruno Latour, this skeptical attitude had produced some unintended consequences. For one thing, it had fallen into the hands of “the enemy”: Creationists were invoking skeptical arguments to undercut the epistemological basis of evolutionary theory; neoconservatives were openly declaring themselves free of any obligation to what was now mockingly called “reality,” as they had taken it upon themselves to create a new reality of their own liking by, for example, invading Iraq and, so they had hoped, planting the seeds of Jeffersonian democracy there. And after Sept. 11, 2001, as Latour quickly began to notice, people of all political stripes were rushing to attribute responsibility for the attacks to whatever party or supernatural force best indulged their fantasies about how the world works.

The degeneration of which Mr. Trump is a symptom is by no means limited to American political life. If Trump is not a reincarnation of Hitler, he is most certainly one head of the same global Hydra that has already given us Vladimir V. Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Narendra Modi. For all of them, the past is not something to study and to attend to, but something to sculpt.

The leader of India, Mr. Modi, for example has brought about, through support of the ideology of Hindutva, a political climate in which Indian nationalist academics can claim that airplanes are described in the millenniums-old Vedas without being ridiculed or marginalized. Mr. Trump is seeking to bring about a climate in which equally false claims may go unchallenged, in the name, purportedly, of something much more important than mere empirical fact: making America “great again.” The invocation of the past in this slogan is obviously mythological. No one will ever call on him to cite any dates or figures to back it up.

History has always been prone to such deformations. In the 16th century the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera forged a cache of documents meant to prove the antiquity of Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula. Far from falling into notoriety when his inventions were uncovered, he instead went on to even greater fame as the author of the “falsos cronicones,” the false chronicles, which were only the more glorious in that the claims they made were not dependent on mere factual truths of history, but spoke of a “higher truth,” coming directly from God. There is a long tradition in fact of the so-called pia fraus: the pious fraud.

Mr. Trump is banking on the American public’s willingness to revert to such a conception of truth that does not require any basis in fact. And it is here that a bit of von Ranke’s hardheadedness can serve as a corrective. We can worry later about drawing significant lessons from history, about finding meaning for our lives in the past. For now what is crucial is to insist that the past can be known — that Mr. Obama was not born in Kenya, that climate change was not made up by the Chinese and that anyone who pretends the opposite, as part of a larger plan to make America great again, is, as a matter of simple historical fact, an impious fraud and a liar.

The task that faces American voters at the present moment is enormous: to save the United States from the same post-democratic order to which parts of Europe and most of Asia has already fallen. Our relationship to history will play no small role in this. History may be rooted in storytelling, but we can summon it to be something more — the arbiter of truth against lies told in pursuit of power.

Mr. Trump himself appears indifferent to history, as well as to the grave significance of the comparisons of him to Hitler. It’s true that Donald Trump is not Hitler. But the fact that the comparison has any traction at all, that it is a recognizable part of our new political dialogue, and that the man at its center is not actively seeking to prove it wrong, shows how severe the current crisis is, and hints at how dark the future might get.

On Pankaj Mishra's Age of Anger

The enemy takes power tomorrow in the United States: the enemy of everything I value, and the enemy of the country he is pretending to govern. What more is there to say? Here is an essay I wrote for Harper’s two months ago, which takes off from Pankaj Mishra’s excellent new book, Age of Anger, in order to explore the historical conditions leading to Trump’s victory. I am feeling much less defeatist now than I was in mid-November, or at least I have grown weary of reading other people saying the sort of defeatist things I say in the essay. I am convinced, more than ever, of the power of individual people to have significant influence over the course of world history: it is not all blind material forces and inevitable macro-scale processes. This is both good news and bad news. The contingent fact of Donald Trump’s existence as an individual human being is making the world a significantly worse place than it likely would have been had he never been born. But he is only one person, a mortal, seventy years old, and while he might believe he is all-powerful we certainly don’t have to. Something will happen to bring him down, whether political or biological, and the world will begin to recover. We will fight to bring about his political end as soon as possible. The blind material forces will continue working then too, but nor will they be all-powerful, and it is very likely that they will be balanced against the much less destructive governance of future political leaders. Their governance will likely be less destructive because Donald Trump is, among mortals, exceptionally evil, cruel, stunted, and stupid. He was elected by only 26% of eligible voters, and many who voted for him are, like the rest of us, gaping in horror at his daily transgressions against the political and moral norms of our society. He is widely hated. I hate him. He is the Ogre of Auden’s poem, whose inability to master speech is a certain external sign of his fundamental evil. I am made happy by the certainty of his eventual demise and disgrace, and by the thought of what might come after that.

Завтра в США враг придёт ко власти: враг всего, чем я дорожу, и враг самой страны, которую он претендует руководить. Что можно больше сказать? Вот эссе в журнале Harper's, которое я написал два месяца назад, и в котором я пользуюсь выдающейся новой книгой Панкаджа Мишры, Age of Anger как исходной точкой для анализа исторических сил, которые привели к победе Дональда Трампа. Я чувствую себя гораздо менее пессимистичным чем в ноябре, или по меньшей мере мне уже надоело читать других писателей, которые выражают те же самые пессимистичные мнения, как я в этом эссе. Я сейчас убеждён, больше чем когда-нибудь в своей жизни, что индивидуальные деятели могут играть важную роль в ходе истории, что это не всё только слепые материальные силы и неизбежные широкомасштабные процессы. А эта новость одновременно хорошая и плохая. Тот контингентный факт, что Дональд Трамп родился, сделает мир значительно хуже, чем если б его никогда не было. Но он один только человек, смертный, в возрасте семидесяти лет, а если он верит сам во своё всесилие, нам вообще не обязательно с ним соглашаться. Раньше или позже, из-за политических ошибок или чисто биологических причин, он падёт, и страна начнётся выздоравливать. Мы будем бороться за то, что политический его распад придёт как можно скорее. Слепые силы истории будут действовать и после его исчезни с политической сцены, но они, точно как Трамп сам, не являются всесильными, и это очень вероятно что политические лица, которые придут после его, будут менее вредными чем он. Мы можем быть уверены в этом, так как Дональд Трамп- это человек необыкновенно слабоумный, злонамеренный, подрубленный и глупый. Он был выбран лишь 26% американцев, имеющих праву голосовать, и я полагаю, что теперь много из них, как и мы все, шокированы его ежедневным нарушением политических и моральных норм нашего общества. Многие люди его ненавидят. Я его ненавижу. Он же Огр из поэмы Одена, у которого неспособность овладеть человеческой речью является несомненным внешним знаком своего основного зла. меня радует эта моя уверенность, что рано или поздно он будет разжалован.

Interview in the Corriere della Sera

Marco del Corona interviewed me for the Corriere della Sera last month, in timing with the release of the new Italian edition of my most recent book, Il filosofo. Una storia in sei figure. You can read a pdf of the interview here.