the online world looks dark

(Chicago) I’m at the #ObamaSummit, much of which can be followed online.

In the opening plenary, several speakers (including President Obama) noted the drawbacks of social media: psychological isolation, manipulation by powerful companies and governments, fake news, balkanization, and deep incivility.

I remember when discussions of civic tech were generally optimistic: people saw the Internet and social media as creative and democratic forces.

I went to the specialized breakout session with “civic media” entrepreneurs and asked them whether they shared the dark picture painted by the plenary speakers. Each gave an interesting and nuanced answer, but in short, they said Yes. The reason they build and use digital tools is basically to combat the larger trends in social media, which for the most part, they see as harmful. Even Adrian Reyna of @ United We Dream, a leader of one of the best social movements that has used online tools, emphasized that relying on civic tech can disempower people and alienate communities.

This is no reason to give up on improving the civic impact of digital media. The work remains as important as ever. It’s just that the atmosphere now feels very sober; the heady days of cyber-optimism have passed, at least for people concerned about politics and civic culture.

[See also democracy in the digital age and four questions about social media and politics]

Citizens’ Initiative Review

Definition The Citizens' Initative Review is a participatory democratic innovation that has been adopted and adapted by several governing bodies such as, most famously, the State of Oregon and, more recently, in the states of Colorado and Massachusetts. Generally speaking, a Citizens' Initiative Review involves the evaluation of one or...

Polarization, heuristics, and the 24 hour news cycle

Skeptics of the democratic ideal of self governance often point to the almost laughable impracticality of the vision. People are simply bad at being knowledgeable and making well-informed judgements.

Notably, this concern needn’t inherently be a slight. While the most elitist of skeptics will judgmentally decry the dreadful specter of “the masses” for perceived failings of willful ignorance or stupidity, some scholars offer a more nuanced view.

Consider, for example, the post-WWI writing of journalist Walter Lippmann. While his rhetorical flourishes reasonably earned him a reputation as an elitist and a technocrat, the full thread of his argument is much more subtle.

Lippmann – who had been intimately acquainted with propaganda efforts during the war – was notoriously concerned about giving too much power to “the public;” that “uninformed, sporadic mass of men” who will “arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece.”

But despite the colorful imagery, his argument wasn’t that the vast mass of men were too lazy or stupid to be entrusted with the vital task of democracy. Rather, his argument was simply that  no single person could ever have the capacity to be all-knowledgeable on all things.

There is just too much.

Reasonably lacking in the time to perfectly master all of human knowledge, every single person is left to make the best decisions they can by drawing heavily from existing knowledge, perceptions, and instincts.

Lippmann, incidentally, coined the word “stereotype” to describe the phenomenon.

As social psychologists will tell you, “stereotyping” is not inherently bad. As beings constantly bombarded by information, we literally couldn’t function if we constantly had to reconstruct our basic understanding of everyday objects and encounters. We couldn’t live without heuristics.

But, they can also become problematic if we become too rooted in our thinking, if we don’t have or take the time to periodically push past our heuristics.

Political polarization is just one example of this. It is too easy, too easy, to heuristically label people who agree with you as “good” and people who disagree with you as “bad.” A mild version of this may be helpful in some cases of electoral politics – knowing that a candidate of party X supports the political platform I generally support is arguably meaningful information. But it most certainly becomes problematic when this heuristic labeling seeps into our every day life and every day encounters.

Markus Prior argues that polarization is an outcome of an increasingly efficient media environment. When people aren’t all “accidentally” exposed to the same evening news – as they were when the evening news was literally the only thing on TV – people tend to self-select into separate, biased news spheres.

Perhaps worse, they self-select out of news consumption all together. After all, there are far more enjoyable things to watch than the constant depressing drudgery of current events.

This causes a perfect storm for polarization – most people are generally uniformed, and when they peak their head up to get a sense of what’s going on, they make quick judgements inferred from a media outlet specially curated to cater to their existing beliefs.

There’s a reasonable amount of psychological and political literature to reinforce this story, but, I think, we lose something if we forget the Lippmann view.

The problem, Lippmann would argue, is not the stereotypes themselves, it’s the thoughtless and broad application of them which results from not having enough time to do otherwise.

In other words, while the wide variety of media options may lend themselves to polarization, the constant, 24-hour avalanche of news coverage is perhaps a bigger problem. It is literally impossible to keep up, to take it all in and study every issue in a thoughtful, non-biased way.

In the absence of time for such activity, and buried in our own personal pressures of work of and life, we adapt as best we can by making quick, vaguely informed decisions motivated largely by our pre-existing beliefs.

It’s not that “the public” can’t be trusted, Lippmann would argue, it’s that we all put too much faith in our own ability to rise above such challenges. It is always “other people” who are politically foolish. We – and the people we agree with – are, of course, more enlightened.

As if anyone has the ability to keep up with all the news.

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Apply for the 2018 Taylor Willingham Fund by Nov. 20

In case you missed it, the National Issues Forums Institute, an NCDD member org is now accepting applications for the 2018 Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund grant. The grants are intended to honor the legacy of Taylor Willingham and her contributions to the field of deliberative democracy by supporting projects in the field, and we highly encourage NCDD members to apply for a grant or donate to the fund.

Grant applications are due November 20, 2017, so make sure you submit yours before it’s too late! Click here to learn more about Taylor’s life work and/or support the deliberative democracy movement by making a donation to her fund. You can read the grant announcement below or find the original on NIFI’s site here.


Apply for a Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Grant to Help Your Community Talk about Public Issues

Applications are now being accepted (deadline is November 20, 2017) from individuals who are interested in being considered to receive a Taylor L. Willingham Legacy Fund grant. Grants are provided to individuals to enable them to develop an understanding of deliberative democracy and launch one or more deliberative dialogues in their communities and organizations in order to advance NIFI’s overall mission, which is to promote public deliberation about national issues.

Grants are expected to be in the range of $500-1,000.

The Taylor L. Willingham Fund was established to honor the work of Taylor Willingham in the deliberative democracy movement and is administered by the National Issues Forums Institute (NIFI).

Click here to download an application.

You can find the original version of this announcement on NIFI’s blog at www.nifi.org/en/apply-taylor-l-willingham-legacy-grant-help-your-community-talk-about-public-issues.

Kieran Setiya on midlife: reviving philosophy as a way of life

I read Kieran Setiya’s Midlife (Princeton, 2017) not only because I have that condition and am sometimes troubled by its complaints, but also because I appreciate the style of thought that Pierre Hadot named “philosophy as a way of life.” Practitioners of this style acknowledge that it is important to develop and test arguments. The philosophical life is one of critical reason. However, arguments should have a purpose: to improve a life. And we must remember that people are habitual and affective creatures. Therefore, arguments—no matter how valid and rigorous—will not change us. We also need practices or mental disciplines to accompany our arguments. But a mental habit or practice can lead us away from the findings of our critical reason. We may train ourselves to be foolish or selfish. So we need habits that are at least consistent with the best arguments, and, ideally, habits that actually include argumentation.

That is exactly the combination offered by the Hellenistic Schools (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism) and by the classical Indian traditions. It has been relatively weak in the modern West. Setiya shows that it can be practiced today.

He is a professional philosopher in the Anglophone, analytic tradition. A clue that he is trying something different in Midlife is the book’s grammar. Setiya often writes in the second-person singular: “You should …” (as in “You should not prefer to rewind time, erase your son, and try again.”) He also sometimes uses the first-person singular or plural: “I wish …”; “We think …” Midlife reads like a conversation that reports Setiya’s real efforts to combat his ennui in order to improve your life, too.

Midlife is almost free of jargon. But one person’s jargon is another’s helpful terminology, and Setiya makes occasional use of specialized words. His distinctive stylistic move is not his informal vocabulary but his shift to the second-person, which implies a stringent test that can be applied to each sentence and chapter: would an actual “you” find this text useful?

Another clue that Setiya is working in the tradition of philosophy as a way of life is that he recommends repeated practices, habits, or meditative exercises at the conclusion of each chapter. These are meant to turn the arguments of the chapter into therapies that might change our mental habits.

Many of Setiya’s recommendations are drawn from the history of ethics, not original to Midlife. Of course, that is fine; it is useful to review and revive others’ points. But some of his arguments are novel, and I will mention two.

Living in the Moment

First, Setiya offers a helpful way to think about “living in the moment.” His argument rests on a distinction between telic activities, which we conduct in order to accomplish them, and atelic activities, which we do for their own sake. “Cook[ing] dinner for your kids, help[ing] them finish their homework, and put[ting] them to bed” are “telic activities through and through”: aimed at their accomplishment. On the other hand, “parenting is complete at every instant; it is a process not a project.” You can be doing both at once.

Some people recommend spending more time on purely atelic activities. Retire as soon as you can and play golf. Until then, take time for meditation or a weekly walk in the woods. Such advice is not necessarily practical—or valuable, if it encourages you to lead a life that’s less valuable to the world.

Other texts recommend viewing every activity as purely atelic. Notably, that is what Krishna teaches in the Baghavad Gita: “Motive should never be in the fruits of action, / nor should you cling to inaction. … / Let go of clinging, and let fulfillment / and frustration be the same.” The problem with that advice is that we should aim for good outcomes. It matters what we do, not only our stance toward it.

Setiya’s advice is to combine the telic with the atelic. Strive to get the kids to bed (and do that as well as you can), but also think of yourself as parenting. Attend meetings, write emails, and perform calculations all day, but also see yourself as leading a worthy life. This is an example of a meditative practice that incorporates argument, because it requires redescribing what we are doing in new terms. It may, to quote Wordsworth, have “the power to make / Our noisy years seem moments in the being / Of the eternal Silence.”

Midlife as a Universal Human Circumstance

Second, Setiya disagrees that “midlife” is a stage that we encounter between the ages of (say) 40 and 60—probably most frequently in affluent societies, where some people have the luxury of dreaming of sports cars. Rather, “midlife” is any moment on the journey of our lives when we have already made consequential and irreversible choices, but when we also face a substantial stretch ahead. In that condition, we encounter specific temptations and troubles, such as regretting paths not taken or fearing that the future will basically be more of the same for a long time to come. These could be the thoughts of people who are 12 or 90, living anywhere in the world, at any level of wealth and freedom. They just tend to be more prominent for people in the middle decades of life who have ascended some way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Midlife is a universal circumstance, but its special discontents may not be the most salient for some people at some times.

Setiya argues that midlife’s challenges have been underplayed in the history of philosophy, because the main questions have been “What should I do?” (as in Kant) or “What constitutes a good whole human life?” (as in Aristotle). “Neither the prospective question of what to do nor the external, retrospective question of the good human life captures the predicament of midlife” when you must confront a “meaningful past and a meaningful future,” when “the question is not simply what to do, but what you have done and what you have not done, what to feel and how to think of yourself.”

The Problem of Midlife in Joyce’s “The Dead”

It would take a longer argument and more evidence to make this point, but I believe that James Joyce’s story “The Dead” is a reflection on midlife in just the form that Setiya describes. It is about a character in midlife and also about an art form—the written fictional narrative—that faces a midlife crisis of its own. It’s safe to say “The Dead” is a greater work than Setiya’s Midlife. But there are ways in which I prefer the latter.

Starting with Joyce’s own brother, Stanislaus, many readers have remarked that “The Dead” reads like a ghost story, conveying an uncanny sense that the characters are literally dead already. When the protagonist, Gabriel, first speaks, it’s to note that his wife “takes three mortal hours to dress herself,” and his aunts reply that “she must be perished alive.” He’s already lightly coated with the snow that will bury everything. Language of death or living death echoes throughout.

An exception might be the vivacious nationalist teacher Molly Ivors, who leaves the Christmas party without any explanation and seems to have an unpredictable life still ahead of her. She could be fleeing a party of the undead.

Instead of reading “The Dead” as a ghost story, I’d suggest that its characters have come to see their lives as complete. That is a frame of mind that any adult can adopt while entirely alive, but it is a deathly one. Right at the beginning of Midlife, Setiya quotes the article that coined that word, Elliott Jaques’ “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis” (1965): “Now suddenly I have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight—far enough away it’s true—but there is death observably present at the end.”

In “The Dead,” the monks of Mount Melleray sleep in their coffins, Aunt Mary Jane explains, “to remind them of their last end.” All the other characters, too, have lives that can be summarized and declared complete. Aunt Julia had a great voice three decades before but no great career, in part because of gender discrimination in the church. Gabriel reflects, “Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade. … He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. [She never took the path of marriage herself—surely a regret.] Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died.”

Gabriel is called a “young man,” but midlife can happen at any age. In fact, Joyce was also young when he wrote “The Dead.” James Ellman writes, “That Joyce at the age of twenty-five and -six should have written this story should not seem odd. Young writers reach their greatest eloquence in dwelling upon the horrors of middle age and what follows it” (James Joyce, p. 253).

Certainly, Gabriel is dissatisfied with who he is, regretful of certain paths not taken (particularly paths involving Molly), yet skeptical that he can become anything different. These are pitfalls of midlife.

Gabriel does look a little way forward: specifically, to a night in a hotel room with his wife after the party, free from their children. He explicitly and lustfully imagines that immediate future. But his foresight is flawed. Gretta is simultaneously lamenting the story that her life might have taken, had not her youthful suitor Michael Furey tragically died before she met and settled for Gabriel. In this combination of a man who thinks his life is all but done and a woman who mourns for a different existence—neither one understanding the other—we have a dark picture of midlife in just the form that Setiya analyzes it.

Joyce and the Midlife Crisis of Literature

“The Dead” is a fitting coda to the collection of Dubliners, whose stories are arranged in a rough sequence from childhood to the end of life. The story is also an apt conclusion to a whole tradition of English literature, which Joyce sees as complete and without a future–except that it is possible to reflect beautifully on what literature has been, which is a task of Ulysses. In short, “The Dead” is a story about lives seen from the perspective of their ends, and it’s also a story about the end of stories.

One might certainly disagree that literature ended around 1900—haven’t some good books been written since then?—but Modernists thought it was dying, and several Modernists (in addition to Joyce) tried to make art about its conclusion.

For instance, Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller” (1936, translated by Harry Zohn], “The art of storytelling is reaching its end.” Developments of the modern era, Benjamin thought, have “quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time [made] it possible to see new beauty in what is vanishing” [iv]. “The Dead” finds a new kind of beauty in the passing world that it describes and in the literary tradition that it culminates.

Benjamin distinguishes between a traditional “story” (oral, concise, meant to inform and motivate a live audience) and a “novel,” which is a fictional world created in polished writing by an individual author for a solitary reader. One difference is that a story invites the listeners to continue it, to invent a sequel or to reply with another episode, as we might by imagining what happens to Ms. Ivors. In that sense, she is a character in what Benjamin would call a “story” (and she must leave the novelistic space of “The Dead.”) A novel, in contrast, is closed because it depends entirely on the author’s imagination. The novelist is the master of the whole text.

Benjamin writes, “there is no story for which the question how it continued would not be legitimate. The novelist, on the other hand, cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond that limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis'” (xiv). Joyce doesn’t literally write “The End” on the last page of Dubliners, but the last sentence couldn’t be much more conclusive: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Gabriel has left instructions to be awakened at eight, so his story will continue. Once the porter knocks, he will have to face a new day with Gretta and then many more days as a teacher, writer, and parent, probably extending well into the twentieth century. But Joyce’s story ends where it should; to resume after this crisis would be an aesthetic mistake. As a fictional character, Gabriel is done.

Gabriel envies Michael Furey, whose life ended neatly, if sadly, with his early death. “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” Gabriel will have to wither, but we have no interest in following that process. In contrast, it might be interesting to learn how Ms. Ivors fares as Ireland becomes free and women gain opportunity.

Although Benjamin never mentions Joyce or ”The Dead” in this essay, he offers a way of reading the story. “Not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of–first assumes transmissible form at the moment of death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end—unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it—suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.” (x).

Gabriel doesn’t die—he doesn’t receive that mercy—but he does experience a “sequence of images” that fully summarize the whole story of his life and so concludes it as a meaningful narrative.

Benjamin sees consolation in such a story. “The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by some virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we will never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about” [xv].

That is a way of describing the cold consolation of “The Dead,” which gains its power from the author’s awareness of the impasse that confronts his characters, his genre, and himself. Kieran Setiya is a much more cheerful writer and he aims to give assistance. By his own admission, he doesn’t solve anything for us, but he is a helpful companion. Above all, his voice is conversational, while Joyce’s is magisterial. Setiya is trying to make the future go a bit better for you and me; Joyce offers pure elegy.

Philosophy with Other People

As Benjamin noted, novels are written by solitary authors for solitary readers. We do better when we also have peers to share our experience with. Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus” includes a formal argument that we should not fear death. Death is a lack of sensation, so we will feel nothing bad once we’re dead. To have a distressing feeling of fear now, when we are not yet dead, is irrational. The famous conclusion (although Setiya finds it weak) seems to me to follow logically enough: “Death is nothing to us.”

But Epicurus knows that even the best arguments will not alone counteract the ingrained mental habit of fearing death. So he ends his letter by advising Menoeceus “to practice the thought of this and similar things day and night, both alone and with someone who is like you.” The main verb here could be translated as “exercise,” “practice,” or “meditate on.” It is a mental practice that anyone can employ, regardless of her other beliefs and assumptions. Importantly, it should be pursued both singly and as part of a community. Unlike most professional philosophers of the modern era, Setiya writes like a fellow member of “your” community. He is someone who is “like you,” reaching out with some suggestions based on his own experience and reflections, and inviting your response.

In Walden, Thoreau observes, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” He explains, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates. … It is to solve some of the problems of live, not only theoretically, but practically.” Setiya has taken a courageous step in that direction.

[See also: twenty-five years of itthe aspiration curve from youth to old ageto whom it may concern (a midlife poem), on philosophy as a way of life; and my notes on Philip Larkin’s AubadeDonald Justice’s Men at Forty; and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Spring and Fall.]

Matter, Motion, Atheism

(This post is part of a roundrobin reading group on Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of PhilosophyI focus here on chapter three; James Stanescu previously discussed the preface and appendix, I covered chapter one, and Joseph Trullinger discussed chapter two.)

It is common in potted histories of philosophy to try to create systems of equivalence between different metaphysical systems or assumptions and political and economic conditions. (Consider all the ink spilled about the liberalism of the Cartesian cogito.) Karatani tries to draw a through-line between Ionia’s materialistic and naturalistic metaphysics and its efforts to preserve egalitarian economic and political relations. In contrast, the Athenians had both the inequality of slavery and a philosophy of super-naturalism: theology and teleology. We are supposed to conclude that naturalism is thus more egalitarian and root out the theological and the teleological where we find it.

Even an avowed atheist like myself finds this kind of defense a bit too neat; much as I might like to pretend that naturalism leads to equality, I don’t see much evidence for that in Karatani or the history of philosophy. And I can readily see Trullinger’s frustration with the assumption.

Hylozoism

In this chapter, Karatani finally breaks the news that the vaunted Ionian naturalist Thales “is purported to have said, ‘All things are full of gods.'” But Karatani does not allow this claim to undermine his reading of Thales as a naturalist: “Thales did not introduce a magical way of thinking. Quite the opposite: it was in order to move away from magical thinking that he conceived the self-moving original substance.” (Isonomia, 59) This is hylozoism; the belief that the forces animating objects are within them, rather than external.

On Karatani’s view, Aristotle’s fourfold theory of causality problematically injects the existence of a God with purposes into the neat efficient causal structure that Anaximander supplied when he claimed that all things are rooted in the four elements. Where Anaximander saw human development in something like evolutionary terms, the Athenian Aristotle found the cause outside of the objects, in a prime mover and a God understood in the image of a craftsman. Of course, though Karatani does not allow himself to delve into the more charitable readings of Aristotle, there is some reason to see Aristotle’s entelecheia (which combines telos and self-movement) as an embrace or complication of hylozoism.

Back to Karatani, an account of self-movement and efficient causation allows us to explain animal and human evolution as either the product of a breeder (natural selection) or the product of random chance (genetic mutation) without ever making reference to aims or projects by an overarching, anthropomorphized deity attempting to make humanity is His image. Aristotle, Karatani charges, could conceive of the breeder as a divine perfecter of living things; but it takes a true materialist to explain growth, development, improvement and variation without reference to a divine cultivator. In a strained effort to make this connection, Karatani puts great stock in Karl Marx’s gift of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, and to the theme of Marx’s dissertation: a rejection of Aristotle’s biology for the adaptive naturalism of Democritus and especially Epicurus, whose “random atomic swerve” which enables variation without an eye to progress.

Ironically, this echoes a recent debate among analytic philosophers of biology. Check out Jerry Fodor’s “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” and his subsequent What Darwin Got Wrong with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. They argued there that the existence of spandrels–and indeed of curly tailed pigs–suggested that we cannot use natural selection to explain all traits: many such traits are the result of selection yet do not contribute directly to fitness, so they’re not selected for. Karatani simplifies this with an argument–which seems to me to be wrong–that selection can only work within a species, perfecting it for its environment, while random mutations are necessary to open up new ecological niches and thus potential capacities. This seems wrong because it ignores large-scale environmental changes, whereby the pressures of the ecosystem might create species variations without fully destroying older species.

System-Building and the Metaphysical Inertness Thesis

The frustrating thing for me in Karatani’s view is that he seems to believe that matter and motion need to be understood as somehow united from the micro-foundations of the sciences to the macro-systems of the social world, from metaphysics to physics and from biology to sociology. If philosophers point to the usefulness of teleology in ecology, in world systems theory, or in neurology, I am betraying his vision of a purified natural science. I suspect that this is a sophisticated form of the “Ant Trap” that continually forces us to try to articulate group behaviors and roles in terms of individualistic drives and goals.

What’s more, I am very much at the end of my patience with this sort of metaphysical overdetermination. I can’t deny that some metaphysical views seem more appealing to me than others, nor can I deny that certain forms of metaphysical pluralism strike me as particularly pernicious and wrong. But it just seems mistaken to claim that there’s one’s metaphysics dictates a politics; the relationships seem much more contingent.

One can imagine a sort of philosophical Mr. Potato Head with mix-and-match ethical, political, epistemological, and metaphysical views, and while there’s probably work to be done figuring out each unique constellation of ideas would fit together, I don’t doubt that there’s some way to get from B-series temporality to Bayesean reliabilism to monarchism to anti-natalism to moral particularism. (Free dissertation topic!) This is different from what I call metaphysical deflation, wherein metaphysical views are crystallized, overweighted experiences; it’s something more like “metaphysical inertness.” But my co-readers of Karatani are likely to push back against this view; Stanescu is a devoted ontological pluralist, while Trullinger has staked his philosophical project on the necessity of theological immortality for both ethics and political emancipation.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone

Karatani posits that when economic inequality first reared its head in Ionia it led to crisis of foreign tyranny, which could only be resolved through a social contract among Ionians; a codification of pre-existing norms, with all the subsequent issues that any such codification will necessarily bring. This raises some interesting questions about the real value of the pluralistic republic of free exit that he posited initially: if it wasn’t sustainable, to what extent can it act as a model? For Karatani, apparently, this move to the social contract is a part of his larger story about how political, economic, and religious regimes can grow towards a more perfect and universal form through a simple synthesis.

That’s Karatani’s version of historical teleology: somehow the social contract is the result of this pressure and further pressures will eventually lead us to his “Mode D,” which somehow overcomes all the difficulties of previous arrangements: it “recuperates” earlier virtues while overcoming (magically!) prior restraints. While he doesn’t tell us how, it’s clear this is somehow not a true teleology, but rather an equilibrium of self-moving matter. (And yes, this is sarcasm: he seems to have a lot of this sort of ad hoc special pleading, and I’m frustrated by it. But perhaps in Transcritique there’s a better account?)

I think it’s notable that Karatani accuses the Ionians of having been ignorant of the way their social arrangements were rooted in their norms–when the social arrangements start to break down under pressure, they don’t know which components of their previous epoch of egalitarian exit to try to restore. It takes Thales to rally them–with his atheistic philosophy of gods in everything. Otherwise, Ionian isonomy threatened to fall into tribal or priestly domination under a shared myth or ethnic identity, and this, Karatani argues, inevitably ends in tyranny, as it did in Samos.

Karatani depicts Thales as using his natural philosophy as a cryptic “denunciation of tyranny and class.” Somehow, this cryptic message gets through and Ionia manages to fend off prospective tyrants and preserve itself as a social contract or a covenant federation with hylozoic gods. (Footnote 1) Does the subsequent social contract evolve from these prior conflicts, like the natural selection of the breeder? Or is it the result of random swerve–a social mutation?

Atheism Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

There’s lately been a spate of good articles on the failure of The New Atheists, the group of evangelical atheists that gained fame in the last two decades arguing vociferously that there is no God. I’m most interested in Sam Kriss’s take, “Village Atheists, Village Idiots.” Here comes a lengthy quote, but I promise it’s worth it:

Soren Kierkegaard, the great enemy of all pedants, offers a story that might shed considerable light. In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he describes a psychiatric patient who escapes from the asylum, climbing out a window and running through the gardens to rejoin the world at large. But the madman worries: out in the world, if anyone discovers that he is insane, he will instantly be sent back. So he has to watch what he says, and make sure none of it betrays his inner imbalance—in short, as the not-altogether unmad Danish genius put it, to “convince everyone by the objective truth of what he says that all is in order as far as his sanity is concerned.” Finding a skittle-bowl on the ground and popping it in his pocket, he has an ingenious idea: who could possibly deny that the world is round? So he goes into town and starts endlessly repeating that fact, proffering it over and over again as he wanders about with his small furious paces, the skittle-bowl in his coat clanking, in strict conformity with Newton’s laws, against what Kierkegaard euphemistically refers to as his “a–.” Of course, the poor insistent soul is then sent right back to the asylum […]

Kierkegaard’s villagers saw someone maniacally repeating that the world is round and correctly sent him back to the asylum. We watched [Neil deGrasse] Tyson doing exactly the same thing, and instead of hiding him away from society where nobody would have to hear such pointless nonsense, thousands cheer him on for fighting for truth and objectivity against the forces of backwardness. We do the same when Richard Dawkins valiantly fights for the theory of evolution against the last hopeless stragglers of the creationist movement, with their dinky fiberglass dinosaurs munching leaves in a museum-piece Garden of Eden. We do it when Sam Harris prises deep into the human brain and announces that there’s no little vacuole there containing a soul. (h/t Scott Alexander for pulling the quote)

Scott Alexander’s take in Slate Star Codex runs with this reading, and I think it’s definitely the one to beat. It’s so tempting because it captures my own reaction: the problem with the New Atheists is that they won’t shut up about religion, and one of the pleasures of atheism is being able to be indifferent to religious anxieties. Of course, most of those anxieties get recapitulated as meta issues, anyway: metaphysics, meta-ethics, meta-politics, meta-logic, etc. so we don’t escape them. But the New Atheists won’t let us get down to the business of thinking hard about moral particularism and non-ideal political theory; they keep loudly assuring us there is no God, and it’s distracting not least because some of the people with smart things to say on these topics are theists.

And this is the other, perhaps better explanation: a lot of my colleagues and friends and students are theists and the New Atheists insist on starting fights with them. The New Atheists have found themselves exiled because they’re rude and boorish for insulting my friends, and all the other atheists’ friends, and in a deeper sense for violating the religious tolerance that Europe and the US embraced after the wars of religion. I’m happy to be an atheist, but I’m not happy with the reputation of atheism in their hands.

Of course, if religion really is a main cause of some of the great evils that bear its name, the New Atheists are a bit more explicable. If faith moves some people to extraordinary excellence and extraordinary evil, then my “metaphysical inertness” view looks pretty weak. You can’t fight wars of religion without religion, right? There’s no drive to convert, kill, or exile the pagans, infidels, or goyim without a corresponding conception of how faith or divine right functions to create those categories, is there?

My view is that most religious atrocities are better understood as the result of ordinary motivations, with faith as the excuse: there’s a lot of evidence for the thesis that reason is a slave to the passions, in the sense that we use reason to justify our pre-existing commitments. I think many people of faith see something like my inertness thesis at work when they consider the wrongdoing of their coreligionists. No Christian, Muslim, or Jew looks at the twisted depravities of historical members of their religion and thinks that the shared faith was truly responsible for those actions. No atheist feels responsible for the misdeeds of our fellow atheists, after all! Always, we interpret the misdeeds of those who share our commitments as mistaken theology, or a broken soul prone to misinterpretation or self-justification or demagoguery.

My view merely extends that error theory: just as God deserves no blame for the atrocities that are committed in His name, He deserves no credit for the great works of art and awesome altruism to which His followers are sometimes inspired. It’s meant as a compliment to those great souls who express their commitments religiously: when someone who belongs to a religious community has a commitment to do good in the world, to be honorable, serve the most vulnerable, or look beyond the in-group, then faith and religion will be the means by which you give shape to those commitments.

But this ignores the large scale sociological effects of religion. In recent conversations with colleagues, I’ve been revisiting my inertness thesis with an eye to the empirical literature. The difficulty with the “merely individual” account of religious expression is that there is an entire discipline, sociology, that is founded on the view that membership in religious communities has a kind of weak causal power. Durkheim, Weber, and Du Bois all grounded their sociological theories on the causal power of these religious cultures. If religion can change the suicide rate, the economic growth rate, or underwrite white supremacy, than it is not inert. But the fact that religion can do all of those things suggests that Karatani’s account (and the New Atheists’ vast antipathy) is woefully inadequate for replacing religious cultural institutions or even differentiating these diverse effects.

At the very least religions can act as a sort of attractor, molding attention, shaping behavior, and creating cooperative pressures in particular–usually fruitful–ways. The worst offenses of religious people are the same kinds of in-group loyalty and out-group enmity that we see in all societies: motivated reasoning activating of deep tribal impulses from our evolutionary past. Yet the most extraordinary acts of women and men of faith and conviction seem almost impossible to imagine in a flat world of metaphysical inertness, and allow new forms of life and new sources of solidarity, including cosmopolitan political regimes that are even now working to destroy the notion of tribal in-groups once and for all.


  1. Oddly, Karatani usually depicts social contracts as Hobbesean vertical covenants between the ruler and the ruled, but in Thales’ case the covenant appears to be horizontal, between the citizens. (It’s possible that this terminological confusion is a result of the translation from Japanese.)

Upcoming Public Engagement Webinars from ILG

We are always excited to see NCDD members collaborating with each other, which is especially why we wanted to share these upcoming fall webinars from NCDD member org, the Institute for Local Government! Among the webinars, NCDD member Sarah Rubin will be teaming up with fellow NCDDers Ashley Trim of the Davenport Institute and later on with Gina Bartlett of the Consensus Building Institute, to share their public engagement expertise. We encourage you to check out the announcement below or find the original on ILG’s site here.


Upcoming ILG Webinars

For information about upcoming webinars in development, please contact Melissa Kuehne, mkuehne@ca-ilg.org.

The Brown Act
Date: November 1, 2017 | Time: 10:00am
Description: This webinar will provide an overview on when and how to communicate with officials to be in compliance with the Ralph M. Brown Act and help attendees understand the role and rules limiting the agency’s clerk, executives and local officials in the decision-making process. Additionally, panelists will share relevant updates and hypothetical examples of missteps and how to avoid them.

Panelists:
– Peter M. Thorson, Richards Watson & Gershon
– Teresa Stricker, Renne Sloan Holtzman Sakai

Are You Ready for Public Engagement?
A Conversation for Cities, Counties and Special Districts
Date: November 8, 2017  |  Time: 11:00am
Description: Join Sarah Rubin, Public Engagement Program Director at the Institute for Local Government, and Ashley Trim, Executive Director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University for an interactive webinar about how public engagement can help you build trust and develop sustainable policy within your community. We will look at setting a good foundation for public engagement within your organization, and explore some key questions to ask before you get started.

Panelists:
– Sarah Rubin, Institute for Local Government
– Ashley Trim, Executive Director of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University

Tips to Promote an Ethical and Transparent Culture
Date: December 5, 2017 | Time: 2:00pm
Description: What practices can a local government put in place to promote public trust and confidence?  What practices can minimize the risk of missteps that could undermine or damage this trust and confidence?  This session will help answer these fundamental questions and provide attendees with tips to:

  • Encourage ethical best practices,
  • Promote transparency in their work place and in their community, and
  • Share information with the public about agency operations and the decision-making procession.

Panelists:
– Ruben Duran, Best Best & Krieger
– Maggie Stern, Kronick Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard

Public Engagement: When to Use a Professional Facilitator
Date: December 14, 2017 | 10:00am
Description: In the midst of planning public engagement, many face the decision of whether to contract with a professional facilitator or work with someone in-house. With limited staff and resources, this can be a difficult decision. In ILG’s 2015 survey, 69% of local government respondents in California do not feel that they have adequate staff, resources, or training to do effective public engagement.

Sometimes outside help, even in the face of limited resources, is needed. During this webinar, participants will be able to think through criteria for deciding when to use someone in-house and when to bring in a professional facilitator. What are the advantages? How can one justify the expense? Who’s qualified and how to find someone to help? The Institute for Local Government Public Engagement Program Director Sarah Rubin and the Consensus Building Institute Senior Facilitator Gina Bartlett will share insights and resources to address these dilemmas.

Panelists:
– Sarah Rubin, Institute for Local Government
– Gina Bartlett, Consensus Building Institute

You can find the original version of this announcement on ILG’s site at www.ca-ilg.org/post/upcoming-ilg-webinars.

working on civic education in Ukraine

(Kyiv, Ukraine) I am here for just a few days, working with Ukrainian civic educators and my American colleagues at Street Law, Inc. I’ve served on Street Law’s board for more than a decade, but this is my first time directly helping with a project. Ukraine’s plans to revamp democratic education in their primary and secondary schools seem highly promising, and I’m pleased to be able to participate. This effort also connects to another project I’ve done with Ukrainian colleagues since 2014: the European Institute of Civic Studies (which is aimed at adults). Finally, it’s nice to be back in this handsome city as the leaves turn yellow and the air is cool and damp.