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Next year — or perhaps the year after, since the historical record is not clear — will be the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the death of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, who was brutally tortured and then executed on the orders of his former employer, Theoderic, King of Italy.  In the history of philosophy, Boethius is both important and famous, but not for the same reasons.   His importance lies in the scholarly work of his earlier life, when he translated several Greek works into Latin, including texts by Aristotle, and wrote commentaries on other important classical works, particularly on logic, as well as some early Christian theological studies.  These translations and commentaries were highly influential in the philosophical and theological thought of the next millennium, leading one contemporary scholar to describe him, along with Augustine and Aristotle, as the fundamental philosophical author in the Latin tradition.  Despite his influence, as a person he plays a very minor role in most histories of philosophy, being viewed today mostly as a conduit of Greek thought to medieval Europe rather than as an important thinker in his own right. 

The work for which he is famous, and which remains easily available today in English translation, is the Consolation of Philosophy, a literary text written while he was in prison in Ravenna, awaiting execution.  Written as a dialogue between the author and a woman who personifies “philosophy”, part in prose and part in poetry, the book asks us to consider what true happiness consists of, and how we should understand life’s sudden reversals of fortune.  For a man who came from a leading patrician family in Rome and had been appointed to a position as a senior royal official, but who now faced imminent death for defending a senator accused of treason, and whose erudition and scholarship had attracted unjust accusations of participation in occult practices, this was a real and pressing question. 

Continue reading “The provocation of philosophy”

Many years ago, I attended a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall in London.  In those days, I could only afford the cheap seats at the back of the auditorium, and on this occasion, I was in the very last row, far from the stage on which the orchestra sat.  Just before the concert started, the man sitting next to me took a large book out of his bag, which I could see was the score of the symphony.  I was impressed that he planned to follow the music, page by page, during the performance.  Then he produced a small white baton and, as the audience quietened and the dramatic opening notes were played, he started to keep time with his right hand while turning the pages of the score with his left.  Unseen by the musicians and unnoticed by almost all the audience, for the next thirty minutes he conducted the symphony all the way through to the end.  Bravo!

I had not thought about this unusual musical experience for a long time, but it came to mind at the end of last year, listening to certain British politicians debating immigration, which has recently risen to levels which they describe as “out of control”.  Various policy proposals are being introduced to try to limit the numbers of incoming migrants.  This was the great prize that many British people thought they had secured when they voted to leave the EU a few years back, that we would now be free to control our borders and to reduce the number of people who can enter Britain to live and work.  These voters have discovered in the subsequent period that meaningful control of our borders is elusive, and that the so-called Brexit dividend is really an invoice.  Those politicians who have not understood this, and who continue to demand policies to reduce immigration, remind me of the man who conducted the orchestra from the back row: they wave their hands around with energy and passion but to no real effect, for the migrants like the musicians are moving to a different beat.

Continue reading “Out of control”

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone (among people who get up in the middle of the night thinking of such things) in being uncomfortable with how political philosophers position “capitalism” against other forms of societal organisation. There’s something that doesn’t make sense; democracy isn’t capitalism, and in history, democracy has existed comfortably with other economic forms. Similarly, capitalism exists comfortably with authoritarianism (to a point); indeed, the Comintern realisation in the Soviet Union recognised the value of the market – the fundamental transformation process of capitalism – in setting objectives for the state.

The confusion, I think, comes from thinking of capitalism as a mechanism for control, instead of seeing it for what it is: a mechanism for establishing relative value. The confusion is understandable, and may stand at the root of much of the debate we are currently engaged in about the future of capitalism and of western liberal democracy. But they are incorrectly confused, which is the point of this scribbling – if nothing else, an exercise in establishing in my own mind the purpose of various activities which seem fundamental to capitalism.

I’ll start with some first principles and definitions. Capitalism is the system by which values are established by human societies through a market discourse: that is, instead of values being defined by either an external source (a religious expression of fundamental principles, for example), or the imposition of relative values by the state, values are established by a constant set of exchanges, which we collectively define as “the market”. The marketplace is where we compare what we have – our accumulated stuff which is available for exchange; our time and labour; the potential expansion of that labour through time; and most importantly, our own preferences for different combinations of things and labour and existential states of being – with what other people have. Capitalism simply expresses the idea that the marketplace is the most effective and most efficient way of determining relative value among people.

Capitalism is posited against other potential ways of determining relative value, most notably mechanisms which define absolute notions of value and require integration of those absolutes into the determination of relative values among people. Historically, the primary source of absolute values were religious, in all of religions various forms; these map today to other sources, both human – progressive notions of absolute human equality, for example, or ecological notions of “environmental value” which supposedly supersede any human expression of relative value, or quasi-scientific notions of absolute scarcity which in theory supply a set of baselines which must be observed by any dynamic system anywhere, including those of human beings establishing their own relative values.

Note that, while none of this requires a specific organisation of human systems of control, there are some obvious affinities. Systems which define an absolute source of basic values align well with control-oriented human systems, whether they be tribal or proto-statist or royalist or full-on authoritarian systems. On the other hand, capitalism – relying on dynamic and constant exchange – aligns far better with non-control oriented human systems, systems like diffuse democracies which fluidly establish rules which can be overruled in the future by common consent. But capitalism itself merely requires some consistency on the margin: the marketplace can adapt to changing rules, and indeed, can live within externally imposed rules – it’s just that externally imposed rules will tend to make a given marketplace susceptible to arbitrage and eventually to a reduction to the absolute principles which govern it, whereas dynamic rule processes will adapt with the marketplace to evolve new expressions of value.

Again, the point is that a system of organising human society – a control orientation – is not the same as a system of deriving human relative valuations of goods and services and future outcomes. Governance and valuation are two distinct – if intersectional – processes.

By observation, if we accept the idea that humanity consists of billions of individuals – and not that it is a differentiable mass of races or tribes or what have you – I find it hard to believe that capitalism is anything other than an almost base definition of the species. We exchange: it’s what we do. We do not survive solely on our own merits; we rely upon systems (parents, villages, families, etc) to grow into beings which then exchange on a full and equal basis with others. We raise new beings to do the same; if we don’t do that, the system does indeed collapse and the world beyond our species will grow to forget us. We exchange at every point of our lives, in various states of equality and superiority and inferiority, but the exchange exists nevertheless. Capitalism simply abstracts a space – the market – in which these exchanges exist. And importantly, it presupposes that there is a further abstraction – money – which enables a fluid exchange of value through space and time. In other words, capitalism is nothing more than the human condition of exchange enabled through a human, intermediary fluid.

We fear this fluid – and we fear the exchange – because at every stage, we unconsciously recognise that we have no direct control over it. But in so doing, we fail to recognise that that fluid mechanism only derives its marginal and total value in our expression of preferences and needs. In other words – if we stopped exchanging, money would be meaningless. Money needs us – but we can’t exist without a fluid mechanism for comparing and exchanging preferences and needs. That is to say, capitalism is merely an attenuated abstraction of what we as human being need to do to exist as individuals. As long as we have individual preferences, and individual needs and desires, we will have to form exchange relationships – and capitalism is simply the academic expression of that process in the form of the market with a fluid means-of-exchange to enable the further extension of that exchange through both time and space.

Oddly, I think as human beings, we struggle with the temporal, and that lies at the core of the confusion of capitalism-as-market and control-system-as-state. We can kind of deal with extensions of space: I get the idea that Joe in the valley over there might value a pig or a bushel of wheat or a strand of pearls differently than I do, because it’s a different space with different ecological potentials. But I don’t as easily grasp the idea that Joe in the future in this valley will value those objects differently, that the passage of time will create different valuations. And thus I look to an absolute to establish value here in this valley, and establish governance and control processes to make sure Joe-in-the-future sees the value of the pig the same as I see it today. It takes a massive mental exercise in seeing difference in place as being exactly the same as difference in time, to allow for the notion that there should be a single fluid to enable comparative value between both differences, and we’re not good at the one (time) even though we’re perfectly comfortable with the other (space). But it’s there.

Capitalism is the social expression of exchanging value across both space and time. Because of our terror at the strangeness of time, we establish regimes which mitigate or attempt to halt it: the state, governing processes, absolutes. But we then reflect back on capitalism and see it as a separate process beyond our control – and see it as a control mechanism itself. But it’s not: we control the market, always. We always set the values, both today and in terms of future value.

It’s our reluctance to admit that our own preferences are at the heart of the future of value – and a parallel desire to control the future the way we seemingly can control space in the instant – that lie at the heart of how we organise the state, organise the mechanisms of control. Western liberal democracies, in their best forms, flexibly establish norms to govern what we do today, while acknowledging the need to adapt in the future (although some of that adaptive requirement seems to have faded in recent times). Most other forms of governance establish a rigid absolute, and without the ability to evolve, eventually fall into some sort of decay or collapse – even if, in our limited four score lifespans, we fail to see the inevitable (and there’s no mystery in the fact that authoritarian regimes such as China or North Korea hate with a passion history as a profession, inasmuch as it reveals the inevitability of authoritarian failure at every step).

But any conversation of value and valuation starts from a single differentiation. Either we are a species of individuals, with individual preferences, or we are subject to an absolute. If we are individuals – and history would tend to support that notion – then we will inevitably tend towards the market as a place to exchange those preferences, and capitalism is merely the expression of that exchange in such a form to allow exchange across time and space. The means – money – is just a convenience, and its form is largely irrelevant as long as it is reasonably fluid: gold and bitcoin are poor examples, but fiat money is the ideal. If, however, we’ve gotten it wrong – evolution isn’t real, human beings are subject to absolutes – then maybe there is an alternative.

But all of this is to observe that the market is not a means of control. The state is: the state exists to assert control of some kind, even if – in its lightest, western liberal form – the control is to assert individual rights to not be controlled by a majoritarian mob. Capitalism feels like a force beyond our ability to control, and thus feels like a mechanism of control: but that ignores the fact that the market only exists by us supplying our idiosyncratic – which is to say off-market, which is to say solely in our personal control – pricing preferences constantly. The market depends on individuals being different, by individuals choosing to transact at a level higher or lower than the last market clearing price – it depends on personal control. That individual choice is what then sets the new relative value process: that individual price, even if seemingly invisible at the margin, is what gives life to the market itself.

The state can’t control your preferences, even if in places like North Korea, or medieval Europe, or within rigid tribal systems, it does everything it can to do so. You’ll still prefer that colour to this one; or you’ll prefer a bigger house tomorrow than a marginally larger flat today; or you’ll prefer to lie with a man in intimacy instead of a woman. Those preferences will always be there, and to the extent they inform what price you’ll pay for anything – a haircut, your rent, your marginal purchases for weddings – they enter into the grand constant integration process of valuation which is the market. No matter what state form exists, you’ll still be communicating your preferences in value.

We are subject to absolutes, of course: we all die. And we all were born of parents who were also human. But that just means time is the absolute, and any process which fails to acknowledge that is prima facie false. The marketplace, however, is the human invention which more than anything accepts difference in time as an explicit part of its construction, where time and space are traded alongside our preferences for stuff. It’s only our own confusion of the market-as-control – which is false – with the market-as-collective-process – not collective control mechanism, but process in which we all are just marginal, but without all of our marginal contributions, would be meaningless – that makes us think today that somehow capitalism is flawed. Drop that notion. We are not at late-stage capitalism: the market will always exist unless we’re at a stage of evolution where we decide to stop being individuals. Thankfully, evidence supports the opposite, that we’re more willing to be ourselves than ever before – and thus, we need the market more than ever.

With that – hopefully you all have completed your holiday shopping, or if not, good luck with the Boxing Day sales… A very merry Christmas to everyone, and as always, thanks for reading.

I have been reading an essay by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.  His theme is the changing character of the public sphere, where debate and discussion lead to the formation of public opinion, which in turn influences public policy making.  This was also the subject of his first major book – The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – which was published fifty years ago and which I read when I was a graduate student.  (Full disclosure: I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Habermas’s work and its application to the theory of democracy.  In addition, I have just written a review of this essay plus the first volume of his history of philosophy, both recently translated into English, which should appear in the TLS early in the new year.) 

Today, the challenge to the integrity of the public sphere has less to do with the growth of mass circulation newspapers, which rely on advertising revenue, and more to do with new social media, which rely on the consumers themselves to become the producers of content.  Nowadays we are all authors, and this is a great advance in freedom as voices that had been excluded or distorted from the public sphere, can now be clearly heard.  To some extent, the media has been democratised, which is undoubtedly positive for the development of free and open societies.  And yet, these new freedoms are often being exercised with scant regard to the responsibilities that freedom brings.  As Habermas says: Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is turning everyone into a potential author.  But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?

Continue reading “Editing myself”

So last Thursday, my son acted out a bit, and I called him on it. I had made a new dish for supper – slow cooked beans and vegetables in a tomato sauce with breadcrumbs, finished with garlicky shrimp – and I knew he’d be reluctant about it. He doesn’t like stews, and this was, admittedly, dangerously close to a bean stew with shrimp on top. But when he came home from school, he said the house smelled delicious, and I was optimistic.

He tried the shrimp and said they were delicious, and then he tried the beans and made a gagging noise and did that thing kids do where he faux threw up a bit of it back onto his plate. And I called him on it.

“That’s bullshit. And you know what I mean.”

“You mean you think I’m lying?”

“No, I think you’re just bullshitting. The food is good, but you decided before you tried it that you were going to play up not liking it.”

Cue blubbing face, accusations of not being a good dad, of wanting to see Mom.

“No, you’re bullshitting, and I’m calling you on it. Go to your room, no dinner, no electronics, no radio. I’m calling you on this and you are now officially punished.”

He ran upstairs, pounding his feet, and cursing me along the way. This isn’t normal – maybe happens every few months, although in fairness to him I can’t remember it happening since the spring, and he is eleven, and is normally a great kid. But for some reason this bothered me. I spend a lot of time cooking for him, and cleaning after him, and for some reason having him pretend-vomit what was, if I may say so, a really delicious meal, triggered a need for me to simply punish him. To discipline him.

But after he stormed up to his room, it occurred to me that I was also releasing some negative energy of my own. I’m not particularly happy these days. Work is a bit of a drag and, just last week, had a bit of a crisis that the principals I work with made me wear the public pain more than was justified. And it’s December in Maine: short dark days, a lot of clouds and rain and wind, the sun – when it appears – too weak to do anything more than illuminate the naked trees and the cold glimmer of puddles in the woods, inspire the kind of low-level, non-clinical depression that makes Mainers and Atlantic Canadians fodder for bad jokes about grumpiness and casual profanity. I have not had any romantic prospects in years and, if I’m honest, I’m romance kryptonite – single dad, unexplainable income and career, tendency to think overmuch about ethics and morality and politics, and a healthy love of gin.

This is not the right mood from which to unleash discipline on an eleven year old, I was thinking to myself, although immediately after that thought, the memory of him fake puking good food made me quite comfortable in the decision to punish; the question became one of degree. And “go to your room without supper” seemed about right.

So I finished my food, gave the dog a quick walk in the pitch black night where she could barely see her way across the street to relieve herself on the neighbor’s lawn, headed back inside, and waited for a few minutes, and then headed up to the boy’s room.

“You get why you’re in trouble, right?”

“Why did you swear at me?”

“I didn’t swear at you. I used a swear to refer to your behaviour, ‘bullshit’. Do you understand why I did that?

And he said yes, he did, although he added several swears of his own which indicated what he thought of me, and my punishment, and what I could do to myself having punished him. He’s eleven, so his voice was repeatedly breaking as he screamed at me, which made it much easier to not get angry because it was so absurdly funny to hear him, in effect, say “yes, Dad, I know exactly why I was punished, but I still hate it”. I told him I loved him, which is why I occasionally punish him, because the love of a parent requires me to push back when he behaves badly; exercising his expletive vocabulary further, he described exactly what he thought of my definition of love. He was screaming, and at one point I asked him why he was screaming, because I was pretty sure I had never raised my voice; he admitted I hadn’t, and that calmed him down slightly. But I let him get on with it, rambling out his frustration, and then reminded him no electronics and lights out at 9pm, and told him to get a good night’s sleep and I’d see him in the morning, and reminded him that he needed to clean up his room because he was heading to his Mom’s the next day. And I said that I loved him. He didn’t say he loved me.

No harm no foul there: one doesn’t become a parent to be loved back, you become a parent (hopefully) out of the love you feel for the person you join in becoming parents, and for the hope that you can create love in the world in the future – and if it’s not for you, well, so be it, as long as love is created. My son does love the world, I can see that: I’m doing well. If, on a random Thursday night, he feels only spite for me, I can live with that.

My son doesn’t realise yet that discipline – when done correctly – is harder than anything. You take the risk that the object of discipline will not get the lesson, not get the joke, and will build up some store of anger or hatred that not only prevents the lesson from being learned, but is a negative lesson. You take a real risk as the disciplinarian but, if you don’t take that risk, you also know you condemn the subject to not moving forward. You could patiently explain why what they are doing is wrong, but you also – as a human being – know that only someone who already wants to learn will be converted by the patient lesson. The child – or employee, or adult – who truly doesn’t care about a lesson needs to be shocked into awareness. But that is never fun, or easy, and it always runs the risk that you, as disciplinarian, gets a rush from the sheer assertion of power. Human beings like being in control, and being in a position of disciplining is a pure moment of such control – but the existential truth of being human is that we are never, truly, in control. So within discipline lies both a need – to make sure another person who is committing a moral error is shocked back into reality – and a vicious danger – that you fool yourself into the error thinking you can control a situation and “make it better” by your sole will.

Punishment won’t make my son better, or make him less likely to bullshit me: all it can do is shock him into awareness that I don’t like being bullshitted. Only love will make my son better – well, love, and some timeout time where he isn’t playing Animal Island or Roblox or whatever the hell he’d be likely to do; indeed, the curative power of maybe just some time staring at the ceiling or reading a Hardy Boys mystery is probably the best hope he has.

The outcome of discipline should be careful reflection for both the person disciplined, but even more so, for the disciplinarian.

The rest of the night for me was painful, but probably for the good. I’m not doubting the actions I took, but I did reflect a lot on what I should do in the morning, and what my own state of mind is, and what I need to do better in any situation, and what I need to think about when the days are long and dark and seemingly bleak.

He got up in the morning and was fine – he even cleaned up his room, in fact did a surprisingly good job. I gave him a hug on his way out the door to catch the bus. He hugged me back, but he didn’t respond when I told him I loved him as he walked down the driveway. But he wasn’t unhappy, and he waved at me as he crossed the street.