Digressions&Impressions

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 4.: on the limits of Anarchism

The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve. The man s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. Like you said, I was to count people.--From Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, p. 407 (page-number are from a 2002 adobe e-reader edition)

This post is the fourth in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.; here for pt 3.).

It is commonly claimed that Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed offers a positive representation of a planet-wide anarchist society (on a planet Annares). This is no surprise because the narrative offers extensive details on the functioning of this society. In addition, Ursula Le Guin has herself invited this interpretation by adding a brief clarificatory note to one of her short stories, "The Day Before The Revolution." The story is about a day in the life of Odo, the intellectual visionary, the philosophical prophet, of Annares, where Odo's writing and her exemplary life function as the shared principles and touchstone of the anarchist program. This dedicatory note (recall) is "In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972" explicitly inserts the story into the history of anarchist theorizing mentioning ""early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman."*

In addition, the action of The Dispossessed, which centers on Shevek, is all about the tension (I almost wrote 'dialectic') between an ossified version of anarchism and anarchism as a perpetual work in progress. And so any flaws noted in Annares can charitably be interpreted as evidence of the need for the more dynamic understanding of anarchism "properly conceived," that "was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process." (230) This Shevek attributes to what we may call true Odo-nism. And the narrative of The Dispossessed is itself plausibly understood as a narration of his growth from (recall) political "fool" (123) to this more mature understanding.

So far so good. And in what follows I do not want to deny that the representation of Anarres, a kind of Socratic political theory, is a major contribution to Anarchist thought. It is especially important because this is not an anarchism that turns its back on technology and goes back to nature: "they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods." (124) But in what follows I suggest that Le Guin herself offers hints that there are limitations to Shevek's character (development) which might suggest more fatal flaws in Annares. After all the subtitle of the book is "An Ambiguous Utopia."

But first a relatively small point. So, there are two important features of the political economy of Anarres. First, their economy consists of cooperatives or syndics which are centrally coordinated from the top-down. Now unlike the economies familiar from the Soviet Union and its allied states, this is not a state capitalism. Anarres rejects property and money. Second, the economy has no mechanism to exchange surplus in one sector (say energy in which it is abundant) for needs in another section (say food). The second feature is a consequence of a kind of self-imposed autarky and political rejection of the mother planet, Urras, from which the revolutionaries were (self) exiled. Jointly, these two features make the economy of Anarres rather fragile, especially against famines in which all kinds of transportational and logistical bottle necks develop and in which starvation is a real possibility. In fact, at one point, during the famine Shevek becomes a locally important coordinator who literally decides the rations which might mean life and death for his community (see, especially, p. 407 quoted above).

Now, it's pretty clear that one of the side-effects or perhaps part of Shevek's mission to Urras is, in fact, the opening up of exchange of a commerce in ideas between Anarres and Urras. (And once on Urras he discovers a wider Hainish universe the possibilities of which are expanded by Shevek's intellectual breakthroughs and revealed to us in the last few chapters.) So, there is a sense in which the novel suggests that a truer Anarchism is open to the world/universe. And, so, perhaps this suggest that the limitations on the second feature might be overcome.

However, spatial distance might make planetary exchanges of commodities too slow and too costly to prevent famines. And Shevek's own approach (recall) is to promote nobly communism of knowledge, not trade. So it is by no means obvious that joining the league of worlds would be decisive on this score, and does not solve the coordination problems that are a consequence of central planning.

So, since there is no sign that Shevek is willing to promote the introduction of markets to solve the coordination problems that beset Anarres (and turn it into a more anarcho-capitalist society), it is by no means obvious that these can be solved. As an aside, it is worth noting that the (Hainish) League of Worlds seems loosely modeled on Kantian ideas as presented in Perpetual Peace. And Kant did think that such a League would need to be composed of commercial, trading republics. Some other time, I return to the Hainish League.

The other limitation of Anarres is that for all its egalitarian ethos, it has not, in fact, eliminated patriarchy. What I am about to discuss has long held me up writing about The Dispossessed. Shevek quietly presupposes and leans on women's labor of his scientist partner Tevek, who does menial tasks for him (see especially pp 488-489 and here paging of his manuscript). More important, Shevek sexually assaults the sister of one of his hosts on Urras, Vea. While the alcohol induced assault is very troubling by itself, it's his reaction once sober after that is, perhaps, especially jarring. While he feels humiliated, he never recognizes his own assault for what it is -- rather, he represents Vea as having betrayed him (355) -- and he rejects feeling any "guilt" (356) or shame, and this is crucial, nor does he seek any kind of atonement for it.

Now, that he rejects 'guilt' is no surprise because he has been taught to despise it. Guilt is associated with property, and in the consequentialist ethic of Anarres it's undoubtedly too backward-looking and too reminiscent of the kind of religions they have rejected. One can admire (recall) the cultivated, anticipatory "sensitivity" or sympathy (or empathy) with the pains and "suffering" of others that regulates behavior and mutual aid (393) among these anarchists, while still noticing that the absence of guilt and genuine atonement prevents forms of accountability worth having. They have norms that banish people from society (sending them to asylums), but nothing that allows people to -(ahh) own up to their wrongs to their victims, or themselves. 

And once one faces up to the significance of this sexual assault that Shevek simply sets aside, one notices that there is a structural undertone of always present violence on Anarres. Compared to the wars of the twentieth century, Anarres is quite pacific. But the book is literally book-ended by actual violence in chapter 1 and the threat of violence toward Shevek in the final chapter.  And while Shevek was still a comrade in good standing back home on Anarres, we see him in an unprovoked fist-fight with his near-name sake Shevet for no other reason that the near nominal identity causes a lot of mix-ups. (Shevet is the aggressor.) And once impartial bystanders decide that it would be a 'fair fight' (65) nobody intervenes to stop the punching despite the fact that this is an organicist society with an abundance of internal norm-enforcing social control. And after the fight a girl gives her body to him. 

Once one is willing to acknowledge that Anarres has more trouble than merely too much politics at the center, one sees that is very much a closed society of walls. This much Shevek himself diagnoses (with the help of his friends). But in so far as we are invited to reflect on the relentless forward looking ethic of Anarres, -- after he assaults Vea, Shevek wastes little time to engage in (a noble) political revolution -- we might well come to think that a society that is so incapable of registering harm done to each other may well be more rotten than just a certain amount of stasis in its cultural and social life. 

Again, this is manifested in troubled gender relations. Part of the political conflict that we are shown between Shevek and his friends with the more establishment critics, is also represented symbolically between his mother Rulag and his friend Bedap. And the reader can't help but wonder if the intensity of the conflict between mother and son isn't fueled by their mutual earlier personal rejection in accord with the anti-family norms of Anarres. The claims of family are treated as instance of property on Anarres, but this means that forms of what we might call natural sympathy are systematically suppressed or discouraged. 

And while one may well end up concluding that the anarchism of Anarres governed by true-Odonism in which a more robust openness to other perspectives may well be the best possible polity given the imperfections of human nature, Le Guin invites us to size up its true shortcomings carefully.+

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 2.: Inductive risk in State Capitalist plutocratic-oligarchic society

"I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To’s Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might as well be that. Here. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world.

He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers.

“Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled.

Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”

The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t let anybody else read them!”

Shevek made no response.

Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”

“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic.

“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do you follow me?”

“Yes.”

“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed (chapter 4; p. 89 in the (1999) Millennium edition).

As regular readers know, ever since Joshua Miller introduced me to The Dispossessed, I have become an Ursula Le Guin fan-boi. I wrote about the book enthusiastically six years ago almost to the day (recall here--that counts as pt 1 of the present series). And I intended to return to it regularly. However, when I taught it the next time around, a class discussion about the sexual assault scene in chapter 7 made me realize I didn't understand the book. Normally, I use these digressions to think my way through to some clarity or higher order confusion, but, despite writing joyously about many of Le Guin's other works since, I was blocked on The Dispossessed, which I think of not just as a work of science fiction, but a major contribution to Socratic political theory (recall also here; this one on Thomas More; and here on Kant and Spinoza) in utopian and anarchist thought. (This post will illustrate that.) So now, I'd like to try again with a series of posts, including, eventually, a revisit the significance of that scene.

Okay, in the quoted passage above, our main protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is introduced to a feature of what philosophers call 'inductive risk' (a now flourishing topic again thanks to Heather Douglas' revival of it). As I noted back in 2015 Shevek is politically very naïve, "a fool," this includes the politics of the science. And part of the action of the book is us viewing his education in politics (as well as the politics of science). And while I would never claim you should primarily read the book in virtue of its many insights into the nature of the socially embedded intellectual mind, but it is a good reason to read the book. (Yes, I am a fan.)

As an aside, I am usually not one for insisting biography matters, but while Le Guin never completed her doctorate, she was the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, the sister of the literature professor Karl Kroeber, and the spouse of the historian Charles Le Guin. And she used her keen powers of observation and analysis in  her (gentle) satire and advocacy of the intellectual life (including the labor of spouses to make it possible).

What makes the passage notable is that Sabul, the director of the Sciences Institute, uses the inductive risk argument in the service of secrecy. That's not surprising; inductive risk does not entail secrecy, but it's always a live option in light of it. Yet, we realize rather quickly that in many ways it's a bogus argument because the interests that are being served are primarily his own careerist ones. For despite the absence of profit as a motive -- Annares is anarchist society without (private) property and commerce -- the Sciences Institute itself has become hierarchical in structure and a source of social benefits not the least prestige. And through his office and political maneuvering, Sabul controls gate-keeping rather severely (e.g., publication locally and access to information from and with international networks). 

And the reason why the inductive risk argument works so well with Shevek is that the social responsibilities of science (and other practices) are very important in Annares, which teeters constantly on the edge of famine, and where all the social mores are organized around mutual aid and local control by local syndics. Part of Le Guin's wizardry in the book is that she simultaneously makes the potential oppressiveness of such little platoons local syndics highly visible and felt, while not destroying the ideal behind it. Like all important ideas that can be communicated to others, inductive risk can be abused. Of course, in this case it is a reflexive problem (it's the inductive risk of inductive risk). And it is striking that it can be abused so badly in a society where social consequences are taken so seriously. In lots of other contexts, the scientists themselves might well resist the idea that their work should be evaluated in light of social consequences--that's other people's responsibility and problem.

Interestingly enough, despite rejecting property, and embracing mutual aid, the scientists of Annares, the idealistic Shevek not excepted, crave credit/recognition for their scientific work. When Shevek is arm-twisted into sharing credit with his boss (Sabul), we see him experiencing misery. And he looks for ways to receive the credit he thinks he deserves. Sabul and Shevek end up bargaining (through barter and withholding labor/benefits) over credit. And it is one of his motives to challenge (and eventually leave) the Physics syndic. On first principles, one would have expected anonymous or collective publication -- so, either put all the names of the syndic on it or just the name of the syndic -- to be the norm in Annares. But Le Guin discerns, not implausible, that even when profit motive is eliminated by society, status and recognition are important pulls.

To be clear, when Le Guin turns to science's functioning in A-Io (on the planet Urras),--an excessively patriarchal-state-capitalist society [a critic calls it "plutocratic-oligarchic" at one point], which appears as a kind of a mirror-hybrid between the UK and US of the 1970s, but still highly familiar--profit and bureaucratic advancement are also not the only motive in science. When Atro, the doyen of science in Urras, and a champion of Shevek's theories, explains his motives he says:

“I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate—which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle—competition—elimination of the weak—a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your Theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.

“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect; and that’s what you can win us. Transilience—if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands—that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?” (119-120)

It's important that in the self-conception of Atro, science is in its social aspect fundamentally about prestige and recognition. In this respect he is not so different from the attitudes of Shevek.

But for Atro, it is a means to winning in a competition. In an important (1987) paper, Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception, the feminist philsopher, María Lugones, noticed, correctly, that modern advocates of play (she names Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer) tend to think of play in terms of agonistic competition, that is winning, and in which competence (under uncertainty over the come) reigns supreme. And she, quite rightly, connects these ideas to imperialist outlook. Atro fits this agonistic schema very nicely.* (I actually think the alternative, loving play, also has a platonic origin in Plato's Laws, but about that some other time.)

In fact, Atro (a scion of an old noble family) rejects the profit motive (which is otherwise very important in his society). But prestige can also be used for ends that are quite political: international standing, and international competitive advantage. And while there are plenty of hints that others in Atro's society intend to make great profits from technological advantage, even derive military advantage, Atro is keen on gifting ideas to others recognizing, a norm once ubiquitous in the academy, that in gift-economy bearing great gifts is a source of great prestige (and power).

There is one more scene that bears on this. It occurs just after the assault scene (and Shevek's response to it) that is so troubling. And after it, Shevek's character changes course in significant. It's an introspective meditation by Shevek:

To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Chapter 9, p. 225)

It's important to recognize (and this is explicit in the book), that in this respect, there is little difference between a communist state [which Chifoilisk serves], where "one [centralized] power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures [and with a] money economy.” (p. 114) And wages are determined by this power structure. And a society (A-Io, akin to ours today) in which profit is pursued, but in which the state and interlocking companies and foundations fund research. The modern state is mercantile in character, and even in the absence of actual violence, it is always lurking in the background to those who refuse or resist its coinage. (This is, in fact, the point of chapter 9.)

Here foreseeable, inductive risk really means either that science is corrupted by letting the state's coinage rule it (that is, that science's intrinsic reward scheme is displaced by extrinsic ones), or that it serves to entrench state power (by becoming "an investment or a weapon" (p. 288)) at the expense of those in the margins of society or other societies. That is, the book very clearly (and rightly!) rejects the idea that the state's and its functionaries' interests coincide with the wider proper interests. And the hard-hitting message of The Dispossessed is that all of us in the academy are, in this respect, state functionaries with more or less greater self-awareness about this.

At the end of the book, Shevek decides that the best solution is free, universal open access; a true communism of knowledge (familiar, say, from the Stoics). But it's not wholly clear whether Le Guin endorses it; because she shows that for Shevek this for all his idealism, too, is partially transactional. He receives credit and a chance at return home (or freedom). And a moment's reflection suggests that international open access may strengthen the states and oligarchs, if they can control, and they have the means to do so, their state functionaries. 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

Cosmic Balance and Civic Flourishing in Omelas.

    They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
    This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

    The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.--- Ursula Le Guin "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Omelas has an unusual coming of age ritual: the would be adults are initiated into a horrible truth that is simultaneously the foundation of civic happiness. And they may not alter this state of affairs on pain of losing their prosperity (and other good things). In addition, their subsequent free speech is limited in a crucial way, they may not comfort or express compassion to the child that is sacrificed for their flourishing. This would violate "the terms" of a kind of (social) contract (recall here; and here) that is either the actual root of this commercial republic, or a kind of civic religion that structures its social reality. 

A skeptical reader may well deny that such "terms" could ever express a truth since it is so manifestly unjust. But as I have noted before, if the terms actually constitute (political) justice in the city, then this move is external to the civic consciousness of Omelas. (Of course, a defender of natural right might take that as evidence that forms of legal positivism are pathways to evil.) And moreover sometimes the truth indicates the abominable misery of the status quo.

But my present interest is to note that the ritual expresses the significance of social and political knowledge in Omelas. Because this ritual is initiated in order to convey a key knowledge about social life of Omelas when the would-be-adults are capable of "understanding" the "explanations" of it. The reactions of those exposed to it, suggests that those not yet ready for understanding are carefully guarded from the truth. So, the miserable child is a social taboo from which the young are guarded carefully. That is to say, the not young maintain a culture of silence among those who are not yet initiated.  This suggests that in so far as it is a civic religion it is carefully expressed. It is by no means obvious that the many visitors to Omelas that the proud city receives would know about it since these might well tell the children of Omelas or be tempted to protest the state of affairs. (This suggests that freedom of speech is curtailed even more widely in Omelas.)

I have noted before that despite the fact that the actual religion of Omelas lacks clergy, the miserable and innocent child is a kind of piacular scapegoat. To me this suggests that the state and its civic religion has claimed for itself that which properly belongs to revealed or clerical religion.

One of my students, Robin Kan, pointed out to me that the sacrifice of the innocent child functions like a cosmic balance principle in their civic religion. For, at any given time of the polity's existence, the child's immense suffering balances out the flourishing of the polity ("that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.") Structurally, such a cosmic balance principle is very similar to Christ's redemptive suffering for the sins of humanity (which is sometimes discussed in terms of such a cosmic balance), except that Christ voluntarily takes on this task and the child is forced into it without ever being allowed any understanding of its role. It is not even offered an ideological explanation for its suffering, and thanks to Omelas' social taboo on it, it has literally no chance of anticipating it. Of course, Omelas' balance principle is not cosmic, but local, bounded by the the territory of Omelas; the child does not redeem all of humanity.

It is natural to teach Omelas as a means to discuss the limitations of utilitarianism in an introductory context. This year my own students saw in it a parable of colonial/imperial conquest or capitalist exploitation, and the way the media makes that available to viewers at the center and simultaneously makes us it feel impossible to change. In a future post I want to discuss one such interpretation because it centers on the purported absence of war in Omelas.

But it is worth noting that if one reads the story on its own terms, it depicts the horrors of state power devoted to the "happiness" of its people. And in the story this is a power that rests on the well informed understanding and tacit consent of its adult citizens, and it is presented as the best kind of polity that accepts the legitimacy of state power. That is to say, the implied point of view of the narration is the question whether it is worth paying the price of the benefits of state power.  

Of course, my present interpretation is informed by my recent (recall) reading of Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution." This story invites us to see in one of those who walk away from Omelas the revolutionary founders of a form of anarchism (which rejects state power).* That is, if we take Omelas as a best case scenario for statism, then it invites us both to reflect on the price we're willing to pay to accept our complicity in its horrors, and to what degree we're willing to contemplate (and to pursue) serious alternatives.

One final thought: the line of interpretation that I have offered here is not an alternative to, or a refutation of, treating Omelas as a means toward discussing the limitations of utilitarianism. For, as Foucault emphasizes, utilitarianism is not merely an ethical system, it is also a technology of governance. And so it does ask us what price we're willing to pay in pursuing such technologies and if we're willing to contemplate doing without them.

The Half Full Glass of Long Haul Covid

A big thing happened: I can read books again! I haven't tried philosophy yet, but I have started to read complex sci-fi novels. I finished Seth Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant, which I had abandoned when I got sick, in thirty minute installments. Then, on Monday I started Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace, which I read more or less normally without developing headache or fatigue. I say 'more or less' because I didn't read either with pen in hand and so without my more customary half an eye on a possible Digression. That is to say, despite many temptations,* I didn't have the intense interior dialogues with them I would ordinarily have. (Yes, I need to scribble in the margins of a book in order to have my best interior conversations!)+ But I was fully immersed in the narrative. 

So compared to my unfolding long haul baseline (here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here) the glass is definitely half full. In addition some other non-trivial symptoms have been reduced in severity. I average now one lost day to headache per week. I even had a ten day stretch that made me hope it was completely gone, but that was premature. On average I sleep better; the proportion of good nights vs bad nights has become favorable. (The effects of melatonin are finally noticeable when I awake in the middle of the night; I now mostly fall back asleep.) And I am physically much more active. But this also brings me face to face with my body's real limitations now.

My son's day-camp was moved to a new location. It is 1,2 miles in each direction. The route there is down, the return is uphill. I do this twice a day. It's pure joy because I get to engage with my son as his dad again, and not just as somebody to avoid bothering. At no point am I out of breath or do my legs feel tired. But it does predictably generate the characteristic 'head fatigue' I have tried to describe before. It also creates the kind of fatigue I associate with the aftermath of day-long hikes, but without any endorphins or sense of achievement. So, in effect I still spend most of the day in bed (but instead of watching kung fu, I am reading again). The good news is that he goes back to school on Monday, and that is a third of the distance. 

In the previous paragraph I also hinted at another symptom that has not disappeared. I am still highly irritable in conversations with more than one person, and I get exhausted by phone conversations. So, dinners with my whole family are challenging. 

I have disliked most confident optimistic responses by people who tried to wish me well and encourage me. I know they came from a good place. But even so, I dislike being offered hope that is not sensitive to my particular circumstances (and ungrounded in solid evidence). For all I know the previous sentence might be a sign of clinical depression or resolute anti-religious aesthetic sensibility.  But the fact that I can read books again, and manifestly enjoy doing so, does inspire hope that I may recover some cognitive skills whose absence were grounds for quiet despair. Either way, in virtue of reading the solitude of my days has been alleviated because I have good company, again. 

 

 

On Tuck Everlasting

"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."--Natalie Babbit (1975) Tuck Everlasting

When my son, now almost 11, first went to school, I had to get used to the fact that he was not especially forthcoming with what happened during the day. I learned that certain directed questions might make a difference, but he quickly and repeatedly alerted me to the fact that I ask too many questions. (Another way my occupation deforms me, I thought ruefully many times.) 

Since, I have been well trained to accept any information about his day from any source with gratitude. I have also learned to read signs of distress or success in oblique fashion. 

I don't want to suggest that I never learn anything at all about what goes on in school. For instance, a recent book they read in class -- Peter Pan -- was deemed boring and stupid. 

It is not because he dislikes reading. Our son is a voracious reader. While we are a rather bookish family, I have been, in fact, astonished by the speed with which he reads and the complexity of the material he assimilates. (Okay, I am a proud dad!) He reads so fast that he is perpetually running out of things to read. But despite the fact that he frequently faces a serious search problem, he is quite adamant that our suggestions won't do. (So, he and I most frequently bond over films and football, not books.)

The other day I was, thus, quite surprised that he recommended a book to me: Tuck Everlasting. I learned they also are reading it in class. When I asked him why he recommended it to me, his answer surprised me: it's very philosophical. But after that enticing morsel little else was forthcoming. 

I had never heard of the book. And I was amazed to learn that it had sold millions and was turned into numerous feature films. I suddenly felt very sheltered. It turns out my spouse was convinced she had read it and still owned a copy. After a fruitless search, and a repeated nudging from our son to me to read it, I ordered it online and read it Saturday.

Now, nearly all books I read I encounter with a reputation attached to it. I either know the author personally or by reputation; it's a classic I should have read or a work central to debates in my field; or it's a novel I have heard about (through reviews or word or mouth) or that has been gifted to me with some kind of comment. And in writing these sentences I realized it is, in fact, incredibly rare that I read a book without any sense of what I might expect.  

When I was a late teen-ager a family friend, Marion Zilversmit, gave me a paperback copy of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I am not sure whether it was for my birthday or a goodbye gift for my departure for college Stateside. For some reason I did not read it initially. And so it stayed in my room in Amsterdam, where I found it after I returned my freshman year. I took it with me in a backpack following the Dutch team around Italy for the world cup in 1990. 

After the (horrible) game against England in Cagliari, where all fans were treated as dangerous animals -- the police used tear-gas indiscriminately --, I found myself alone on the deck of a freight boat returning some of us to Palermo. The fans were packed in and the boat reeked of alcohol and piss. I found a spot on the upper deck, and started reading Auster through the night under the mediterranean sky. When I look back on it, I only see the romance because Auster took me into a vastly more fascinating and stimulating world than the one I was sailing; the smell and disgust are evaporated. 

The first major surprise of Tuck Everlasting is the incredibly abstract, even mythical style that is achieved at once:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Yes, my brain knows that this is strictly false in the Southern hemisphere and, in some sense, unintelligible prior to the building of the first ferris wheels. But simultaneously it feels like I have just assimilated a truth eternal. This sense is heightened by the next sentence with starts with an "Often..."

After I read the book my son pointed out to me, while we were on an errand, that Babbit's descriptions are simultaneously lively ("glaring noons") and austere ("silent," "blank"); that when you read it, you have to do a lot of work imagining what's going on, but this work of imagining does not feel like work. I recognize part of the point and whisper, we co-construct the story, as it were, with the author. He squeezes my hand. 

A second major surprise of my reading Tuck Everlasting is when I recognize (I hope he forgives me for sharing this) my son's recent bedtime questions to me in a passage early in Chapter 1:

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”

At the time he did not disguise his disappointment with the inadequacy of my responses (something about local jurisprudence, scarcity, innate commitments) to his questions. I hope to do better some day.

The other day, I asked him if he wants to talk about Tuck Everlasting (which is a rather violent book). No. Did he identify with the main protagonist (also a single child around his age). No. I could tell I was risking asking too many questions. We eventually negotiated a compromise that I could write a digression about it.

That concessions feels like a pyrrhic victory here; what to say now?

You, perceptive reader, will have noticed that eternal return and heracleitan flux are key themes in Tuck Everlasting. And I don't share any spoilers if I say that the plot is accelerated by ordinary decisions about what to do with dangerous secrets that take on weight in virtue of the possibility of eternal return. 

And then, as I am contemplating a post about how Frodo has to leave Middle Earth, and wondering if I have written that already, and before I realize what's happening, I recognize something else my son was telling me, but hadn't heard; if he and I both co-construct the story while reading it, there is a sense we have not read the same story at all. And while I reflect on this, I discern that asking about the version he is constructing with Babbit would be a way of grabbing illicitly what's now his. 

 

 

 

On philosophical love (or why I fell in love with Iris Murdoch) {Guest Post by Fleur Jongepier.}

[This is an invited guest post by Fleur Jongepier.--ES]

Have you ever fallen in love philosophically with a philosopher? Do you know the reasons why (not)?  Is there even such a thing as philosophical love? I believe there is such a thing, and that having such intellectual emotions is vital to philosophy as well as one’s own academic wellbeing. I also believe it’s intricately related to inequalities of various sorts, and that we also need to think about the sociology, if you will, of philosophical love.

Let me start with a confession: recently, I fell in love with Iris Murdoch. One can fall in love with someone after years of friendship, but this was not like that. I knew of her, but was never really ‘into’ her. I don’t think I was ready fall in love with someone like Iris, someone who worked on the topic of love and someone for whom the loss of faith constituted an important personal-philosophical theme. Back then I thought such topics were too personal to constitute proper philosophy. Also, she was never on any of my syllabi as a graduate or undergraduate student and none of my lecturers talked about her in any serious or respectful way. Happily things are different these days (see e.g. women in parenthesis, the Iris Murdoch research center at the University of Chichester, the journal Iris Murdoch Review, etc.).

In preparation for a lecture on ethics and aesthetics, I recently watched an interview with her on Youtube, and I was smitten. When asked whether she believed one can do philosophy in novels, she said that, at best, a novelist would be engaged in “idea play”. Dostojevski involved in idea-play, the audacity of it! I loved the concept of “idea play”, and I loved her mischievous smile when she said it. (I didn’t really love her accent, but we would get over that.) She said things like “I feel in myself such an absolute horror of putting theories as such into my novels,” and I thought that was excellent. It resonated strongly with my own emerging views on philosophy and literature. But I also wondered whether she really believed it, that the two were so separate even in her own case. And then I wondered if I really believed it, and whether they were so separate in my own case. And so I wanted to get to know her better. I soon bought The Sovereignty of Good, a large pile of her novels, and listened to hours of excellent podcasts. So far, I’ve only read part of the third essay from Sovereignty, and none of her novels. I’m a little afraid I might fall out of love with her, and I’m not ready for that. That’s because I have reasons for loving Iris.

I don’t know if one might have reasons for romantic love, or parental love, or love for one’s friends. As yet I have no explicit views about the relation between love and rationality. All I know is that there are reasons for philosophical love in my own case. There’s a sense in which I needed to fall in love with someone who reflected explicitly on the very discipline of ethics and on how certain ways of doing and teaching ethics can be ineffective if not harmful. I had reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared about how teaching ethics matters to how persons might (fail to) become better beings. On the importance of distinguishing between theories about the good, and actually being a good person. Given that I recently took up fiction writing again, I also wanted to fall in love with a philosopher who wrote novels and who was (happily?) prepared to make philosophical sacrifices to do that.

I have reason to fall in love with a philosopher who cared deeply about topics that human beings outside of academic philosophy typically also care about. I want to feel passionately about a philosopher who believes that working on humanly important questions is compatible with being a rigorous philosopher. I need to feel close to someone who could show me that writing well and clearly is compatible with embracing ambiguities and complexities in one’s writing. I want to fall in love with a philosopher with different and refreshing conceptions on what rigor and clarity in philosophy and ethics amounts to. I want to be together with someone with whom I might further explore freer ways of doing philosophy; to explore the boundaries of philosophy and fiction; to explore the role of language, rhythm, emotions and real life in my academic work. I want to love a philosopher who loved those things, and I want it to be Iris. 

I had another reason to fall in love with Iris, which has to do with my reasons for wanting to (continue to) be an academic philosopher in the first place. Philosophical love can make that one is unprepared to “let go” of certain positions when confronted with objections, like a dog unprepared to let go of a stick (even when it cannot pass through the gate). The distinct type of doggedness that accompanies philosophical love can – like any other type of love – create serious problems of having myopic views and whatnot. However, it can also constitute a form of intellectual virtue and an important factor to the vitality of certain debates and disciplines. It’s a good thing that, due to intellectual love and passion, some people are prepared to go to great – all too great – lengths, and it’s often because of love that they are so prepared.

Intellectual emotions are important to one’s academic wellbeing. For me, in any case, philosophy is something I want to remain genuinely passionate about, at least sometimes. I’m not prepared for philosophy to become a purely cognitive or instrumental affair of finding good “niches” to publish in.^[1] And even though I see the dangers of philosophical love slipping into heroism – and I’d prefer, with Liam Kofi Bright, there to be #noheroes in philosophy – I still want to be able to fall in love philosophically, with all that that entails. I want to be able to defend certain views, or indeed someone’s work, to irrational lengths. I want to be able to be sometimes epistemically vicious, as Quassim Cassam calls it. I want to be able to be dogmatic, closed-minded, prejudiced, overconfident, gullible, and I definitely want to engage in wishful thinking every now and again. Just as love can be blind (fortunately enough), so too can philosophical love. Such blindness can be a good thing, both for the discipline and the progress and vitality of debates, but also for one’s intellectual wellbeing. I started doing philosophy because I was passionate about it, and I want to keep it that way. But it’s getting more difficult, given the increasing specialization of the discipline and instrumental thinking and publishing strategies. And so I needed fire, I wanted to lose myself in intellectual passion like I used to, and so I had to fall for Iris.

I also had reason to fall in love with a woman, specifically. Widespread sexual harassment and all other types of behaviours in its vicinity in academia has acutely obvious consequences, but also has negative effects that are much harder to identify. I believe being able to (allow oneself to be) passionate about philosophers and their work, especially if they are male, in a position of power, and alive, is one such hard to identity consequence. Due to all sort of incidents near and far, and the disappointment and disgust I feel in response, I’ve come to realize that experiencing philosophical love and passion for male philosophers is not really an option for the time being. Not even dead ones. I’m genuinely sad I (appear) to feel this way, and I feel uncomfortable about how these unreflective disinclinations generalize against all philosophers (m) despite knowing full well there are many lovable philosophers (m) around. But that’s the way it is, and I fear I’m not the only women who has become rather reserved with respect to experiencing intellectual passions. Even if, for some, the disappointment is less acute, it seems we all have reason to be aware of the dangers and inequalities surrounding philosophical love. If only because some philosophers themselves are apparently unable to recognize the not-so-difficult distinction between romantic love and philosophical love, and are incapable of behaving appropriately when intellectual passion comes their way. It wouldn’t surprise me if the safest and most uncomplicated type of philosophical love is, if you would allow me, homoerotic (in acute contrast to romantic homoerotic love, needless to say).

It’s not just women that philosophical love affects differently, it’s also people of colour and persons with mental or physical disabilities. Philosophical love and academic passion can be a privileged thing to feel, to allow oneself to feel, to be open to, to (dare to) act on. Given the importance of being able to experience philosophical love and passion at no cost to oneself, it’s tragic that it’s likely to be less open to some.

Philosophical love is thus likely to be implicitly (or perhaps on occasion explicitly) sexist, racist, and ableist.  This should be evident when one regards the typical receiving end of philosophical love: male, white, abled. That’s simply the result of a lack of diversity in most syllabi, curricula, and department staff. That’s part of the reason why I didn’t have the chance to fall in love with Iris before: I never encountered her during my undergraduate or graduate years, and was taught to love the “cooler” type. I taught myself to be passionate about depressingly analytic styles of writing, where the joy of playing around with language and real life had no place. I eventually fell in love with Dennett, whom I thought was analytically respectable and an engaging writer, thus a fine compromise for my intellectual heart and mind. But not being able to love Iris may well have meant not being able to flourish philosophically more fully, or earlier on.

One might think that the fact that I have so many reasons to love Iris – many of which have rather little to do with her and all the more with me, with feminism, and with various disappointments – is love-debunking. Love-debunking, as one might think of it, is when there are explanations for why you love someone or something that aren’t actually good reasons to love. If you come to see and accept those reasons for love, they would undercut your love. But there’s no reason to think my love for Iris can be debunked (I know, that’s precisely what smitten people would say). It’s true that I have reasons to love her, and know that I do, but that fact in itself isn’t love-undermining. Explaining something doesn’t always have to involve explaining it away (pace, Dennett). For one thing, reasons to love and feelings of love might be different things running parallel: I (sometimes) love philosophy for instance and I recognize, looking at myself from a distance, that being the sort of person I am, philosophy is the sort of thing I must love, tied as it is to my self-conception, and so on.

The point here is this: we do not need to be so worried about the fact that we fall in love with certain philosophers for all kinds of personal and social reasons, good or bad. The fact that philosophical love is often explainable doesn’t make one’s love any less real, deep, or indeed any less of a valuable academic-philosophical drive. Maybe you fell in love with a philosopher because your PhD supervisor not so coincidentally shared the same love. Maybe you fell in love with a certain topic because someone whom you greatly admire was passionate about it. Maybe you fell in love with a book because you thought you needed to love that book to be a “serious” philosopher. I think we all have philosophical love stories like these, and I don’t think they are “fishy” love stories. It’s only to be expected that philosophical love will often, or always, have robust social and personal-level explanations. And it’s not “unscientific” to recognize the reasons why one falls in love with certain debates, books, articles, or philosophers and their work.  It’s better to recognize and acknowledge these socio-personal love-explanations than to pretend, on the basis of some naive idea of academic neutrality and objectivity, that there’s such a thing as pure philosophical love, that is, a purely content-induced love.

Given the dangers of philosophical love and academic passion more generally, one might want to try and root out these emotions and try to avoid them in ourselves and our students and strive towards “impassionate philosophy”. I think that would be a mistake. Such intellectual emotions are crucial to deciding to (try and) become an academic philosopher in the first place, and – for me – to (want to) remain one. Such passions are integral to philosophy and science (see also the recent piece by Helen de Cruz on the importance of awe). One’s relation to philosophy and science requires both the head and the heart. And so instead we need to design our institutions and behave in such ways that we, including our students, can safely fall in love with concepts and debates and, yes, to also fall in love, non-romantically, with philosophers and their work. We need to make sure, by taking diversity seriously on all levels, that there are concepts and debates and philosophers for us to safely fall in love with.

Do I really love Iris though? One might think philosophical love is, at best, love in scare quotes. If one thinks that, then I fear one must be prepared to narrow down the love domain to rather impoverished ends. If one can’t love philosophers but only ‘love’ them, then it seems one can’t love Bob Dylan either, or Bessie Smith, or Francis Bacon, or Sofonisba Anguissola. I’m not prepared to only ‘love’ Bob Dylan, and by modus tollens/ponens, I don’t just ‘love’ Iris either. But if philosophical love is anything at all, what might it be? Philosophical love meets many characteristics of romantic love, though not all (and importantly so!) One importantly shared characteristic is “depth” which makes love different from mere liking. Philosophical love will involve being prepared to dedicate oneself to certain (shared) values and courses of action, even at cost to other projects that one values. Also, loving someone typically involves knowing their faults and loving them regardless (see this Digression).

For me, loving Iris involves being non-instrumentally curious in her work and a willingness to find out who she is, to have a “softer view”, as Julia Driver puts it, on her flaws, and not to try and mold her into my ideal image of her. Most importantly, love, as Murdoch tells us, is a way of getting “away from the self” (or “unselfing”) and to focus wholly and lovingly on the other. One is directed “towards the great surprising variety of the world, and the ability to so direct attention is love”. If suddenly seeing a kestrel is, for Murdoch, a way of unselfing, then Iris is my kestrel. Loving Iris is a way of focusing wholly on philosophy, seeing strands of philosophy I didn’t even notice before, of forgetting about misbehaviours in academia and to be mindfully passionate in philosophical thought, to forget about my laundry, the bills I need to pay, my own existential worries and self-interested concerns.

And so, for all these reasons, and many others besides, I’ve fallen in love with Iris. I’m well aware that I want to love her, for my own academic wellbeing, philosophical vitality, and fiction-writing enthusiasm. Being Iris, she might be rather displeased that I love her for reasons, she might even think this means I don’t love her, but I love her all the same. (I hope we’ll get through the holidays; I’m not looking forward to the baked beans with olive oil.)

Omelas' Social Contract Reconsidered.

I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

Unlike More's Utopia, or Bacon's Bensalem, Le Guine's Omelas is not (relatively) isolated from the rest of the world. In fact it is clearly welcoming of visitors. The train station is a very important building, after all. And while Omelas reject finance (they don't have a stock-market) they do trade (cf. the "magnificent Farmer's Market.").In many ways Omelas, which is a port-city, resembles a commercial trading republic; they explicitly do "without monarchy." 

I have noted before (recall) that the practices, which structure social life in Omelas, are ground in a social contract. I have analyzed the contract before (recall). I had claimed the contract has three clear terms:  (a) a miserable child; (b) no talking to the child; (c) "the happiness" of the citizens of Omelas.  I had claimed there were two ways to honor the contract: (i) stay in Omelas as a citizen; (ii) walk away of Omelas; by contrast, one way to break the contract (iii) would be to free the child and thereby destroy Omelas's perfected happiness. So far summary.

I want to add three key point: first, one becomes an accountable party of the social contract by learning about the terms. Children between the ages of "eight and twelve" learn the basic facts. And often these also come to see the imprisoned child. The ones that walk away from Omelas are sensitive souls who avoid getting their hands dirty, but leave the status quo as is. Third, the social contract of Omelas constitutes the "terrible justice of reality." Knowledge of the terms of the social contract transform the meaning, by a kind of philosophical chemistry (familiar from Hobbes and Hume), of very same facts what looks like manifest "injustice"" into justice.  This means that by Omelas' lights would-be-destroyers of the social contract are not just rebels, but (if unsuccessful) unjust.

So, it means that one can be governed by the contract without being full party to it. That's clear in the case of (iv) the miserable child (who is so dehumanized to be barely human). The other (v) children of Omelas benefit from the contract without being aware of who is paying the price for it. My students pointed out to me that these children are like (vi) the visitors to, and those that trade, with Omelas. That is to say, those that benefit from Omelas' social contract, and indirectly, perhaps, enhance it, may not all know the horrible social conditions that structure their reality. 

As an aside, I tend to assume that Omelas' social contract is somewhat Hobbesian in character--that it is a contract among all the adults who thereby constitute a certain social regime. But it is not impossible that (vii) a hidden God is the counter-party to the contract. So that the contract of Omelas is more akin to a Biblical covenant; say the one promised in Jeremiah 31-4. There is religion in Omelas, but not one with clergy. This is not entirely silly because the innocent child is piacular, that is, a kind of purifying sacrifice, who thereby gives meaning to the lives of the citizens of Omelas and "makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science."

Okay, with that in place, let me get to the main point. In discussion with my students I realized that, in fact, there is another party to the social contract of Omelas: (viii) the readers of the story. For, we are actively and repeatedly invited by the narrator to co-constitute Omelas: "it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids;" "As you like it;" "I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy" and or two more such suggestions. We are like the visitors to Omelas, but unlike them, we do know the terms of the contract. 

If we, the readers, benefit from Omelas, in full awareness of the terms of the contract, and we may be fairly said to have co-constituted elements of Omelas, then we are complicit in evil.* Now, some sympathetic readers may wish to put on the breaks here, and say, that the miserable child in Omelas is, after all, purely fictional, so no harm done. We may say then, that a certain species of philosophical realism urges on us the idea that one can turn one's back on Omelas without consequence.

But the miserable child is also an intentional object. We carry it with us after co-constituting the city that harms it. And in virtue of that, we cannot walk away from Omelas because wherever we go that suffering intentional object goes. And so while we are guiltless, we are stained, too. 

Orwell's 1984, the Jewess Refugee

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off....To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back...For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper....His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984.  Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. There was a middle-aged woman might have been a Jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself. all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child's arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish.--George Orwell  (1949) 1984, pp. 8-10 [typos and italics in original].

Recently I re-read and taught 1984. I was startled to be reminded that the opening set piece of the novel is the diary entry quoted above. When Orwell wrote the lines, memories of the catastrophic treatment of Jewish refugees were fresh to his audience, even if not Winston's contemporaries. Somehow I had completely suppressed the fact that readers are introduced to the essential lawlessness ("nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws") of Oceania and its inhumanity by way of its undisguised savage treatment of refugees. 

As an aside, this element of 1984 is more widely repressed. The lengthy and interesting wikipedia page devoted to 1984 makes no mention of refugees. And judging by scholar.google this aspect of 1984 is not of much interest.+

In the present (the actual 2018) navies shooting at refugees and killing refugees, or creating circumstances in which they are let to drown, are not uncommon in the Mediterranean (see here; and here). While the main intent is not, perhaps, to kill refugees, it is a foreseeable side-effect from a system of incentives designed to  keep them out of Europe. (In practice, the policy of disincentives is indiscriminate among refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants.) 

In one-non-trivial sense present reality is worse than Orwell imagined (for my admiration of his essays, see here and here). European governments are democratic, rule-governed, and, for the most part, their policies have the sanction of law. And while there is a part of the European public that prefers not to really know about such distasteful matters, there can be no doubt that a non-trivial part of the public -- increasingly xenophobic --would cheer these deaths on and reliably vote for parties promising these results.

I call this 'worse' because Oceania is a ruthless tyranny of the few (the elite of the inner party) -- although the few are also gripped by this tyranny --, and so the reader can imagine that the horrific behavior described in Orwell's set-piece is a consequence of the sort of propaganda that can only thrive in a tyranny. This thought is encouraged by Orwell because the set--piece seems to imply, in fact, that while Winston (part of the meritocratic elite, even if in the outer party) cheers on the killing, by contrast the natural sentiments of ordinary people, if left alone (as the 'Proles' are), are not fully corruptible.* But the sober reality, one that needs permanent reminding (as (recall) Judith Shklar correctly insisted), is that democratic politics -- even ones operating in a strong juridical framework  -- are also capable of horrific policies.

There is another sense in which the situation is worse today. Winston's predicament is, in part, that his diary words only can have meaning to his interrogator as means to torture him. (Because of the absence of law their status as evidence is irrelevant.) In other respects his words are utterly futile because (to put Winston's words in my terms) there is no implied audience for which they may be transformative. It is notable (and worth further reflection some other time) that in a future in which Oceania does not exist anymore he expects his predicament not to generate sympathy but to be meaningless.

The Mediterranean killings are happening among a people who pride themselves on free speech and the role of public opinion. Our civic religion, or ideology, is that we are capable of political change in virtue, at least in part, of the availability of public speech. But it's precisely (recall) unfettered (profitable) speech that sustains our inhumane policy. And the false lovers of freedom and democracy feel no shame.

Invisible Cities

In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city's true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia's confusion, the mules' braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.

It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet's immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.

An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects -- the oracle replied -- has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.--from Invisible Cities, by  Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver. [HT Saar Frierling]

The day after the most talented side the Dutch had ever fielded in the world cup was humiliated by the Germans in San Siro, I bought a copy of Invisible Cities in the Feltrinelli in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele next to the Duomo. I spent the day in the Feltrinelli store because I was broke and it had excellent air conditioning; it seemed like a refuge from the turmoil in my heart. After the defeat, Peter and I had said our goodbyes at the hostel; he was going to go back all the way down to the boot of Italy, whereas I was going to try my luck scalping a ticket for the Brasil - Argentina match in Turin before heading to (recall) Sestri Levante on weightier family matters. Before leaving Milan, I solved my money problems by selling my ticket to the semi-finals to an optimistic German fan in an alley behind the train station. A few days before Peter and I had been arrested there as dangerous hooligans in front of hundreds of cameras, but now nobody seemed to care.

I read the book on a train crossing the Northern plains of Italy.  I found it contrived and later could not recall a single image from it. After the Summer when Peter's mom, who grew concerned about lack of news from him, asked me where he had traveled to after our split I had to confess that I did not recall what he had said to me; Bari, Tarente, and Lecce all seemed like plausible destinations for  him. Years later, long after he had resurfaced safely, it crossed my mind that my self-absorption made me a perfect fall guy for a murder since I could not convey knowledge of any facts that could establish a plausible alibi. 

Yet, a few days ago, nudged by a friend, I re-read the passage quoted above; it enchants me now; a true map does not just capture the relations of what it purports the represent, but also helps get you from any initial conditions or (implied) coordinate on the carpet to where you need to go. That is to say, it's not just a copy of some original, but also a teleological object that can presuppose your true ends. And when you have an image of that carpet in your mind, you are never lost in the bustling streets of Eudoxia. 

It is notable that the idea that a city could be a carpet is found in Plato's Republic (557C),  where the democratic city is compared to a garment of many colors, embroidered with all kinds of hues, a trope repeated in (recall) Al-Farabi's Virtuous City, where he claims the democratic polity/regime is "on the surface, it is like an embroidered garment replete with colored figures and dyes" and Ibn Rushd's Commentary on Plato's Republic. The name of the  city, Eudoxia, may well be a nod to Plato's friend, the astronomer-mathematician Eudoxus.* 

To mention Socrates, is to evoke Socrates's claim (recall 592ab) that there is a pattern of the best polity laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it. On my reading of Socrates, the embodied relations of the pattern can be configured differently at different times (while still being a proper copy of the heavenly pattern). So, that in each context we must explore these relations anew. 

At this point one may object and claim that for Socrates the best polity is not the democratic city and so it cannot be the true pattern, even if glittering. This connects with a more disconcerting possibility: the name of the city, Ευδοξία means 'good deeds' (Εύδοξος can mean 'good opinion' or 'good glory.') The inhabitants of the democratic city think of their own as the best and blessed by the gods, but their deeds can't justify it.

Calvino's narrator points out against the consensus of the experts, that the cosmos, which Eudoxia mimicks, may, in fact, not be teleologically organized, but one in which epicurean chaos/chance rules. This is a cosmos in which the nightly screams are not part of a vindicating theodicy, but the unanswered, lonely calls ignored by the cowardly and servile burghers who stay inside while their neighbors are deported. And while writing the previous sentence I am transported back to the dusty carriages of the Ferrovie dello Stato staring out on the quiet, industrious towns of Lombardy.