“This is the way the world ends”: Drowning in Plastics

There is much debate about climate change, but changes to our environment are nor limited to the weather. Environmental degradation is everywhere and, as the world’s population keeps increasing and more human beings want to participate in the benefits of modern civilization, it is not going away very soon.

One aspect of it is our growing production and consumption of plastics. Plastics cram landfills, they float in the oceans, are consumed by fish and thereby ultimately end in our bodies. Click here

The US and the West have long relied on China to take its used plastics for recycling. China has now banned those imports because of their poisonous impact. Now we are ready to poison some other, economically less powerful countries. Click here

 

Forget Fire and Fury; It’s Confusion and Turmoil in Trump’s White House

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House, Henry Holt and Company, New York 2018

On August 8 of last year, Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” His words were meant to cow the North Koreans into abandoning their nuclear and missile arsenal but until now, at least, they appear to have been only idle threats. Michael Wolff has now adopted the phrase as the title of his book on the first nine months of the Trump presidency – surely, a cleverly ironic choice. For since his election Trump has proved to be more a source of combative words than of real achievements.

Wolff insists that Trump and his circle had never expected to win the election, that he had been planning his campaign, instead, as a business promotion for the Trump brand and a possible new television channel. Victory thus left Trump unprepared for the job ahead. This story must, however, be too simple since Trump had been toying for years with the idea of running for president. He had been telling everyone willing to listen of all the things that, in his view, were wrong with America and the world, how they could be set right in simple ways were it not for corrupt and incompetent politicians everywhere, and how he, Trump, could easily do so, given half a chance. There was, no doubt, some hesitation in him about whether he would actually want to put such words into action. But in the end, it was a combination of overconfidence and ignorance that propelled Trump to actually seek the highest elected office.

He did so with few thoughts about job once he was elected. He had run his shaky business for many years as a small, somewhat chaotic family affair. How was he supposed to operate now the vast machinery of the Federal government? What was worse: “Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was in print it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate… But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise – no matter how paltry or irrelevant – more than anyone else’s.” (pp. 113-114) An explanation of the Constitution left him yawning. And when Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host, asked him whom he called on for advice, Trump is supposed to have answered sheepishly: “Well, you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.” (p. 47)

Resisting advice and skeptical of the Washington bureaucracy, Trump left himself, thus, open to being influenced by whatever he had seen most recently on television and whatever he had been told by the last person to speak to him. The problem was that even though Trump had strong opinions, he also changed them frequently and was often unable or unwilling to reach any final decision. Three factions vying for the new president’s attention emerged in consequence. There was Steve Bannon, backed up by Bob and Rebekah Mercer and the alt-right media, who pushed a confrontational agenda of “economic nationalism;” there was Reince Priebus and his cohort advancing a mainstream Republican Party line; and there was the family, Ivanka and Jared Kushner with their moderate “New York Democrat” friends. The competition between them soon turned bloody and led to the ouster of Priebus, Bannon, and others from the White House. The turmoil was exacerbated by the investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with this in the Trump campaign. This led soon to the ouster of the FBI director, James Comey, and Trump’s alienation from his Secretary of Justice, Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest supporters. The dynamic set thus into motion is still working itself out and we can expect more turmoil to come out of Trump’s White Hose.

While Donald Trump is the central figure in Wolff’s narrative, an important second role is filled by Steve Bannon. It was Bannon who, in fact, helped Wolff to gain initial access to Trump. Trump himself had then invited Wolff into the White House under the impression that Wolff was writing a book on his first year in office to be called The Great Transition. And so, Wolff, with Bannon’s help, managed to sit in the White House for half a year observing and overhearing the things he reports in his book. It begins and ends not surprisingly with Bannon. Its first section describes a dinner party in the spring of 2017 at which Bannon and Roger Ailes, the deposed head of Fox Television, freely dissect the Trump presidency and it ends after Bannon’s banishment from the White House with his declaration that “Trump was just the beginning.” For Bannon, Trump had, in fact, always been only the vehicle for his own political ambitions even as he was professing again and again his loyalty to the president. He could thus confidently declare after his ouster from the White House: “I am the leader of the nationalist, populist movement.” (p. 301) As far as Trump himself was concerned, Bannon foresaw that he would had little to fear from an investigation into his links to Russia. Yes, Donald Jr. had made a serious mistake when meeting with the Russians during the election campaign. But What he had done was possibly treasonous, or unpatriotic, and, in any case, “silly” and “bad shit.” (p. 255) And there was no reason to believe Donald Sr., when he denied all knowledge of this meeting. But none of this would be sufficient to bring the president down. It was, however, another matter altogether, if the inquiry should turn to Trump’s finances. “You realize where this is going,” Bannon said during another dinner party in July 2017: “This is all about money-laundering …. They are sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.” (p. 278) Bannon had no doubt that Trump’s business dealings had been fishy. He thought, in the end that “there was a 33.3 percent chance that that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent that Trump would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of incapacitation), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term. In any case, there would certainly not e second term, or even an attempt at one.” (p. 308)

Bannon emerges from this account as Wolff’s tragi-comic hero. Unlike Trump, he actually reads books (to the astonishment of everyone else in the Trump circle). Unlike Trump, he has ideas, convictions, and “projects.” Unlike Trump, he thinks in large, strategic terms about politics. But his learning is spotty and his vision of political reality and his own place in it is distorted. We can’t help feeling that he has been caught in the web of “fake news” that threatens to swamp everything and which the Breitbart channel directed by Bannon himself was so clever to exploit. It turns out that Bannon has come to believe in the absurd Noel Howe and William Strauss theory that history moves in strict generational circles and that we are now in the fourth stage of that development, a moment when the existing order inevitably disintegrates. So, Bannon’s view of American and world politics is duly apocalyptic. And he is eager to speed the apocalypse on its way; Trump is for him only one of the tools to bring that about. If this world-view separates him from Trump, he shares with the president an overwhelming desire to speak, to communicate and what the one pursues with his tweets, the other does through incessant leaks. It is this inability to stay silent that finally brought Bannon down. Bannon’s leaks were, no doubt, a rich source for Wolff’s book they were finally also instrumental also bringing about the complete break with Trump.

Wolff’s book has been criticized for a number of factual errors – though none of them deadly – and for his willingness to conjecture and interpret, but when we read it in the light of what we already know about Trump’s presidency from other sources, we cannot doubt its overall veracity. Its devastating effect is not even primarily due to its revelations (there are a few) but to the fact that it collects bits of common knowledge into a single compelling narrative. The book is a major achievement of the kind that the great Roman historians would have recognized. It is not like works of modern historical scholarship with their endless footnotes referencing every claim, and their desire for detachment and balance. Like the Roman historians, Wolff seeks to tell a story and he allows himself to put fitting words into people’s mouths. Like the ancient historians, he revels in the foibles and vices of our rulers. And also in the style of those historians he is clearly advancing an agenda, all the while claiming to be writing in a disinterested fashion (“sine ira et studio,” as the Romans put it).

After reading Wolff’s book it becomes difficult to believe that the Trump presidency will have a happy outcome either for Trump himself or the United States as a whole. If that turns out to be the case, Wolff’s book will surely be read for a long time. Even if it comes otherwise, I hope that the book will be remembered for its vivid depiction of a deeply disquieting moment in US history.

 

Populism’s everywhere. But what, the hell, is it?

Three ways to think about populism

Populism is the political fashion word of the moment. Trump’s critics accuse him of being a populist. Steve Bannon calls himself proudly “a populist-nationalist.” The alt-right and their offshoots are considered populists. Populism is said to lie behind the UK’s Brexit decision. There are, so we hear, populist parties emerging all over Europe.

But do we know what the word stands for? It is, in fact, in the words of the English philosopher W. B. Gallie, an “essentially contested concept.”  (Click here)  Both its content and its valence are in dispute; the word does not serve as a politically neutral tool of analysis, in other words, but as a weapon in the political struggle and there may no way to avoid this. The natural opposite of “populist” is “elitist” – but that is just another essentially contested concept.

We may want to distinguish at least three things:

(a) Populism as a set of policies – and often of policies that are defined in negative terms. Thus, populism as opposition to “the other” (e.g., immigrants, Muslims, transgender people), as anti-globalization, as anti-establishment. But don’t expect there to be a sharply defined list.

(b) Populism as the politics of a particular social group: the populus consisting of disadvantaged white (?) males(?) — but there is no precise definition of who does and who does not belong to that group and, furthermore, why should we assume that the members of the populous adhere to a single politics? It may be safer to assume that they divide between left and right and that populism, understood in this second sense, has both a left-wing and a right-wing variety.

(c) Populism as a set of policies defined by a political elite (an activist political movement or even a ruling elite) which it ascribe to another social group (the populus), and which it then embraces or deplores – in the name of or on behalf of that social group. Think of Trump, the billionaire, claiming to speak for “the ordinary people.” Think of Bannon promoting “economic nationalism” in the name of a working class to which he clearly does not belong.

The tensions and contradictions in populism understood in this third way should be obvious. In his Bannon-inspired Inaugural Address Trump proclaimed that “the ordinary people” would now have access to government and we, see, indeed, how Trump receives all kind of ordinary folks in the White House. But they are there only for photo ops, not for serious consultation. When it comes to the latter, Trump is on the phone to his billionaire friends. Trump, the self-declared anti-globalist, is at the same time engaged in promoting his own name as a global brand. Steve Bannon, similarly, posed as the spokesman of the American working class, all the time being promoted and financed by Bob and Rebekah Mercer, with their billions of dollars and their nutty, extremist views. He says that he is an American nationalist, but also travels the globe to promote such nationalism universally to other nations.

In a word: contemporary populism is a looking-glass world.

Another headache

Should we worry about the alt-right? They are noisy and in-your face, but do they matter? It’s surely important to keep an eye on them and to know what they stand for. They may still fade away, but perhaps it is more accurate to see them as one symptom of the ongoing destabilization of our political order.

 

 

Diagnosing Donald Trump

January 21, 2018 – Over the course of the last twelve months, both laymen and experts have sought to diagnose Donald Trump. They have been asking again and again after each one of his many bewildering tweets: What is wrong with the man psychologically?

I am interested in another kind of diagnosis. My question is what Trump’s elections means politically: Is it an aberration or does it signal a tectonic shift in our political landscape? I am inclined to the latter view. We appear to be drifting into some kind of plutocracy – and that not only in the United States. The many weaknesses of the democratic system of government seem finally to be catching up with it. But plutocracy can take many different forms – think of the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, on the one hand, and Suharto’s Indonesia, on the other. So we need to consider what kind of political system we are moving towards. My answer, in short, is that we see the coming of a nihilistic techno-plutocracy. I ask myself, however, whether that will be a new stable political order or only a step toward the end of politics altogether in the way that Hannah Arendt once conceived it. click here

My attempt at such a diagnostic view at our political situation is meant to explore the possibility of a different kind of political thinking – different from traditional political philosophy with its eyes on abstract norms and principles. Where the tradition asks: What is the best form of government? What are the principles of justice? I want to explore the political realities from the ground up in order to find out what needs to be done. (See Politics and the Search for the Common Good.)

 

 

Zuriaake

We must keep an eye on China, if we are to understand the future of global politics.

An article in the South China Morning Post drew my attention to Zuriaake, an intriguing and unsettling Chinese black metal band:

Zuriaake combines the Western and the Chinese, the global and the ethnic, ancient and modern, mysticism and revolution.  Click Here

Watch their 2016 performance at Festival Midi in Beijing. It will tell you more about the current state of China than many official reports: Click Here

 

The disunity of knowledge

Our sharpest break with the tradition has come with the realization of the disunity of knowledge (of thought, the mind, the world, and pretty much else that concerns philosophy). We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere.

A vivid expression of this revolt against the entire philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Hegel is due to Nietzsche who declared his “profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world” and proclaimed, instead, the “fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.” (The Will to Power, 470) The remark provides a key to Nietzsche’s writing and thinking. It helps to make sense of his aphoristic style as well as of his belief in many perspectives. Not that readers of Nietzsche have always appreciated this point. Nietzsche himself wrote in a sketch for his last book: “I mistrust all systems and systematizers; perhaps one [of them] will even discover behind this book the system I have sought to avoid. The will to system is a dishonesty for a philosopher.”

Another expression of this same idea is found in Wittgenstein’s later writings. He asks himself there what reasons he has for trusting text-books of physics and he answers: “I have no grounds for not trusting them. And I trust them. I know how such books are produced – or rather, I believe I know. I have some evidence, but it does not go very far and is of a very scattered kind. I have heard, seen, and read various things.” (On Certainty, 600) This is, of course, not a biographical note but meant to reveal the status of our usual claims to knowledge. What we call knowledge is, indeed, of a scattered kind. Linked to this thought is Wittgenstein’s realization that the mind (or soul or self) is not a unity – a conviction that the tradition has made a supporting pillar for its belief in the immortality of the soul. (A simple substance, it says, cannot disappear through a process of disintegration.)

Michael Foucault speaks of different discourses with their own distinctive internal rules and he points out that not everything possible is actually ever said. “We must look, therefore, for the principle of rarification or at least of non-filling of the field of possible formulations… The discursive formation is not therefore a developing totality, … it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions.” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 119) And again, in slightly different language: “The archive cannot be described in its totality… It emerges in fragments, regions, levels…” (p. 130)

While Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault agree that there is nothing uniquely foundational for philosophy to think about, they do not mean to say that it doesn’t matter what we make the subject of our thinking. Some philosophical questions are clearly more urgent than others. For us the decisive issue is now our individual, social, and political existence as human beings. The pressing issue is what it means to be human and all three, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, wrestled with that.

 

 

Why I am (still) a philosopher

 (Click here for part 1)

Dear Raymond,

Do we have to be as pessimistic about the future of philosophy as you are in your latest book? I still hold some hope for the subject and believe it, in fact, to be needed today more than ever.

That said, I agree with you that the current state of philosophy is not good. You are right that philosophy as conducted in our Universities and Colleges seems to be turning more and more into a propaedeutic enterprise for future lawyers. But what we call “philosophy” has often been two very different things: on the one hand, a scholastic undertaking for schooling young minds, and, on the other, a creative form of thinking on “fundamental” issues and the latter has frequently taken place outside the educational institutions. Of the philosophical thinkers you discuss in your book only some were professors. Socrates was a public gadfly and nuisance, Lucretius a poet, Augustine a bishop, Montaigne a bit of a hermit, and Hobbes a courtier. It may turn out that the most serious thinkers of the future will not be found in philosophy departments.

Philosophy as serious thinking has, of course, never been an academic “discipline” with set boundaries and doctrines. It has always moved, as you describe in your book, from subject to subject, and for question to question, like a snake wriggling here and there, constantly shedding its old skin. Since science has changed our intellectual climate and technology our social environment, we shouldn’t expect philosophy to remain the same. I like a phrase that Wittgenstein used to describe his own work; he called it “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called ‘philosophy’.” So, whatever it was that once went under the label of philosophy has left an inheritance; something is left over to be carried into the future; but the inheritance is dispersed; there is more than one heir. That seems to capture where we find ourselves today.

I like to believe that there will be those in the future who will continue to ask questions about all kinds of things that others are leaving unquestioned. There will be those who continue to invent new concepts and with their help recast what may already have been said by others; there will be those who experiment with new ways of looking at ourselves and the world; there will be those who attend to all kinds of details of things that others pass by; and there will also be those who test arguments for and against all kinds of sane or insane convictions. All that will hopefully go on and we may as well call what is practiced in some such a way by the old name of “philosophy.” There is surely no harm in appropriating that word for ourselves. In doing so we are waving our hand at those who have come before us, indicating to them that we are still walking on the road on which they have walked.

But if we say that philosophy as serious creative thinking is still needed, we must be clear on where and how it is. We must ask ourselves: what calls most urgently for such thinking? We have been through a period where philosophers would have said that we need to think most urgently about the foundations of knowledge, logic, mathematics, or science. I believe that our priorities must be different and here I think you and I will agree. What most calls for thinking today is our social and political existence because we can see today how fragile their structure has become. And if we can’t secure our social and political existence, then nothing else can be secured. This alerts us to the fact that our entire reality is changing dramatically and that we will therefore also need a new kind to creative thinking, one that can keep up with the changes around us. Our question then becomes, who will be able to engage in the kind of thinking that is now needed. This is where the challenge of your book really begins to bite. Of how much creativity is our philosophizing capable? There may, of course, be no theoretical answer to this. All we can do is commit ourselves to the project of serious thinking and continue to work as well as we can with what we have inherited.

Your friend,

Hans

Does philosophy have a future?

Raymond Geuss,  Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 2017

Professor Raymond Geuss
Professor Raymond Geuss

Raymond Geuss has made a name for himself in recent years as a critic of the abstract, normative theorizing that dominates mainstream political philosophy today and is represented most prominently by the work of John Rawls. (The kind of philosophizing that asks: What is the ideal socio-political order? What is the best form of government? What are the right principles of justice? and that proposes carefully honed theoretical answers to these set questions.)  By contrast, politics, is for Geuss, a practical craft rather than the application of a theory; it is concerned with what people do rather than what they ought to do; and its actions take place in institutional contexts that change over time. Political thought should therefore be  realist, practical and historical in spirit and forego the search for general normative principles; these, Geuss argues, will in any case turn out to be formulaic and politically useless. (Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008)

It is, perhaps, no accident then that Geuss has been led now to take a broader critical look at the entire tradition of philosophy. Changing the Subject consists of twelve essays on individual philosophers from Socrates to Adorno, focusing in almost every case on a single text. Geuss calls it “an intellectually relaxed essayistic introduction to some issues that I take to be of interest.” (p. xvi) Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Adorno are each given an essayistic reading, but some other prominent philosophers – Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, and Kant – are all absent. But historical completeness is not Gauss’ goal. That was, he explains at the end of his book, to show us how “the questions which humans ask change, depending on the historical and social circumstances.” Most of the questions which philosophers have asked were moreover never convincingly answered and some have simply disappeared. In a final, positive flourish Geuss declares: “There are, however, questions that do not go away, even if we cannot adequately answer them.” (p. 302) It is obviously his hope to have shown in the course of his twelve essay which questions these are and why it is worth asking them in ever new ways, even when we can’t come up with conclusive answers.

But there is another worry that becomes apparent in Geuss’ conclusion to his book. He understands that “the twelve authors whose work was discussed here do not form a natural group or an invisible collegium or tribunal.” (p. 302) Why then do we call them all philosophers? What is this discipline whose questions seem to be changing over time and whose answers are never final? Geuss is convinced that there has been enough continuity “that one can pick out an identifiable configuration called ‘philosophy’.” (p. 296) But the configuration has a specifically historical character: it began with Socrates and Plato, and we should not assume that it will persist indefinitely. Geuss has, indeed, doubts that it can go on because “it is a highly peculiar social and cultural configuration which requires a highly specific set of conditions to flourish. These conditions, whatever they are, do not seem to have existed during the past forty years.” (p. 301) The conclusion suggests itself to him because he does not see any kind of originality left in philosophy, no real capacity for turning old questions into new ones. Philosophy, he fears, has lost its capacity to “change the subject.” And it is certainly remarkable how “professional” and inbred philosophy has become today, how preoccupied it has become with elaborating ever more complex theories. There have really been no philosophical writings in the last half century or so who have succeeded in opening up new issues.  Such publications – from, let us, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – are by now all half a century old.

Geuss allows that, even without being creative, the discipline may continue for a while “as an exercise in running through traditional thoughts and forms of argument in pedagogical or propaedeutic contexts.” (p. 300) It may persist through mere inertia. “This is the current state of philosophy in the universities.” (p. 301) Its logical and linguistic puzzles may go on to occupy some minds as a harmless occupation and private pastime. But genuine philosophy can flourish only under very specific conditions. For it to exist “deeply rooted dissatisfaction with the state of our world must be experienced by some people who are living a life in which their basic physical needs are satisfied, are capable of focusing developed intellectual and cognitive powers on their situation, and do not think the situation is so self-evidently hopeless that there is no point in thinking about it.” (p. 299) Admittedly: “Just because nothing much seems to have happened since the 1970s doesn’t mean that the dying embers of the subject might not flare up into life again under the right circumstances.” (p. 298) But Geuss concludes despondently that “we cannot assume that as our world falls apart now in ecological catastrophe, there will necessarily be any renewal of philosophical activity.” (p. 299)

Should we agree with this dire assessment? We might answer Geuss that philosophy has previously gone through cycles of creativity and sterility, and that it has been in an unusually productive phase since the last quarter of the 19th century, one which seems now to have run its course. Phenomenology and existential philosophy, positivism and analytic philosophy all originated in this period. So one response to Geuss would be to counsel patience and see whether some new forms of philosophical thinking will eventually emerge. But what about his worry that in the face of a looming ecological catastrophe this is unlikely o happen. There are, of course, those who discern no such catastrophe ahead. But even if one agrees with Geuss on such a possibility, one might think that it is precisely what calls for philosophical engagement. Aren’t we faced with the question what it can mean for us to be human under the present conditions and why the human form of existence deserves to be preserved and nurtured? Are we justified in giving up on this question simply because the looming catastrophe may overwhelm us? Perhaps we should be saying in the words of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now under conditions that seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”