Category: History

History, philosophy of history

Cause, Effect, History, Truth

Forty years ago, Apple changed the world when they launched the Macintosh computer, with a superbowl ad echoing Orwell’s 1984. So the story goes anyway. Reading that (really very good!) piece from Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian this morning, I was struck as I so often am by the declaratory confidence of the headline. WORLD CHANGED; MACHINE LAUNCHED. Vaidhyanathan layers it on, claiming that the launch could be seen as ‘the beginning of the long 21st century’. It struck me in reading that we are now starting to see the end of the twentieth century as a historical phenomenon, and writing about it in a way that seeks consistency and consensus, in the same way as there is consensus about the rest of history as we have learned it – that there were two world wars in the 20th century, that the Cold War was between America and Russia, that the EU was formally launched in 1993, and so on. In structuring history, we superimpose salience upon people, and events, that may not have been obvious at the time, and that possibly misshapes our understanding of the world we live in today.

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Deleuze, France, History

The Drama of Revolution

How revolutionary are revolutions? Are they accelerated historical developments? Or are they merely dramatic and shocking moments that somehow capture a moment, and lend themselves to compelling narrative? Having just finished Simon Schama’s monumental Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, I’ve been thinking a lot about how genuinely revolutionary revolutions are, so to speak. Schama himself is sceptical on how much the Revolution changed, and excoriating when it comes to the needlessness of the violence that surrounded the fall of the monarchy in France. While there was a disempowering of the clergy, and some transfer of wealth in that sense, little else really changed in France, in terms of social order and loci of control. While at the time the book was seen as a revisionist work, I am persuaded by his arguments that the required social reforms were underway well in advance of the Revolution, and that the subsequent reversion to traditional power structures further emphasised its vapid core. The General Will, as the wags had it, was ultimately replaced by the General’s Will, as the shadow of Napoleon loomed large over the epilogue.

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Carl Schmitt, Futurism, History

History and the Young
As long as the world spins around, I’ll take my time.

I finally got Covid. It’s been a miserable few days, though as I begin to recover, one saving grace is the annihilation of all other distractions; those few words ‘I’ve got Covid’ are enough to get one out of the most insistent commitment. And so after a hiatus of some months, I can read important things again! Two pieces yesterday caught my attention, Nathan Gardels’ The New Nomos of the Planet in Noema Magazine, and Stephen Buranyi’s Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution? in The Guardian. Summarizing Carl Schmitt’s later work The Nomos of the Earth (originally 1950), Gardels argues that of the available options, a multi-polar global geopolitics is emerging with multiple powers, who one the one hand are seeking to become internally self-sufficient, but on the other must collaborate in the face of planetary challenges – like climate change and pandemic (and, I would add, trade and migration).

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China, History, philosophy of history

The Contested Space of Truth and History
The Abu-Ghraib image arguably defined that history far more than documentary evidence or subsequent investigations.

The Chinese appear to have fabricated an image to support a narrative that Australian soldiers committed war crimes in Afghanistan. In the modern media dominated world, negative stories are quickly suppressed and ignored where they can be confidently denied by a robust and well-disciplined communications strategies. However, when there’s a picture, it is more difficult. Audio and video make the story even more difficult, as they lend themselves to blind sharing, hot takes, and indiscriminate proliferation.

In the post-event / post-allegation battle for control of the narrative, and for a definitive version of events, truth becomes defined. The immediate aftermath is the most important time. Witness Bill Barr’s decision to release his (inaccurate) version of the Mueller Report in the US several weeks before the actual report was released; even though it was wrong, and ultimately provably so, the narrative was sufficiently blunted to as to protect his ‘client’, the American president.

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Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, History, philosophy of history

The Politics of Posterity
Titus Livius, or simply Livy, Historian of Rome. The question is why did he write his histories?

In assessing the battlefield casualties Rome suffered in the first thirty years of the second century BC, Livy (c59 BC – c17 AD) estimates 55,000. The classicist Mary Beard distrusts the figures – and that number, she suggests, is far too low. In the first instance, ‘there was no systematic tally of deaths on an ancient battlefield; and all numbers in ancient texts have to be treated with suspicion, victims of exaggeration, misunderstanding and over the years some terrible miscopying by medieval monks.’ In addition, she continues, ‘[t]here was probably a patriotic tendency to downplay Roman losses; it is not clear whether allies as well as Roman citizens were included; there must have been some battles and skirmishes which do not feature in Livy’s list; and those who subsequently died of their wounds must have been very many indeed (in most circumstances, ancient weapons were much better at wounding than killing outright; death followed later, by infection).’ (SPQR, p.131-2)

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Ancient Greece, Democracy, Fukuyama, Hayek, History, Inequality, Informal Economy, law, Markets, Power, Rule of Law

Failures of Political Philosophy
Adam Smith: the Invisible Hand only goes so far.

In a very crude sense, the western history of political philosophy can be divided into five phases: the city state Greek democracy, an oikonomia derived in Ancient Greece from a principle of agreed control; colonial empire, deriving first from the Greek colonies and extending into the military-bureaucratic structures of the Roman empire; federalist patrimonial states, an essentially feudalist structure allowing for larger domains to be managed through grace and favour; and modern variations on social democracy (including communism) since the French Revolution, based on concepts of individual equality and freedom. Max Weber, Francis Fukuyama and countless others have variations on these phases and structures, some more global (Fukuyama in particular considers Indo-Sino histories), and others more scientific (Weber’s forensic sociology in particular).

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Bewilderment, Donald J Trump, Epistemology, Fukuyama, History, Human Rights, Philosophy, Philosophy of SCience, Postmodernism, Truth

The Philosophy of History and The Binary Wasteland
Image result for dead or alive poster original
Death, the ultimate opposition, is the one we choose to disregard.

Presence or absence, with us or against us, in or out: righteousness has dogged mankind in modern times. Confidence in ourselves, in our existence, in our being, as rightful, positive entities on this planet and in this universe, has dominated the human condition. And so we seek to dominate! Assertive and strong (for to be otherwise is wasteful and somehow wrong) our existential duty is to dominate and multiply, to spawn and own. We are – nay, I am – absolute. Who denies me this? Who would argue that my existence is not infinitely significant, eternally worthwhile? Just as I shall not deny others their entitlement, I shall have mine.

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Alienation, Anarchism, Bewilderment, Brexit, Democracy, Donald J Trump, Electoral System, History, Power, Progress

Anarchist Reactionaries

The term ‘reactionary’ is a part of the conservative lexicon, referring to those opposed to progressive or liberal politics. In general terms, the reactionary harkens back to imagined histories, recoiling against the ‘improvements’ of liberalism and the destruction of a happier, often bucolic past. Things were simpler then. As Tony Soprano says, ‘What happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do.’ The reactionary abhors what is called ‘political correctness’, ‘safe spaces’, and the idea that everyone is somehow entitled to their own personal truth about the world. The reactionary seeks a common view of the world that he and his kind can share in. The world, in the mind of the reactionary, is not a complicated place, it’s pretty black and white. 

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Accelerationism, Anthropocene, Artificial Intelligence, Bewilderment, Big Data, Climate Change, Critical Theory, Ecology, Economy and Society Summer School, Environment, Hayek, History, Lewis Mumford, Philosophy, Philosophy of SCience, political philosophy, Power, Progress, Religion, Technology

Reflections on Blackwater: Technological Theologies, Autistic Robots, and Chivalric Order

order-now
Order is something we take for granted. That’s the mistake, the grand error of modernity.

In his 1966 work The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes in his preface a passage from Borges to establish his objective. Quoting Borges, who in turn refers to ‘a certain Chinese encyclopaedia’, the section describes a classification of animals as being ‘divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In a later lecture recalled by Laurie Taylor, Foucault lambasted the impulse to capture and mount every butterfly in a genus and lay them out on a table, to highlight minute differences in form and colour, as if trying to solve God’s puzzle. Continue reading “Reflections on Blackwater: Technological Theologies, Autistic Robots, and Chivalric Order” →

Artificial Intelligence, Church, Critical Theory, Ecology, Ethics, Germany, Hayek, History, Human Rights, Identity, monarchy, National Identity, Progress, Technology, Zizek

Back and Forth: State Legitimacy, AI and Death

In the Distance
If we are to make progress, we need to know where we’re going. Does an AI know where it’s going?

In 2012, I began looking at State Legitimacy as a political entity under attack from globalisation and technology. At its core, my thesis was that the nation state was being re-cast in new dimensions, beyond geography and ethnicity, into brands, global culture, and digital communications. This was a more intellectual evolution, beyond the physical, into deeper concepts of identity. The possibility of deviance, of what Foucault or Zizek might call perversions, presented an opportunity for reduced anxieties and improved conditions for all of us.

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