"The Future" Is Not Beyond Left and Right

I have never once heard a person who claimed to disdain those who "cling to outdated political classifications," or who crowed about being "beyond Left and Right" or who fancied they had found their way to the latest "Third Way" or the next "New Way" or the next "Post Politics" whose politics were not completely and transparently legible within the most conventional political terms: Democracy, consent, and equity in diversity across the Lefts. As against incumbency, authority, and hierarchy across the Rights.

And I find that such claims to post-politicizing novelty or innovation are not only readily translated back into these conventional political terms, but also disproportionately tend to expose essentially right-wing assumptions and aspirations once they are so translated. This should not be surprising, since to fancy oneself post-political, a-political, anti-political is usually simply to take for granted as natural or inevitable or necessary or optimal or most practical incumbent states of affairs that in fact could be otherwise and very likely have been otherwise hitherto and most surely will be otherwise eventually come what may.

To naturalize the status quo is to express an essentially conservative world view, to police its maintenance through de-politicizing inattention to the actually open futurity inhering in plurality, peer-to-peer (and usually this passive-aggressive epistemic policing is supplemented with actual police, or at any rate with engineers, pencil-pushers, and salesmen acting as police collaborators). These de-politicizing gestures typically: [one] invest some self-appointed elite with an unearned (unearnable) position of unaccountable authority over the majority of their peers in a naturalized hierarchy as in conventional ideological formations of the aristocratic/oligarchic type; or [two] treat historical arrangements or outcomes as "spontaneous" when they are in fact facilitated -- sometimes to an extent that approaches outright determination -- by contingent legal, normative, and infrastructural formations as in the endlessly proliferating variations of "market" rhetoric pervading neoliberal, developmental, libertarian discourses (it sometimes seems as though libertarianism is re-discovered and asserted as a rationale for naturalized hierarchy among would-be aristocrats on a daily basis, each time with some neologism to mark its "discovery"); or [three], treat as a technical problem for engineers or bureaucratic/technocratic quasi-engineers acting (in a sense perhaps better denoted as "behaving") on a warranted consensus what is in fact a political problem of a diversity of stakeholders to ongoing change actually acting to reconcile their dissensus of histories and hopes while maintaining a shared world.

Politics, recall, arises from the fact that we share the world with a diversity of peers with a diversity of aspirations that provoke an open and interminable diversity of contingent reconciliations. It is this open and endlessly re-opening force of futurity inhering in plurality that is disdained and denied by the politics of the right in its many variations, including those prevailing discourses that clothe themselves in the false futurity of "The Future." Typically, this gesture takes the form of [one] a parochial extrapolation from the status quo demanding calculation rather than deliberation or [two] a fraudulent salesman spiel promising a hyperbolic amplification of the privileges and pieties of incumbent interests or [three] a reassuring rationalization of present problems and injustices enabled either through an expedient location of the present within a progressive developmental narrative that pretends to infuse present imperfection with the coloration of inevitable perfections toward which it presumably aspires and in which it is asserted already partially but definitively to partake or presumes to survey present imperfection from a vantage of superiority from which it assigns imperfections the status of atavisms and to itself the authority (often depicted as responsibility) to impose conformity to itself in the name of education or treat difference from itself as consent to exploitation.

Every futurism is a retro-futurism: every solicitation of identification with or effort at selling through the conjuration of a "The Future" would evacuate plurality of the substantial futurity with which it presents us, in our own we-presence, peer-to-peer. This gesture is essentially reactionary, and almost inevitably authoritarian, despite its tendency to celebrate duressed outcomes as consensual, despite its tendency to celebrate conformism as spontaneism, despite its tendency to celebrate incumbent triumphalism as progress or even transcendence, despite its tendency to celebrate reductionism as imagination, despite its tendency to celebrate moralizing as ethics, despite its tendency to celebrate instrumentality as freedom.

Not Offensive, Just Delusive

Michael Anissimov writes, over at Accelerating Future:

Dale’s post on cryonics, when he talks about the brain being “hamburgerized” -- he is making no sense. Vitrified brains don’t get “hamburgerized”. Dale probably knows about vitrification, so he is just forwarding propaganda because he is politically and morally uncomfortable with cryonics. That is because cryonics symbolizes the affirmation of the individual and potential avoidance of death in a way that can be offensive to hyper-socialistic, here-and-now-and-nothing-else politics. Well, too bad.

I did not quite realize that the designation "hamburgerized" was such a term of art for your modern day cryonicist, that it had the technical force to blur a distinction between frozen as against vitrified brains that is cherished by Robot Cultists of the techno-immortalist sect. Since I think intelligent minds of the human sort are indispensably biological rather than bio-dispensably informational I can't say that I agree that the distinction properly affords Michael his apparent triumphalism on this score as I reckon these things myself. Whatever our differences, I do hope he will be reassured to hear that in describing corpses disposed of by cryonics firms as "hamburgerized" (as against what tends to happen to them in graveyards or crematories) he does not think I mean to suggest by this that they should find their way with pickles and mustard onto a sesame seed bun.

As for the "hyper-socialism" and rabid "here-and-now-ism" of my politics, dude, get a grip. Why be stupid if you don't have to be?

My Irreligiosity

Upgraded and Adapted from the Moot. "Mitchell" asks:

Dale, I was wondering the other day - were you ever a transcendentalist or utopian in any form?

I was raised Catholic -- and went to a Catholic school for a few years when I was very young. My faith was habitual and never considered, and did not survive for more than a few weeks after I left home for the first time for college. There I confronted peers of different faiths and drew the conclusion that faithful attachments were arbitrary almost at once, and I became an atheist quite soon thereafter. I've never looked back.

When you ask about "transcendentalism" though, you know of course that folks like Emerson and Thoreau are taken up through that moniker explicitly, and I will say that I have a deep fondness and affinity for much that they wrote (though not all), as I do for Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" and the discussions of a "web of mutuality" in Martin Luther King, and the "web of life" in George Eliot, all of which seem to me inter-implicated notions.

When William Burroughs declares that we live in a "magic universe," a universe susceptible to poetic refiguration it seems to me that this is less a conventionally supernatural claim than a recognition of the force of re-signifying practices, of rhetoric (my trade, after all), connecting the shamanic-qua-poetic imaginary to the American Pragmatist/post-Nietzschean European philosophical traditions. I find these connections edifying, and they come up quite a bit in my teaching.

Despite the fact that I do not believe in either God nor gods, I tend to be rather laid back about those who do believe in these things, unless they want to get all authoritarian or judgmental about them. This is because I have noticed that when people affirm such beliefs they tend to be saying things I can make good sense of if I simply translate them (to my self, out of politeness) into terms of affirming matters of personal aesthetic taste or affirming matters of we-intentions concerning moral communities to which they happen to belong. Likewise, I have noticed that when people do terrible things they rationalize through recourse to the affirmation of such beliefs I can make better sense of what is afoot if I simply translate them into terms of authoritarian/incumbent political views or, sometimes, mistaken or deranged claims that fail to pass muster as warrantedly assertible descriptions of the world for purposes of prediction and control.

The power of such translations tells me that there are more warranted modes of belief ascription than just the instrumental claims of the naturalist (indeed, I believe there are different criteria that render reasonable or not beliefs in instrumental, moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political modes, about which more here), and although this doesn't inspire a faith in the supernatural in my case, I do not doubt that those who cherish reductionist epistemologies would likely decry as "transcendental," or possibly menacingly relativist, in me what seems to me simply like sensible pluralism.

As for utopianism -- surely every progressive is properly speaking utopian at least some of the time? Progress is always progress toward an end, and there is something utopian about any unrealized end toward which one aspires through political education, agitation, and organization. I will say that I consider my "progressivism" subsidiary to my devotion to democracy, consent, equity, and diversity as ends. I struggle for progress toward the realization of these values, hence I think of myself as more of a democrat than a progressive, strictly speaking. I don't think this is a big deal, since most progressive-identified folks are really struggling for a more peaceful democratic world, too, and terminological squabbling doesn't seem very useful to me for the most part outside the context of academic philosophy.

I have argued that democracy relies for its intelligibility and force on a scene of consent that is actually informed and actually nonduressed, and that access to reliable knowledge and social security (non-duress) demand at best (as close as we can get to) the provision of universal education and a free cultural commons, universal healthcare, and a universal basic income guarantee -- political ends which many would surely describe as plenty utopian. I happen to be more interested in the ongoing social struggle for democratization -- the struggle through which ever more people achieve ever more of a real say in the public decisions that affect them -- than in "democracy" as some abstract ideal. And so I am interested in the actual educational, agitational, organizational, legislative struggles through which more and better education, more and better access to knowledge, more and better healthcare, more and better welfare are accomplished, and ongoing democratization achieved, than in the distance intellectuals claim to discern between the present state of affairs and some ideal. So, I don't know if you really want to call me utopian or not given all that.

Like many a good pragmatist, I think it is enormously important to remember that the perfect can be the mortal enemy of the good. Like many a fine idealist, I think it is no less important to recognize that pragmatists who assert the previous can in their fixation on what seems possible, lose sight of the good in ways that undermine their grasp of the actually possible. I think both insights are indispensable and I don't think there are any criteria on hand to assure us which is the more relevant perspective in any generally useful sort of way, and so that one must remain rather self-critical and attentive and persistent in the face of inevitable frustrations, come what may. All of this seems to me simply a straightforward matter of intelligence.