I stopped writing. It seemed after Trump was elected for a little while there that writing would be essential. A wave of protest and fear swept the country; women marched in unprecedented numbers all over the US, outraged that a man who admitted to a habit of sexual assault on national television could be elected President. The outrage was sharpened no less by the fact that ~60% of white women would vote for the man. How could such a morally odious, socially- and intellectually-disgusting man get into such a position, and why would women with so much to lose at best blindly follow partisan branding and fall in line behind someone who was at best incompetent in his malignancy, and more likely determined to end all the institutions and conventions they depended on?
I'm firmly of the opinion that business culture reflects political culture. Most modern American corporations are at least moderately conscious of what's happening at the level of national governance, and many employees are, while completely silent at work, more than aware of what's happening to their government. But its no secret that late-financial capitalism has its problems, and the success of a religious right more relativist than even Michel Foucault would have tolerated, the rise of "nobody could have foreseen" death-of-expertise conservatism and the elevation of style and substance even higher than we've ever seen historically: All of this has led to a general fecklessness in the modern corporate sphere. There's a lot of "clap louder" doctrine happening now, whether its in the way sales teams are run, the way software projects are held together, or the strategic planning process. I look at the needs of the companies I've worked for, and their means for getting where they need to go, and they simply can't connect them. Everyone is exhausted from the bullshit, but 35% of the country thinks a morally- and financially-bankrupt game-show host who sold his soul to foreign dictators for another kick at the can is doing a bang-up job. If one in three of your employees is incapable of rational thought, its hard to make something productive happen. If another third of those employees are on the fence waiting to see which way the wind blows, you've got nothing.
This is the kind of smoke and mirrors game that makes fascism possible and successful. Pretend that there's no truth: immigrants are the real criminals; fascists who want to stop all speech have a right to free speech; white men are really the oppressed ones; racism is just political incorrect science. There was a lot of discussion in the early days of the Trump presidency about Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, the very obvious historical example of societies that allowed groups intolerant of free conscience to exercise their conscience, where said free societies then become progressively unfree. The fact is that the civil rights movement has made it socially unacceptable to make illogical or unempirical generalizations, and to create social institutions - whether as jokes or op-ed pieces - designed to restrict the freedom and personal security of people who are not part of the politically dominant group. Its difficult for people to realize that "equality" is a convention, a series of rules invented and patrolled by human beings; this is especially true of the people who patrol the convention, the many many white folks who still think civil rights are defined by some capital-letter agent like God or Nature or whatever.
The observation that when you're the only one with privilege, equality becomes a loss of status is now so commonplace I only mention it to help explain the prior paragraph. Two centuries ago it was a commonplace in North America that people of African descent were not people, and people who were indigenous to North America weren't either. But the conceptual framework was significantly worse than what those words can convey: The culture was ruled by people who denied agency to anyone who wasn't from their tightly constrained peer group. In practice that meant only people who were male, but also from certifiable members of particular families in England, France and Prussia. Consider then that poor men and most men from Scotland, Ireland, the Italian peninsula, Greece - all of whom would today call themselves "white men" and assume a natural droit de seigneur as a result of their skin color and testosterone - were thought of as unthinking automatons, acting on brute instinct. Women were all ruled by instinct. Indigenous people in Africa, Asia, North and South America: All of them were merely human-like, but fundamentally no different in agency from cattle and birds, whales or wolves. A whole vast and unthinking cosmos, then, surrounded those lucky by right of birth and breeding to possess consciousness. Truly free will was available only to a very small number of beings. Is it any wonder they behaved the way they did?
We are still living with that assumption, obviously, which is why a good portion of those upper-middle-class white women voted for Trump. To be honest, a good number of those women voted for Trump because he was the GOP nominee; you might say they were simply unthinking automatons, slaves to their instincts, but that would be uncharitable. But the spring of agency is still perceived to be small and meager, its entrance is jealously guarded, and there are still signs restricting it to Whites only.
So why have I decided to start writing again?
About a year ago I decided to do some reading in Animism. I've half-jokingly called myself an animist for a couple of decades now. Partly that was because I don't particularly like the random and arbitrary assumptions built into organized religions. Its also partly because, while I find philosophical Taoism very attractive, its a philosophical position and not a religious one; in a similar vein I find Zen Buddhism an extremely attractive worldview, but its got very little moral consolation and I find it actively discourages that basic desire to try stuff that appears to be one of my main reasons for getting out of bed in the morning. Which is to say, I've got lots of philosophy; I've got bookshelves full of it. What I don't have is religion, or belief, which is more to say a sense of the animating spirit.
I'm not talking about the standby, "I'm not religious I'm spiritual" understanding of "spirit" here. I'm talking about the role religion plays in the lives of the religious: It explains, unifies and motivates. In the Euthyphro Plato points out that behavior is either moral because the gods command it, in which case there's no "morality," just stipulation; or behavior is moral because it is morally good as such, and the gods commend it, in which case there's no real need for the gods to demand it. The religious don't concern themselves with that dilemma, because for them there's just an association, as arbitrary as peanut butter and jelly or blue and sky, between God(s) and The good. From a philosophical standpoint these associations are maddening evidence of the basic irrationality of human agents, and suggest that perhaps we are drinking from a very small pool of rationality, surrounded by a vast lot of unthinking machines acting on brute instinct. But for the religious, there is still this feeling that they're all in it together, for some value of "all", "they" and "together."
But I read Emma Restall Orr's book The Wakeful World because it seems to me that we are all in it together. I do not feel, and never have, that the universe is a dead and unthinking place. I've never felt "god" and it was for that reason I drifted off during Sunday school and could never quite make sense of the sermons; not because I was incapable of following the sermon or reading the New Testament, but because the assumptions and the conclusions and the derivation process were not themselves sensible. (So many big hops and small leaps.) But the universe itself? The universe as a whole has saved me more than once. As a whole it takes care of me. Its also tried to kill me more than once, and then oddly enough pulled back at the last minute. The universe is uncaring and caring; thinking and mechanical; random and ordered all at the same time.
But Orr's book helped some thoughts begin to coalesce. For one thing, she makes a strongly philosophical case for Animism, using a careful and rigorous argument from the Philosophy of Mind that dualism is nonsense, and since monism and realism are both sort of the obvious consequences of our senses, the universe has to be conscious. Both as a whole, and in parts. Now there's some weirdness in this argument - does that mean atoms are conscious? neutrons? quarks? neutrinos? how does that work? - but that's more a function of the argument framework she's engaged in, which is traditional Analytical philosophy. Traditional Analytical or Anglo-American philosophy is full of logical holes you can drive a Catholic Charities delivery truck through, and while its those holes that ensure grad students have PhD topics and the few remaining tenured professors have lifetime employment its technically impossible to build an argument that doesn't, somewhere, leak. And not because of human fallibility or whatever; its because, as Wittgenstein tried to point out, the words themselves don't seal as tight as we like to think they do. But Orr's point is that yes, the universe is conscious.
And anyone who's not a solipsist can see that. I spend most mornings meditating for twenty minutes, doing very basic Zen meditation with a little of the modern Buddhism techniques. In the course of that meditation I might get a whole two minutes of clear-headed rational thought; the remainder of the time I'm unthinkingly thinking about whatever I'm reacting to. I'm worried about this or that and letting an irritating conversation spool on repeat, or fixated on a song lyric, or whatever, but what I'm not doing is exercising free will. I'm certainly not in control of my mind, and its clear much of what happens in my head is not consciousness, but rather unconscious, reactive, brute instinct.
And if I'm not conscious more than 10% of the time, then the universe must have some other consciousness somewhere. Because I'm nothing special; whether its Rene Descartes, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Kelvin or Steve Bannon, its clear that no other human being and probably no other agent possessing consciousness is itself actually conscious of what its doing more than 10% of the time. Which is ok, in its way, because there's still a lot of someones, with their own agenda, watching.
Once you begin to see the universe this way - as conscious - a lot of assumptions that were formerly simply philosophically questionable become laughable. We think dogs don't think, but if they do then we should grant them the rights and responsibilities of moral agency; but then its a slippery slope to granting amoeba and cows moral agency, and then how will we get them to work?; and that slippery slope argument is - gosh darn it! - the exact same argument the Elite used to deny the agency of poor white men, never mind African men or English women or Yanomamo women; but then where do we draw the line?
Well maybe there is no line. Much of what used to count as cognitive science and psychology was premised on finding the thing that made humans unique! in the cosmos. We aren't unique, though. We keep trying to find excuses for being blind to the things happening around us, but those excuses keep failing.
So all this has been running through my head, from the mundane - the latest example of idiotic Trump family corruption - to the inspiring - the united front I'm seeing from conservatives to the left wing that this Presidency is corrupt and illegitimate - to the sublime. There's still lots to do. Its okay to be discouraged, but there's lots more going on than is apparent from the surface.
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