In his column at Standpoint this week, Cohen has finally written about the Cultural Appropriation Wars, using as his springboard the fracas involving Lionel Shriver, a white woman who gave a talk at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival defending a writer’s prerogative to write about the lives of marginalized and oppressed people—indeed, about anybody. In response, the black Australian Muslim writer Yassmin Abdel-Maglied, mortally offended at what was not that provocative a talk, stalked out of Shriver’s talk in tears, and wrote a petulant screed in the Guardian about the dangers of culturally appropriating minority…
It’s unbelievable to any rational person—but not those who have read postmodern philosophy or discourse—that anyone can deny there’s an objective reality in the Universe, that we can know about it through science, and claim as well that science is merely a “social construction”. These misguided people argue not only that there is no objective reality, but that attempts to find and teach it are sexist: that such endeavors are a masculine ones, and that the methods of science themselves make sexist and patriarchal.
Those who make this claim, as does Laura Parson in a paper in The Qualitative Report (reference and free link below), advocate a brand of “feminist science” that is more cooperative and less competitive. Well, that’s a suggestion worth considering, as is the idea that we need to make science more welcoming to women. But along with this goes the notion that there really isn’t any objective truth to be found: that science is…
Despite their mainland demise, eastern quolls continued to thrive in Tasmania – until recently. Across Tasmania, quoll numbers declined by more than 50% in the 10 years to 2009 and show no sign of recovery.
Recognising this worrying decline, the quolls have recently been listed as endangered internationally and in Australia. This is a stark reminder of how quickly a common species can plunge towards extinction.
But the quolls can still recover, as long as we act now while we still have an opportunity. In research published in Wildlife Research, I looked at what caused the decline, and how we can help.
Eastern quolls prefer areas with low rainfall and cold winters. But an 18-month period of warm winters and higher seasonal rainfall during 2002-03 resulted in most of Tasmania becoming unsuitable for eastern quolls. This rapidly drove their numbers down. In fact, the amount of environmentally suitable habitat in this period was lower than at any other time during the previous 60 years.
Eastern quoll numbers declined as unfavourable weather conditions reduced the amount of environmentally suitable habitat across Tasmania (grey shading). Fancourt et al (2015)
The predator pit
Interestingly, while weather conditions have since improved, eastern quolls have not recovered. With their numbers pushed so low, the remaining small populations can no longer breed faster than other threats kill them off. Historically, when quoll numbers were higher, they could cope with these threats.
Quolls are now trapped in what ecologists call a “predator pit”. Predators, cars, poison and a range of other threats are killing quolls as quickly as they can reproduce.
So population growth is in limbo – not because any threats have increased, but because small populations don’t have the capacity to outpace those same threats anymore.
Contrary to earlier predictions, feral cat numbers in Tasmania have not increased following declines in the Tasmanian devil population. Quoll populations could previously cope with the loss of a few quolls (mainly juveniles) to cats. However, that same number of quolls killed by cats is now potentially enough to wipe out any population growth, preventing the species’ recovery.
While feral cat numbers have not increased in Tasmania, cat predation of juvenile quolls could still be preventing their population from recovering. Bronwyn Fancourt
Numbers game
The key factor preventing quoll recovery is their current small population. Quoll numbers need a boost, increasing reproductive capacity so that they can once again outpace the threats they are facing. This could be done by supplementing small, surviving populations in Tasmanian with quolls from captive-breeding colonies, insurance populations or the wild population on Bruny Island (which is doing better than mainland Tasmania).
Reducing feral cat numbers at key sites in early summer could also help reduce predation as juvenile quolls enter the population. That would potentially increase juvenile survival and allow quoll populations to grow and recover.
Increasing survival rates of juvenile quolls in the wild is key to helping the species recover. Bronwyn Fancourt
Should quolls be reintroduced to the mainland?
Since word of the eastern quolls’ plight has spread, there has been increasing talk of reintroducing them to Australia’s mainland, where they disappeared more than 50 years ago. Such proposals are often well-intentioned and could potentially help restore some mainland ecosystems.
However, this could actually serve to drive wild populations in Tasmania closer to extinction, making the species’ recovery more difficult.
With only small populations persisting in the wild, removing only one or two individuals from a population could be enough to render that population functionally extinct – and once a population is functionally extinct it is on the path to total extinction.
Similarly, using quolls from captive colonies and insurance populations for mainland reintroductions further removes valuable quolls that could be used to repopulate and recover wild populations in Tasmania.
The eastern quoll’s persistence in Tasmania decades after it disappeared from the mainland suggests Tasmania is a far safer place for eastern quolls and offers them the best chance to recover. Removing them from a relatively safe place and reintroducing them to high-risk mainland sites filled with dingoes, foxes and toxic fox baits could actually hinder, not help, their recovery. For example, while baiting foxes may reduce the threat from foxes, it takes less than half of one fox bait to kill an adult female eastern quoll.
Mainland reintroductions should definitely be a goal in the longer term. But given the dangerously low numbers in Tasmania, we shouldn’t take Tasmanian quolls for high-risk mainland reintroductions until the Tasmanian population is safe. Once numbers in the wild have recovered, wild-sourced Tasmanian quolls could be reintroduced to mainland sites without putting wild populations at risk.
It’s time to act
Australia’s declining species face a slippery slope towards extinction. The key to recovery is understanding why the species declined, then acting while there is still time.
Australia’s history is littered with examples where delays and inaction prevented small populations from recovering, with some species now lost forever. The eastern quolls’ fate is not yet sealed. But we have to act now.
Conspiracy theories are nothing new, of course. From 12th-century anti-Semitic conspiracies to modern moon landing hoaxers, the rumor that people are being misled by groups of elites with ulterior motives has been swirling for centuries.
To be fair, people on all sides of the political spectrum can fall prey to these alluring theories. One study, in fact, suggests that the type of thinking that is often associated with political extremism – a desire for simple solutions to complex problems – is also associated with a belief in conspiracy theories.
The problem is that conspiracy theories are dangerous.
Research suggests that exposure to these unorthodox ideas can influence how we see the world. For instance, in one experiment, participants who were shown a video that suggested that climate change is a hoax later expressed less confidence in the scientific consensus that climate change is real. Conspiracy theories can erode what we think we know about the world by promoting arguments based on poor evidence, evidence that’s been debunked or no evidence whatsoever. They can even be used to vilify entire groups of people and justify their mistreatment.
Social scientists have long been interested in conspiracy theories. Their research can help explain Trump’s rise – and why he seems so eager to embrace just about every conspiracy theory he’s ever heard.
Living in a world that can’t be explained
One school of thought argues that the rise of conspiracy theories is an inevitable result of our increasingly complex and globalized society.
The famous sociologist Max Weber argued that modern society was characterized by rationalization, with systems like the global economy humming along seemingly on their own, driven by the rules of commerce. These systems are complicated and opaque, and even experts struggle to fully explain them. They’re also dehumanized; there is no real answer to the question, “Who’s in charge of the global economy?” The result is a state of anxiety where people feel as though their lives are being pulled along by forces beyond their control – stock markets, globalization and political parties that seem unresponsive to their needs.
One of the core facets of enlightened thought is that science can help us better understand how the world works. But not even science can save us from this anxiety about an increasingly complicated world. Increasingly specialized and technical, primary research is difficult for nonscientists to work through. Although Americans generally hold science in high regard, perceived doubt and disagreement between scientists can encourage people to become uncertain about issues that experts agree on.
Now, in fairness, science is a process of contention and continual revision. But modern media take these lab-room discussions and pump them out more than ever before. Things that are generally “settled” among scientists no longer seem like they are. Think again about how climate change is covered in the media, with a climate scientist on one side of the screen and a denier on the other. As these conflicts play out in full public view, the public becomes less certain about the truth.
For many people, then, science seems like it can no longer explain what’s going on in the world.
How conspiracies lead to scapegoating
Conspiracy theories are our attempt to make sense of these complex world systems. They fill the gaps where personal experience and science have failed us. Capitalizing on feelings of alienation and anxiety, they – and the politicians who promote them – create what historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style” of politics. This style of politicking encourages people to believe that corrupt, shady elites and dark forces are conspiring to disenfranchise the masses.
The paranoid style and the proliferation of conspiracy theories are problematic because they make thoughtful deliberation over public issues impossible: Political opponents are not even talking about the same set of facts. But they become decidedly dangerous when combined with a process described by literary critic and philosopher KennethBurke as scapegoating.
Burke argues that scapegoating begins when people stop identifying with established social structures – like governments or political parties – leading to a sense of disorder within society. This disorder causes people anxiety and the sense they can no longer control their own lives. They feel guilty about their loss of place in the world and search for a way to alleviate that guilt.
Birthers, Howell argues, faced a loss of economic status during the 2008 financial crash, which created a sense of fear and guilt. This discomfort led them “to explain all of the nation’s sins [and thus the social disorder of the times] by making the ‘foreign-born’ president the scapegoat.”
During the current campaign, we see scapegoating playing out again as Trump calls immigrants criminals, says first-generation Americans can’t serve as unbiased judges, says “there’s no way to tell” whether Syrian refugees are potential terrorists and says Black Lives Matter activists are encouraging violence against law enforcement officers. Fingering these groups not only gives disenfranchised Americans someone to blame, it also empowers them by promising to punish these “others.”
Meanwhile, his campaign surrogates actively encourage people to accept their feelings as facts (Newt Gingrich famously said in an interview that “The average American does not think crime is down, does not think they are safer,” despite myriad statistics showing crime rates are down). He continues to hint that something very concerning is going on with Hillary Clinton’s health.
From Fact Magazine comes the first pop songs composed entirely by computer using artificial intelligence (AI) programs. Now of course the machine had to be programmed; otherwise it would just emit random combinations of sounds and noises. And, as Turing predicted, it couldn’t write comprehensible lyrics, either; those came from a human. As the site notes:
The song, which is called ‘Daddy’s Car’, was composed by an AI system called Flow Machines.
The Flow Machines software got its music knowledgefrom a huge database of sheet music with songs in varying styles and wrote that track after being given a style prompt from a human composer. The melody and harmony was composed by AI and then a human musician, French composer Benoît Carré, produced, mixed and wrote lyrics for the track.
‘Daddy’s Car’, which you can hear below, is expected to be on an album of songs entirely composed by…
Recently Dan Kauffman and I have had another of our recurrent conversations, this time a second installment of an occasional series that we might call “philosophers who influenced us” (the previous one featured Bertrand Russell, on my part, and Gilbert Ryle for Dan).
This time I picked David Hume, the empiricist and skeptic who famously awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber,” and who — I think — is still not appreciated as much as he should be for his impact not just on subsequent philosophy (including epistemology, ethics and aesthetics), but on science as well. Dan’s pick was the philosopher of aesthetic and highly impactful critic of art Arthur Danto, who developed one of the most recent and compelling theories of art to date.
This is the slightly rewritten text of my address to the opening plenary session, ‘New Enlightenment Neue Aufklärung’, at the European Forum Alpbach, Alpbach, Austria, 28 August 2016.
European Forum Alpbach, Austria
Ladies and Gentlemen, Citizens and Citizenesses:
The disintegration of Europe that the world is witnessing, and in some quarters beginning to fear, no doubt has multiple causes and causers. One cause whose power to shape ultimate outcomes should not be underestimated is the felt decadence of democratic institutions. Many observers speak of a developing crisis of European democracy. While the headline phrase triggers my discomfort about unwarranted exaggeration, it plausibly captures a basic fact of contemporary European politics: the fact that the present-day paralysis of the spirit and institutions of democracy in the European region is bound up with the slow death of social democracy.
In the Austrian context, in the run-up to a bitterly contested presidential election, I’m aware that talk of the death of social democracy sounds straightforwardly a political statement. Understandably so, for once upon a time the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAPÖ) was among the most powerful, dynamic and forward-thinking party machines of the modern world. In striking contrast, today’s Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) is a sickly pale shadow of its former robust self. The decline of social democracy in Austria is palpable. Yet what I have to offer to you this afternoon is an analysis that aims to be less local and more far-reaching, an audit of social democracy that is at the same time conceptual and historical and concerned with global trends, a probe that equally pays attention to language, through which (I remind you in the village of Erwin Schrödinger) people form pictures of ‘reality’ and move through their world.
Enlightenment
The theme of our European Forum Alpbach symposium on politics is the New Enlightenment (Neue Aufklärung) so here’s my opening conjecture: the language and ideal of social democracy has its roots in the 18th-century Enlightenment. Enlightenment: when people encounter the word, they think immediately of reason and rationality, a black swan moment when new mental energies flowed, when the early modern 18th-century world began to be turned upside down by fearless criticism of prejudice, pride and power.
The interpretation is unfortunately too simple. Truth is that the intellectual upheaval that came to be called the Enlightenment (the phrase was largely a 19th-century neologism, typically circulated by its enemies) was a much messier affair. Historians, philosophers and political thinkers have taught us to see this 18th-century upheaval in less Whiggish and sanguine ways. Most analysts of the so-called Enlightenment today prefer to view it as multiple enlightenments, as various intellectual and literary tendencies centred on many different themes, with positive and negative effects.
Consider, for example, how Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Michel Foucault long ago challenged us to see that the 18th-century fetish of ‘reason’, its will to know everything and to measure and master the world, fed the spirit of bureaucratic ‘unreason’, incarceration and totalitarian rule. Or think of Isaiah Berlin’s reminder that the opponents of Enlightenment, dubbed the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, included thinkers, poets, painters and writers who plausibly championed pluralism and attacked the blind belief in scientific progress, in effect because they viewed the world as shaped not by the ‘laws of nature’, but by the contingencies of history.
My research on Thomas Paine and the eighteenth century (published as Tom Paine: A Political Life) tried to complicate matters by making the point that the Enlightenment also included champions of civil rights, social justice and democratic representation, rebels and radicals who were sharply aware of the miseries suffered by people ground down by modern institutions not of their own choosing. These dissenting rebels despised misery. Thanks to them, we could say, misery was given its proper name. Starvation and indignity, violence and powerlessness, were denounced as unnecessary blights on the face of the world. Misery was no longer regarded as God-given, or as part of the natural order of things (natura naturans). It was seen to be contingent, remediable, if necessary by means of revolutionary upheavals.
Social Democracy
Social democracy was the offspring of this bold way of imagining a world freed from misery. Its fortunes were tied to the rise and expansion of modern industrial capitalism. Coined during the 1840s, the neologism Sozialdemokratie first circulated among disaffected German-speaking skilled craftsmen, farm and factory workers, whose support for social democracy made possible the conversion of isolated pockets of social resistance into powerful mass movements protected by trade unions, political parties and governments committed to widening the franchise and building welfare state institutions.
Market inequalities fuelled resentments among the supporters of social democracy. Their powerful charge was that ‘free market’ competition produces chronic gaps between winners and losers and, eventually, a society defined by private splendour and public squalor. If Eduard Bernstein, Karl Renner, Rosa Luxemburg, Clement Attlee, Jawaharlal Nehru or Bruno Kreisky were suddenly to reappear in our midst, they would not be surprised by the way practically all market-driven democracies are today coming to resemble hour glass-shaped societies. In these societies, as Thomas Piketty and other political economists explain, the wealth of small numbers of extremely rich people has multiplied, the shrinking middle classes feel insecure and the ranks of the permanently poor and the precariat are swelling – as in the United States, the richest capitalist market economy on the face of the earth, where 1% of households now own 38% of the national wealth; or in Britain, where at the end of three decades of deregulated growth, 30 per cent of children live in poverty; or in Austria, where at least 20% of citizens are now suffering money and dignity problems.
Social democrats of the 19th- and early-20th centuries found obnoxious, and actively resisted, social inequality on this scale. They railed against the general dehumanising effects of treating people as commodities. Social democrats acknowledged the technical prowess, productivity and dynamism of markets. But they were sure that love and friendship, family life, public freedoms and the vote could not be bought with money, or somehow be manufactured by commodity production, exchange and consumption. That was the whole point of their radical demands for a living wage, the abolition of child labour and Eight Hours Work, Eight Hours Recreation and Eight Hours Rest. In the dark year of 1944, the Hungarian social democrat Karl Polanyi put the point in defiant words: ‘To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment’, he wrote, ‘would result in the demolition of society’. His reasoning, traceable to the 18th-century Enlightenment, was that human beings are ‘fictitious commodities’. His conclusion: dignity through democracy had to be fought for politically, which at a minimum meant the weakening of market forces and strengthening the hand of the commonweal against private profits, money and selfishness.
Market Failures
More than a few social democrats went further, by pointing out, in opposition to Jean-Baptiste Say, Friedrich von Hayek and other liberal political economists, the reasons why unregulated markets are prone to collapse. Economists of recent decades have regularly described these failures as ‘externalities’, but their jargon is misleading. Something more fundamental is at stake. Free markets periodically cripple themselves, sometimes to the point of total breakdown, for instance because (a) they whip up socially disruptive storms of technical innovation (Joseph Schumpeter’s point) or because (b) as we know from recent bitter experience, unregulated markets generate bubbles whose inevitable bursting bring whole economies to their knees.
The social democratic critique of free market capitalism proved compelling for millions of people. But what exactly did social democracy mean to its champions and sympathisers? Winning parliamentary elections and controlling the levers of state power, certainly. Yet there was always some muddle over the meaning of the ‘social’ in social democracy; and there were frequent brawls about whether and how the taming of markets, which many called ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’, could be achieved.
There is no time for me to recall the great moments of high drama, conceptual strife and contradictions, dark sides and luscious ironies that form part of a recorded history that includes courageous struggles of the downtrodden to form co-operatives, friendly societies, free trade unions, and to spread literacy and win the struggle for the universal franchise through social democratic parties. There were fractious splits that gave birth to anarchism and Bolshevism; and outbursts of nationalism and xenophobia and (in Sweden) experiments with eugenics. The history also includes the re-launch of social democratic parties at the Frankfurt Declaration of the Socialist International (1951), as well as efforts to nationalise railways and heavy industry, to socialise the provision of health care and formal education for all citizens. And the history of social democracy also embraces big and bold thinking, romantic talk of the need to abolish alienation, respect for what Paul Lafargue called the right to be lazy (le droit à la paresse), even the vision of a future communist society projected by his father-in-law Karl Marx, a society in which women and men, freed from the shackles of the market, went hunting in the morning, fished in the afternoon and, after a good dinner, engaged others in frank political discussion.
A Slow Death
A strange but striking feature of the history of social democracy is just how distant and worn out this language now feels. The slow death of social democracy during the past several decades has the quality of an unfolding political tragedy; it certainly signals the decline and disappearance of the spirit and substance of the old Enlightenment. Yes, there is a Grosse Koalition in Germany, and a red-green government led by Stefan Löfven in Sweden. But almost everywhere social democratic political parties and organisations have run out of steam; their loss of organising energy and political imagination is palpable. Collaborators with financial capitalism (Jürgen Kocka) then double-speak apologists of austerity, their Third Way has turned out to be a dead end.
Gone are the flags, historic speeches and bouquets of red roses. Party leader intellectuals of the calibre of Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941) and C.A.R. Crosland (1918-1977) are figures of a distant past. Today’s party leaders who still dare to call themselves social democrats are by comparison intellectual pygmies. Loud calls for greater equality, social justice and public service have faded, often into choking silence. Positive references to the Keynesian welfare state have disappeared. As if to prove that social democracy was just an intermezzo between capitalism and more capitalism, these leaders speak of budgetary restraint, triple ‘A’ ratings, ‘renewed growth’ and ‘competition’, public-private partnerships, ‘stakeholders’ and ‘business partners’.
Sometimes the duplicity induces pain. I once witnessed the fabulist Tony Blair reassure a gathering of trade unionists that he was against free market forces before moving on, two hours later, after a light lunch together, to tell a group of business executives exactly the opposite. The crisis of Atlantic-region capitalism since 2008 seems to have amplified the duplicity. Within the dwindling ranks of committed social democrats, few now call themselves socialists (Alexis Tsipras and Jeremy Corbyn are exceptions), or even social democrats. Most leaders are party faithful, machine men and women surrounded by media advisers, connoisseurs of governmental power geared to free markets. Few make noise about tax avoidance by big business and the rich, the decay of public services, the weakening of trade unions, or rising inequality. All of them, usually without knowing it, are blind apologists of the drift towards a new form of financial capitalism protected by what I have elsewhere called ‘banking states’ that have lost control over money supply, so that in most democratic countries over 95% of the ‘broad money’ supply is now in the hands of private banks and credit institutions.
Ladies and gentlemen: social democracy failed to understand, let alone regulate, this new historical type of capitalism, whose near-breakdown in 2007/2008 has damaged the lives of millions of people in Europe and elsewhere. But the disintegration of social democracy has been overdetermined by other, multiple forces. Among the most important are these entangled trends, here summarised in the briefest form:
● Membership of social democratic parties has dipped dramatically. Although accurate figures are hard to obtain – these parties are notoriously secretive about their active membership lists – we know that in 1950 the Norwegian Labour Party, one of the most successful in the world, had over 200,000 paid-up members; and that today its membership is barely one-quarter that figure. Much the same trend is evident within the British Labour Party, whose membership peaked in the early 1950s at over 1 million and is today less than half that figure. Helped by the recent £3 special offer registration, total membership of the Labour Party is now around 370,000 – less than the 400,000 figure recorded at the 1997 general election. During Blair’s years of leadership alone, membership declined steadily every year from 405,000 to 166,000. When it is considered that during the post-1945 period, the size of the electorate in most countries has been steadily increasing (by 20% between 1964 and 2005 in Britain alone) the proportion of people who are no longer members of social democratic parties is far more substantial than even the raw numbers suggest. The figures imply a profound waning of enthusiasm for social democracy in party form. Satirists might even say that its parties are waging a new political struggle: the struggle for self-effacement.
● Social democratic parties were among the slowest to react to the upheavals effected by the digital, globally networked communications revolution that began during the 1960s. The harnessing of big data through networked campaigning techniques by these parties has often been resisted, or ignored. Striking is the contrast with the powerful social democratic parties of the late 19th century. They stood for universal public literacy and published influential newspapers, books, pamphlets and best-selling utopian novels and literary fantasies such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888). Social democracy was once a powerful symbol of democratic openness and communicative empowerment. Today it symbolises sound bites and media grabs, the avoidance of bad news. The old class struggles have been replaced by phrase struggles;
● Social democratic parties have shown limited awareness of the emergence, since the 1940s, of monitory democracy. This is a new historical form of democracy in which free and fair elections and parliaments are of declining importance, certainly when compared with the rising importance of the public monitoring and restraint – humbling – of arbitrary power by means of a multitude of newly-invented watchdog institutions such as citizens’ assemblies, teach-ins, public forums, activist courts, environmental networks and WikiLeaks, to name just a few innovations;
● Gripped by a territorial state mentality and confined to nation state barracks, social democratic parties have underestimated the agenda-setting and blackmail and veto effects of cross-border chains of organised corporate and governmental power. Operating within the boundaries of territorial states, social democratic parties and governments have consequently been weakened and victimised by what Albert Einstein dubbed ‘spooky action at a distance’: cross-border butterfly effects, arbitrage pressures and quantum tunnels, all of which have greatly complicated the politics of wealth and income redistribution;
● The rise of the People’s Republic of China as an economic great power on the global power stage has had two ironic effects: it has weakened an important part of the social support base of social democracy (industrial manufacturing, trade unions, workers) and established a viable ‘socialist’ alternative to capitalism in social democratic form: one party state capitalism legitimated by locally-made forms of democratic rule; and
● The long-term silence of social democrats about environmental degradation has accelerated the death of social democracy. We have entered an age of gradually rising public awareness of the destructive effects of the modern human will to dominate our biosphere, of the bad habit of treating nature, just as Africans or indigenous peoples were once treated, as commodities, as objects of production, profit and other selfishly human ends.
This last-mentioned development needs some elaboration. For more than half a generation, beginning with works such as Rachel Carson’s _Silent Spring _(1962), green thinkers, scientists, journalists, politicians and social movement activists have been pointing out that the whole social democratic tradition is implicated deeply in the spoliation of our planet. They note that social democracy was the Janus face of free-market capitalism: both stood for the human domination of nature. Hence they call for a new politics with green qualities, a new democratic enlightenment that poses a fundamental challenge to both the style and substance of the old social democracy, or what remains of it.
The New Democratic Enlightenment
What is this new democratic enlightenment? It has multiple features, especially a strong sense of the complexity and indeterminacy of things and processes in our world. It displays resistance to wilful simplification, and opposition to all ideologies, including populism. There is preference for extra-parliamentary civic action and monitory democracy against the old model of electoral democracy in territorial state form. The Neue Aufklärung features sympathy for a rich repertoire of new political tactics practised in a variety of local and cross-border settings: citizen science networks, Barcelona-style municipalismo, bio-regional assemblies, green political parties (the first in the world was the United Tasmania Group), earth watch summits and the skilful staging of non-violent media events (Greenpeace originally called them ‘mind bombs’).
The new democratic enlightenment is marked by an earthy cosmopolitanism. It displays a deep sensitivity to the global interdependence of peoples and their ecosystems. There is support for new post-carbon energy regimes and opposition to fossil-fuelled growth and habitat destruction. There is also acute awareness of the opportunities and dangers posed by marketisation of the most intimate areas of everyday life, for instance fertility outsourcing, data harvesting, nanotechnologies, stem cell research and humanoid robots. The new enlightenment has a clear understanding of the golden rule that whoever has the gold rules. It displays strong awareness that market control of daily life, civil society and political institutions has negative social and political consequences, unless checked by open public debate, political resistance, public regulation and the positive redistribution of wealth, for instance through a basic citizens’ income. Especially striking is the new enlightenment’s call for the ‘de-commodification’ (Claus Offe) of the biosphere, in effect, the replacement of social democracy’s will to dominate nature and its innocent attachment to History with a more prudent sense of ‘deep time’ aware of the fragile complexity of the biosphere and its multiple rhythms.
The new democratic enlightenment is opposed to the old social democratic metaphysics of economic progress, and the machismo of its favoured imagery of warrior male bodies gathered at the gates of pits, docks and factories, singing hymns to industrial growth, under smoke-stained skies. The new enlightenment issues a warning: that unless we human beings change our ways with the world in which we dwell things may turn out badly – very badly indeed. Its overall attitude to the world is precautionary: whether we know it or not, it is said, we humans are now deciding which evolutionary pathway awaits us, including the possibility that we are trapped in an extinction event of our own making.
It is worth asking whether these themes of the new enlightenment are evidence of a black swan moment in global affairs? Are they proof that we are living through the beginning of a large phase transformation analogous to the last decades of the 18th century, when the rough-and-tumble resistance to the miseries produced by market-driven industrial capitalism slowly but surely morphed into a highly disciplined workers’ movement receptive to the siren calls of social democracy?
It is impossible to know with utter certainty whether these are the right questions, or whether our times are like that. Only the historians of the future will be able to tell us, yet it should be noted that many champions of the new enlightenment are now convinced that a tipping point has indeed been reached. Their sense of alternative possibilities (Robert Musil’s Möglichkeitsinne) is strong. In effect, the new enlightenment is an exercise in democracy ‘dreaming itself’. It demands that democracy be taken seriously and self-reflexively redefined as monitory democracy. It insists that the point is not only to change the world, but also to interpret it in new ways, through new languages, to grasp that so many things of our times are too strange to be thought, to see that although democracy is never fully realisable, that it is always the ‘democracy to come’ (Jacques Derrida), it is nevertheless still the most powerful earthly weapon available for humbling the powerful and taming their arrogant and foolish will to power.
But where does this new enlightenment leave social democracy? What is the relationship between the first and second enlightenments? Thinking social democrats will reply to such questions by emphasising the flexibility of their creed, the capacity of their originally 19th-century standpoint to adapt to 21st-century circumstances. I have friends and colleagues who are adamant that it’s much too early to bid farewell to social democracy. They reject the charge that it is a worn-out ideology whose moments of triumph belong to the past, or that it is a mournful lament for the achievements of bygone days (Tony Judt).
These social democrats admit that the goal of re-building social solidarity among citizens through civil society and government action has been damaged by market-produced inequality and fudged agendas designed to win votes from business, the rich and right-wing political competitors. These thinking social democrats know that the old slogans and sense of time of social democracy are exhausted. They admit to being impressed by the media-savvy initiatives and staged détournement of civic networks such as M-15, Amnesty International and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose actions aim to put a stop to the violence of states, armies and gangs, but also to corporate misconduct and market injustices and miseries in cross-border settings. These thinking social democrats then play the ace card in their pack: they reiterate the importance of ‘complex equality’ (Michael Walzer) as the core value of their creed. These social democrats aim to retrieve its most fruitful old ‘wish image’ (Wunschbild) to deal politically with the new problems of our time. They are sure that the old topic of misery, inequality, capitalism and democracy deserves to be revived. In a recent lecture in Firenze, along these lines, Jürgen Kocka, one of Germany’s most influential social democratic intellectuals, expressed this point well. The new ‘financialised’ capitalism, he noted, is ‘becoming more and more market radical, more mobile, unsteady and breathless’. His conclusion is defiant: ‘capitalism is not democratic and democracy not capitalistic’.
The Future?
Ladies and gentlemen: you will no doubt be asking after the chances of practical success of the new enlightenment, this new dreaming of democracy. In Europe and elsewhere, how viable is the hope that red and green can be mixed, you will ask? Can the result be more than bland shades of neutral brown? Might the old and new be combined into a powerful force for an enlightened politics of democratic equality against the power of money and markets and their ruination of our biosphere? Time will tell whether the proposed metamorphosis I’ve sketched can happen successfully. As things stand, only one thing can safely be said. If the new enlightenment happened then it would confirm an old political axiom famously outlined by the English designer, poet and socialist William Morris (1834 – 1896): when enlightened people fight for liberty, equality and democracy, he noted, the battles and wars they lose typically inspire others to carry on their fight. When they do that, in much-changed circumstances, he noted, they need to experiment with new languages, and use new and improved means, fuelled by new hopes and new sensibilities. Shouldn’t a new enlightenment, a second enlightenment that is less intellectually arrogant and more democratically powerful than its predecessor, heed this wise advice?
Peter Singer’s new book on ethics, a series of short essays about real-world ethical issues, came out September 13 (Princeton University Press), and already it’s Amazon’s #1 release in “Philosophy of Ethics and Morality”. I’ll be reading it for sure, as Singer is one philosopher who has something to say about how real people live their lives. He’s a clear writer, and tries personally to adhere to his ethical conclusions. Here’s the Amazon blurb; click on the book’s screenshot to go to the Amazon order page:
Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words.
In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and…
Matthew emailed me that he was lecturing at Isaac Newton’s house today, and would send a picture of the apple tree that supposedly inspired the theory of gravity. I responded that I thought the story was apocryphal, and here was Matthew’s response (along with two photos):
“Yes, the tree. And here’s the window the light came through that he split with a prism.”
I’ve never seen Matthew this dressed up!
Newton’s House, Woolsthorpe Manor (pictured below), is in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, near Grantham, Lincolnshire, England. This is where Newton was born and then, when Cambridge University closed in 1666 due to the plague, Newton repaired home. And it was here that he did many of his famous experiments, including the splitting of light with a prism. I still think the apple-falling incident is apocryphal, but readers are welcome to weigh in.
Recently Dan Kauffman and I have had another of 
The Logical Place 