I read a report this week that assessed that Russian casualties in the Ukraine war have now exceeded Soviet loses at Stalingrad- 1.4 million dead and wounded. Some may be tempted to dismiss the figure as Western propaganda, but doing so leaves open the question of why there has been no Russian battlefield breakthrough. After four years of war, Russia controls little more territory than the Donbass rebels controlled at its beginning. The war has been a political disaster for Russia. Contrary to initial expectations, Russia did not quickly overwhelm Ukrainian defences or collapse its morale. The Russian economy was also expected to contract as a result of sanctions. While the expected economic damage has been staved off so far, growth has slowed significantly. With no obvious way to end the war and save political face Putin seems to have boxed himself into a situation that can only deteriorate. The debacle serves as yet another reminder that at this point in history wars of choice are materially irrational.

As Russia massed troops on the Ukraine border in 2022 anti-imperialist critics in and of the West pointed to the steady eastward expansion of NATO as the cause of the crisis. They were not incorrect, but the cause of a crisis that increases the probability of war is not the same as the cause of the war. The cause of war is always the decision to go to war by one or other of the parties to the conflict. Wars are not natural events; they are political decisions. Since the decision to go to war will set off a chain of events in which lives will be lost that would not have been lost had the war not commenced there are always moral criticisms to be made about the resort to arms. However, critics cannot stop at moral condemnation. Although wars begin because political decisions are made, those decisions are made in political-economic-social contexts that exercize a constraining force on options. The more intense crises become, the less room for peaceful manoeuvre politicians have. I came up with the term “material irrationality” as a response to my worries about the limits of moral criticism of international political conflicts. Wars are functions of choices, but not arbitrary choices: there are reasons why politicians choose to go to war and they will always appeal to that necessity to justify the choice. Critics of war as a means of conflict resolution cannot simply reject that appeal as an ideological excuse. To ignore the pressures exerted by circumstances is mere moralism that invokes life-values but ignores the problem of whether or not those values could have guided alternative courses of action in the concrete historical context.

By calling wars of choice materially irrational rather than simply immoral sacrifices of life I was trying to bring together the value of life-preservation with attention to the real contexts of political choice in international affairs. If a war of choice was materially irrational then it must have been concretely possible for politicians to have chosen a non-military means of conflict resolution. The choice to go to war is materially irrational when it undermines rather than promotes the political values invoked as justification for going to war in a choice space in which on-going negotiations were possible. In Putin’s case, he justified his aggression in terms of national security, but he has made Russia less rather than more secure, exposing serious military weaknesses but more importantly hastening the very outcome he most wanted to prevent: the encirclement of Russia by NATO, now a fact after Sweden and Finland joined. It is true that NATO and US policy was provocative, but there was no supreme emergency that would justify Russia being provoked into the war it started. And now 1.4 million Russians have paid the price.

The main contribution the idea of “material irrationality” makes to the critique of international relations is that it does not judge events in terms of extraneous moral values that themselves require justifying arguments but starts from the political goals invoked by the parties. Hence Hamas’s October 7th attacks of Israel were materially irrational because they set back rather than advanced Palestinian struggle for self-determination and Israel’s reaction to the attacks are likewise materially irrational because they have isolated Israel politically and make it more rather than less likely (although still not very likely) that condemnation will give way to concrete sanctions against the Israeli state. One accepts the value of goals like self-determination and national security rather than plucking some other set of values from an imagined alternative world and then demonstrates that the means chosen undermined rather than promoted the value. By criticizing these strategies and tactics as materially irrational I wanted to highlight the existence of other political means of pursuing the stated objectives as a way of concentrating the political imagination on solving problems as they actually appear, as opposed to speculating about an alternative world that might be theoretically possible but whose path to actualization no one can specify. Political problems have real negative effects on peoples’ lives right now: effective political criticism contributes to the solution of those problems in as short a time frame was possible so that the lives of the people suffering the consequences of those problems are improved. “Another world is possible” talk invoke futures in which the deep structural causes of all social problems have been removed but ignore people’s immediate need for practical amelioration of their actual life conditions. The abstractness of the goals of left wing other-world thinking has contributed to the rise and power of right wing populism.

That outcome is itself materially irrational given that the right is defined by the goal of securing and augmenting ruling class power over the majority of people. Although the composition and complexity of the working class has changed dramatically in the late twentieth and twenty-first century the majority of people still work for a living and the crucial problems that they face remain functions of the dynamics of capitalist society. The changing international division of labour has benefited some workers outside of the Global North (most notably in China) but has trapped others in extremely dangerous and precarious forms of old and new labour. The shift of manufacturing industries out of the Global North has also created a large class fraction of precarious and gig workers in the Global North, disrupting old working class identities and solidarities and pushing too many working class people into the illusions that populists like Trump, or Marie Le Pen, or Nigel Farage have solutions for them. If there was ever a time when class consciousness was needed it is now, to re-build solidarity between white and immigrant workers and workers in the Global North and Global South. The weakness of the socialist left for the past 4 decades has aided the rise of the right and the rise of corrosive and materially irrational identity politics. Warring communitarianisms of the right and left waste time and energy over opposed but equally essentialized and romantic symbolic worldviews while the underlying ecological, political, economic, and, social causes of environmental crisis, poverty, inequality, international conflict, and alienation go unaddressed.

The idea of material irrationality is not an abstract philosophical idea but at the heart of efficacious political practice. It suggests that the best means of ideological engagement with right wing forces is to avoid ideological argument altogether and focus on the observable failures of right wing parties in power: failures that can be brought together under the idea of material irrationality. Take the example of Trump’s old-school red baiting of the still developing social democratic wing of the Democratic Party. The wisest response to Trump’s warnings about a new “communist menace” is none at all. Let Trump bloviate to himself and focus on working out and building support for policies that will re-channel resources from the largely untaxed profits of corporations and capital gains of wealthy individuals to public purposes, public institutions and public goods.

This argument can be generalized to the critique of political priorities and social institutions. So much of the history of political philosophy has been wasted on debate about the meaning and implications of names for social systems: what is the “true” nature of capitalism, communism, socialism, feminism, and so forth? But there is no “true” nature of any of these systems: to take a Wittgenstinain approach, the meaning of the word is its use. Therefore, the names have meant whatever those with the power to assert them have meant. The real issue is not with the meaning of the terms but with the implications of different institutional structures and value systems for the quality of life of the majority of the people. People are not harmed by “capitalism.” They are harmed by being deprived of the resources they require to live healthy, valuable and valued, and enjoyable lives. If a social system permits the private accumulation of wealth and resources to the point where others cannot satisfy the full range of their fundamental natural and social needs then that system– whatever one wants to call it– harms the lives of the deprived. So too for the ecological damage that a system that requires constant growth causes. The operations of the system cause harm to the living things whose habitats it destroys, on those who pay the immediate costs of climate change and environmental degradation, and eventually everyone, because all human beings require breathable air, potable water, arable soils, for survival. Critics must focus on the causal connections that explain the harm rather than making abstract arguments that “capitalism” cannot solve ecological crisis.” Instead of abstract theoretical proofs that an alternative system is necessary critics need to build for support for changes that can be made right now. They need to focus not on demonstrating that “another world is possible” but rather that it is possible to address concrete problems in this world, right now, and that not making those changes is materially irrational, because one can deny the reality of environmental degradation, but no one can escape its deleterious effects on life in the long run. The irrationality is not a logical contradiction but a threat to life on which all other goods– social, economic, cultural– depend.

Hence the “task of socialists” if one wants to talk that way is not to prove that “another world is possible” or to wax poetic about past injustices and crimes as if they ha da time machine that could take us back and create a different history than the one that happened. It is to work out and institutionalize actual polices that address concrete problems in ways that demonstrably improve the lives of the people living today. When policies get to the heart of a problem they should be affirmed; when they contribute to the problem they should be criticized. The ruse of reason is not going to lead us to socialism because it does not exist. People organizing and fighting for this set of policies or that will gradually transform existing social systems. In the past, forms of civilization ultimately collapsed under the weight of their contradictions and there are signs that the present form of global socio-economic system will do so as well. But I do not find it “revolutionary” to hope for the collapse of capitalist civilization because we know more or less exactly what we need to do today address its problems: re-distribute wealth, gradually implement an energy transition towards renewables, gradually reduce the ecological footprint of humanity on the earth (beginning with the grotesque overconsumption of resources in the global north, and so on. Arguing in the abstract in academic treatises that capitalism cannot be reformed and therefore must be overthrown wholesale is a waste of breath and resources.

Let me take one example to conclude the argument. In 2024 China invested 625 billion dollars in renewable energy. One can remain critical of the undemoratic politics of the Chinese Communist Party and still agree that this investment contributes in a meaningful and measurable way to brining about the globally necessary transition towards renewables. It does not matter to the soundness of this policy whether or not “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is real socialism or not. That is a taxonomic, not a political, question. Political questions ultimately come down to the real world effects of different policies on people’s lives and life-horizons. If there is a logic to historical development it is not a metaphysical force working behind the backs of people, as Hegel argued, it is an emergent product of institutionalized decisions. Different forms of civilization are not stages of the realizations of a universal historical goal but solutions to problems as they appear to the people living at the time and as they are modified by the social practices that try to solve them. Learning from history does not mean seeing through the noise of detail to the underlying universal rationality working itself outbut developing deeper understanding of the causes of contemporary problems and what the moment demands in terms of changed policies and practices. If another world is possible then it will emerge over time as the synthesis of concrete improvements (effective solutions to immediate problems) and not the remaking of the world according to an abstract idea of how it ought to be organized.

Whatever one thinks of US Vice-President JD Vance, few, if any, sitting American politicians have ever spoken with such candor to Israel as when he confronted the Netanyahu government with the unsustainability of its approach to conflict: : “And I guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.” With two curt sentences Vance cut through 8 decades of Israeli exceptionalism according to which the horror of the Holocaust grants Israel a permanent exemption from international law whenever the government of the day claims an opponent constitutes an “existential” threat to the nation. Vance did not say so, but his argument implies, that it is the nature of historical time that the real (as opposed to ideologically sustained) causal influence of the past on the present fades. The longer the time between the historical trauma and the present the more other events intervene as mediations, reducing the material force of the original event. When these ever increasing mediations are taken into account the justificatory value of the trauma must decline proportionally. The crimes of the Nazi were the decisive motivation for the formation of Israel in 1948, but Israel’s opponents today are not Nazi’s and the armed struggles that they are waging are functions of Israel’s own aggressive actions, not the Nazi goal of exterminating the Jewish people. The struggle of Palestinians for self-determination and Hezbollah’s resistance to repeated violations of Lebanese sovereignty are grounded in international law– the same international law by which the state of Israel was created– not a desire to exterminate Jews from the planet. In order to solve problems one must focus on their concrete contemporary structure. Appeals to increasingly distant past traumas obscure the clear understanding of the present needed to effectively solve problems. Vance did not put his point that way exactly, but it is implied by his criticism of Israel’s default tactics.

Critics of the Trump administration will rightly counter that talk is cheap: Trump also made abstractly true objections to Netanyahu’s Gaza strategy but rather than force him to abandon his annexationist designs he rewarded them in his “peace” proposal (which itself has been repeatedly violated by Israel with impunity). Vance’s barb also did not have an immediately restraining effect- bombs continued to fall on Lebanon– but it does signal at least the possibility of a deeper ideological break between the US and Israel (which many American Realists have been arguing should have been made long ago). What struck me as noteworthy about Vance’s intervention was the insight it shows into what I call (in my forthcoming book The Moral Economy of Peace) the material irrationality and moral incoherence of war.

It was the Prussian General Karl von Clausewitz who de-romanticized war. Writing in the early nineteenth century he argued that war was nothing but “Policy (politics) by other means.” If war is political then it is a choice that statespersons make: it is neither woven into the fabric of things nor an occasion for men to prove their heroic mettle. War is just one of a number of means by which states pursue their interests and resolve tensions and conflicts. While it was not his intention to do so, von Clausewitz, by disclosing that war is always a political choice, opens up the possibility of a non-utopian politics of peace. If war is politics by other means then the reverse is also true: politics is war by other means: means that leave all parties to the dispute alive at the end of the conflict. Dialogue, diplomacy, and negotiations are therefore, more materially rational and morally coherent than war.

Peaceful means of conflict resolution are more materially rational because– as Trump found out with Iran and Putin is finding out with Ukraine– wars of choice do not always succeed. If the material goal of international politics in the most general sense is to advance a state’s political and economic interests, then materially rational means are those that are most likely– on a dispassionate evaluation– to achieve and secure that goal. Wars can become historically necessary when tensions build to the point where all other options appear closed off (a point never reached in the cases of Iran and Ukraine), but the (more or less) free choice to go to war because one feels one’s own side has an overwhelming military advantage ignores the fact that the other side will fight back if attacked. One side’s military advantage is the other side’s spur to creativity in the interests of survival. War thus introduces the risk of failure to the detriment of the interests that the purportedly stronger side sought to achieve. Since these risks could be known beforehand (by studying history) the choice to go to war, when there was the option to pursue objectives by peaceful means, is materially irrational.

But more than materially irrational, the choice to go to war is morally incoherent. Statesperson who choose war always justify it in terms of some life-valuable goal: national security, greater prosperity, the spread of freedom, and so on. These political goods are not valuable in themselves but presuppose the existence of people whose lives will benefit if they are secured. In states of war each side relates to the other side as “enemy” such that the underlying humanity and shared life-interests linking them beneath ideological differences are obscured. The demonization of the enemy leads to a conflation of a universal political value with a one-sided reduction to a state interest. International law, for example, recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination, not the right of Israelis or Palestinians to self-determination. Each peoples’ right is a particular expression of a universal legal value. The reduction of the universal value to a one-sided expression transforms a life-valuable norm into a justification for killing the other side and risking the lives of one’s own citizens in the conflict. If, on the other hand, the universality of the value remains the starting point, then each side can recognize an identity of interests with the other and work out, through open-ended negotiations, mutually acceptable compromises that resolve the conflict without killing people. Instead of being killed in a military mass sacrifice of life in the name of one-sided interpretations of universal life-values, citizens on both sides remain alive to enjoy the fruits of concrete political problem solving.

It is far too soon to say that the history of the Middle East has reached an inflection point whereby Israel will be challenged to abide by the political norms that underlie its own creation and sovereignty. Netanyahu will certainly try to exploit the US foreign policy establishment’s and Congress’s antipathy towards Iran to derail this opening towards peace. But as I argued above, rational foreign policy must allow the causal force of historical traumas to fade. Americans intent on scuppering the deal will invoke the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis and hardliners on the Iranian side will invoke the long history of American imperialist interference in the region to warn against trusting the Trump administration. But one must make deals with the real people across form you at the table and therefore requires each side to let the past go and think about how agreement in the present will free everyone to construct a new future. There is no point at which past events and the causal nexuses that produced them can be changed once they have happened. But there is a point at which the past ceases to mechanically determine the future: the point at which both sides decide to not let it exercise justificatory force any longer and jointly commit to a new relationship.

The pressure exerted by American opponents of the deal is already manifesting itself. Trump’s belligerent threats on Fox News to resume bombing if there is no forward momentum at the bargaining table shows that he has heard the criticism that the Memorandum of Understanding makes him appear weak. Those criticisms show that opponents know that he always wants to appear to be the toughest guy on the block. But his tough guy image is in conflict with the other side of his self-conception: the master deal maker. The sometimes seeming incoherence of Trump’s policy-making cannot be explained by ideological confusions: I think his ideology really is the simplistic-nostalgic American nationalism he openly avows. His wild policy swings and rhetorical somersaults are not functions of contradictions in his vision of America and its place in the world but the two warring sides of his personality that make him susceptible to radically different arguments. Mindless thugs like Pete Hegseth prey on his tough-guy image, but by vocation Trump is a developer for whom there is always a deal to be made. A negotiator needs leverage, which is how he clearly regards military force, but his– surprising, in the history of American foreign policy– refusal to unleash the full destructive fury of the American armed forces suggests that his bellicose rhetoric notwithstanding, he regards military force only as leverage in negotiations and not an end in itself.

How else to explain the political risk that he has assumed by signing a Memorandum of Understanding that clearly favours Iran? Iraq was invaded twice and bombed on and off for more than two decades and Afghanistan occupied for 20 years. Let us not forget that it was the great Democratic humanitarian Madeleine Albright who said that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.” One does not have to relax one’s criticisms of Trump and the MAGA movement one bit to acknowledge that he was correct when he argued that “Too many people have been killed. You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they’re not all Hezbollah.” Trump talks big (recall his threat to destroy Iranian civilization), but at the end of the day he would rather make money building apartments than bombing them. That is why, as Trita Parsi pointed out, Trump, alone amongst American Presidents since World War Two, has avoided the escalation trap.

So why would a self-styled strongman not follow through on his threat to destroy Iran from the air? The evidence suggest that he recognized– as other American President’s have not– the superiority of political-economic to military power. What Vance said to Israel applies even moreso to America: it has tried and failed to kill its way out of problems. That is one part of the answer. But the other part lies in Trump himself: with Trump the political really is personal. His compulsive need to leave his mark everywhere reveals an essentially weak person fearful of his mortality and being forgotten. He breaks things so that he can put them back together again– even things he was responsible for in the first place, like the Canada-Mexico-United States trade agreement. If negotiations with Iran succeed the ultimate agreement will look more or less like the agreement that he tore up in his first administration. What else could it look like? The same will most likely prove true with the trade agreements with Mexico and Canada. But the content does not matter to Trump so much as his having his fingerprints on it. He wants to be seen as the great artificer that forms reality according to an idea that only he is capable of fully understanding and appreciating.

Addendum, July 8th, 2026

Well, it is my own fault for not heeding my own advice to not allow the blog to chase the news, but elements of the argument above seem to have been negated by events. I should not have commented on the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran, but its potential political importance compelled me to write the assessment contained in the original post. Now, it seems. Iran may have overplayed its hand by continuing to attack ships in the Straits of Hormuz and Trump may be undermining the ceasefire he so clearly needed by responding with what he promises to be an open-ended bombing campaign. The seeming unravelling of the Memorandum of Understanding does not undermine the truth of the position I defended above: wars are ultimately resolved through negotiations and getting locked into revenge cycles and escalation traps waste lives that would not have been wasted had the parties stuck to the path of negotiation and compromise. But the unravelling proves once again that the realties of the international system today militate against politically rational solutions to conflicts, even when the reasons in favour of negotiated solutions are clear to all parties. One sees the better and chooses the worse (Spinoza) not because of some perversity in human nature but because of the inertial force exerted by historical suspicions, zero-sum models of political-economic competition, and the need to win according to the existing rules of the game. Making those rules more materially rational is more difficult in the practical concrete than it is in the theoretical abstract.

The blog has evolved according to its own logic over its fifteen years of existence. The posts have become less sarcastic than the earliest posts that I can remember. I will always save room to mock pretensions and I created the blog so that i could play with ideas in ways that the conventions of academic writing tend to discourage. But over the years I began to treat the brevity of the blog-post as a formal constraint that is conducive to philosophical clarity and creativity of expression. Working with 1000 words rather than 10 000 or 100 000 forces me to think hard. not only about what I want to say. but how it must be said to communicate without loss to an indeterminate audience the point I am trying to make. That applies to the philosopoems that I sometimes compose as well: they are also exercizes in not wasting words, in finding the right image to evoke the thought-feeling I am trying to explore and unfold.

All this is to say that the blog is not just a vehicle for my thoughts but a living form that also shapes the thoughts that I have and how I choose to share them. The philosophical ideas and principles that underline the blog posts also underline my academic publications, but the more condensed form of expression for which I strive here changes the quality of the arguments. It is not that I skip argumentative steps on the blog that I could not get away with in a peer-reviewed journal article, but rather that I have to think of how the argument can be crafted as a unique intervention in an on going debate or problem without all the textual support that would be required in an article. I relish being liberated from those requirements, but with freedom always comes danger– in this case, of superficiality or laziness. I am sure that I do not always avoid those dangers, and readers can decide for themselves whether I do or not.

Looking back over this year’s posts one thing that stands out for me is the higher proportion of Readings and “Thinking Along With” posts than in previous years. That was not exactly deliberate, but it is a sign that I am starting to feel more self-conscious about repetition. While it sounds surreal to say, 2026 marks the thirtieth anniversary of my first academic appointment (a contract position at the University of Alberta). I have been fortunate to publish consistently over those thirty years. Having managed to publish almost everything that I have felt compelled to write, I find myself more circumspect before undertaking the task of committing thought to academic papers or another book. And so too the blog: I don’t want to bore readers by making the same argument over and over. Sometimes the world compels me to explore a problem over several posts (the Iran war, for example), but I have allowed a little more time for reflection about whether or not I want to intervene on a given philosophical or political problem. If I felt that I have said enough on the subject, I have refrained from posting.

Space that might have been devoted to interventions has been given over to readings of other people’s work and riffing on fragments from novels and poems in the “Thinking Along With” series. With my readings and thinking along withs I can indulge my enjoyment of reviewing books and share with readers the places that great literature takes my mind when I lose myself in it. Both are exercizes in humility (the cardinal virtue for an intellectual, I think). Positively reviewing others’ work or being inspired by a particularly evocative turn of phrase shows that one is not afraid to admit that one has not thought of everything and that philosophy is only one way of exploring the human condition (and that poets and novelists often explore more profoundly than we philosophers do).

The fun of life is that one does not know what will come next. There will be a year 16 of the blog, but what it will contain I won’t be able to say until next June. Year 15’s posts have been collected and can be read or downloaded here.

Thanks for reading.

A few months ago Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded to students who criticized the changes that his government was making to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP) that they would not have to worry about the cost of education if they spend their dollars wisely and study disciplines that will prepare them for the “jobs of tomorrow”. If they wasted their time with “basketweaving” courses they would only have themselves to blame if they ended up unemployed.

I suppose it is part of the avuncular charm that some people find that Doug Ford exudes that he revived the “basketweaving” metaphor for undemanding courses of study that I have not heard in about forty years. But if employment is what one is concerned with, basketweaving might not be a bad choice– maybe wiser than choosing to go into computer science, since AI is proving more adept at writing code than at at tasks like basketweaving that require manual dexterity. Ford maintained that there were not a lot of baskets being sold these days, but the prevalence of craft and makers markets where all manner of old school manufactured (literally, hand made) products are for sale.

The point is that no one can say what the ‘jobs of the future’ will be because no one can say with any certainty what the overall social and economic impact of the increasing integration of all forms of I across the spaces of social interaction and institutions will be. Ford’s reasoning (and his argument is typical) is that AI will continue to transform how we shop, find information, make decisions, transport people and goods, interact, and work, AI is the product of mathematical, scientific, and engineering labour, therefore mathematics, science, and engineering are the disciplines that will prepare students for the jobs of the future. In fact, they might be the disciplines that destroy the future of paid employment without creating the social conditions for life without the need to exchange the money earned as wages for the commodities that one needs to live.

What the denser integration of AI into all facets of social life will not destroy, ironically, is the importance of the queen of the basketweaving disciplines: philosophy. I cannot say that studying philosophy will prepare students for the jobs of the future, but I will say that it is increasing in social importance the more that AI displaces human beings not only from manual labour but increasingly intellectual and symbolic labour as well. The machinery of the industrial revolution increased the productive power of labour but it did not force workers to confront the question of what they essentially were. AI does: we might laugh today at the doggerel it produces when it is asked to write a poem, but its real capacities are no laughing matter. The first Copernican revolution displaced the earth from the centre of the universe. Is AI the second Copernican revolution that will displace humanity from the centre of the universe of intelligent beings?

I cannot answer that question. I do not think the scientists and engineers that are continuing to deign new AI systems can answer it either, although, as their creation, they are rather more inclined to the belief that AI will soon exceed human intelligence. I think the problem of how wide and deep AI develops depends upon the emergence of an evolutionary dynamic analogous to that which emerged in the world of life, and that depends upon something similar to a survival instinct developing in AI systems. Whether that is a physical possibility or not the future will decide. But of course, the “future” is not a reified entity that makes decisions: only we humans make decisions. And reminding human beings of this banal but profoundly important truth is the “historical task” of philosophy in the twenty-first century.

Science studies the evolution of matter and energy in the universe and seeks quantifiable patterns that can be expressed as mathematical laws which enable prediction and technological intervention. The degree to which technologies have transformed the earth undermines all generalized skepticism about the truth of scientific knowledge and skepticism’s close relation, the attempt to reduce natural science to the peculiarities of a particular culture. As Marx said, “in practice human beings must prove the truth” and that is what scientific method does. Typically, skeptical or ethnocentric criticisms confuse scientific truth with the absolute certainties of classical metaphysics or theology and then, finding that science changes in light of new experiments and more comprehensive models, reject the truth value of scientific knowledge. But if one starts from science as it actually is: historically situated inquiry that builds on what survives of the past but rejects models which turned out to be partial or based on faulty assumptions, one will understand that all scientific truths are provisional: until (as Pierce argued) we have an absolutely complete account of the universe established truths can always be revised.

In the field of objective knowledge of the quantifiable dimensions of nature scientific knowledge is san pareil. But there are other questions that have to be asked in addition to the scientist’s “how.” Most importantly, there is the “why.” And so long as humans ask the question “why” philosophy will still be in business, for the question why is philosophy. The question why disrupts the natural course of events in so far as nothing else in nature (that we know of) asks it. The Detroit River does not ask why it flows from Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie, it just follows the contours of the land. If there were no philosophy human beings would just follow the contours of the land, (as we in fact do, most of the time). But when someone has the temerity to ask “why” the natural and normal becomes problematized: we turn our focus from what we can in fact do (or does in fact happen) to the reasons for deciding to pursue one course of action or another. We cannot argue with gravity, but we can argue with someone’s reasons for pursuing one project on the basis of different reasons in support of a different project. And we can also move the argument up a level, to what constitutes a good reason and how the values that reason serves in human social life can be evaluated.

But that second order set of arguments which constitutes, in a very general way, the field of academic philosophy would not exist without the posing of the question “why.” To be philosophical does not require a degree in philosophy: the most philosophical people are children who cannot stop asking why. Unfortunately, most children are taught that while it is good to question it is wrong to persist to the point of annoying people: sometimes you just have to accept things as they are and not ask why.

Wrong. The whole point of asking the question why is to annoy, i.e., demand an account from authorities of the reasons that they have to pursue the projects that they pursue. When they try to swat away the question with the claim “because that is how things are and must be” one knows they are hiding faulty reasons and self-serving values. Unless there are people who persist with the questioning those faulty reasons will not be exposed.

AI is now entering the “this is the way things must be” stage even though the reasons behind arguments in support of its unregulated further development are unsound. Here I am not talking about whether artificial intelligence is intelligent or not. That is another issue. Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is intelligent. One can still ask– indeed, one must ask all the more exigently– why? Why continue to develop it all? What human purpose will it serve better than our own brains (which, after all, invented AI). That is not a technical question. It is political and economic, but even more deeply it is existential: it poses the question of what AI proponents feel is lacking in human intelligence that they devote themselves to the project of replacing it in all fields where AI can purportedly replace it.

But this existential question is not some academic abstraction cut off from life. It is rooted in real life contexts. Take for example the project recently announced by minor league Canadian celebrity and major league self-promoter Kevin O’Leary; to help build a data centre in Utah that would be twice the size of Manhattan. The immense scale of the project has raised concerns from those who will have to live next to it. More systematically, ecological economists might pose questions about the sustainability of ever increasing demands for energy (economist Maximilian Kasy notes in a recent critique of existing AI policy that energy demand for all forms of AI will double between 2022 and 2026 from 500 to 1000 terawatt hours- 2 times the energy consumption of France or Germany (The Means of Prediction, p. 93) Environmental activists will worry about the contribution of the satisfaction of this massive new demand for energy will have on climate change. The philosopher, or the philosophical citizen, asks a much simpler question: Why bother at all in light of the fact that our brains have served us perfectly well for 100 000 years and each one takes only 2500 calories of energy a day to run?

If one looks at the problem only as a technical problem then these data centres will be built so long as energy to run them can be produced. Solution of the technical problem distracts from but does not solve the problem posed by the why. The why question asks for the reasons that support the project of AI development as a whole.

Supporters will have their answers. They tend to take the form of what I called “technotopian transhumanism” in Embodiment and the Meaning of Life. Human brains are too slow and too error prone; AI will unlock the potential to solve problems that human brains alone wither cannot solve or would take years, or decades.

But what the supporters cannot answer, because they never pose the question, is why faster is better and why mistakes and unresolved problems are bad. I have written a great deal on different dimensions of what I regard as the fundamental contradiction of the technotopian project of AI superintelligence (most recently the chapter Artificial Intelligence, Alienation, and the Existential Conditions of Human Flourishing). The contradiction is that they believe that AI superintelligence will realize in unlimited abundance goods which in human life are limited and ephemeral. But the human good is necessarily finite and limited. Take reading, for example. In one life time a human being can only read a small fraction of all the books ever written, while Large Language Models train themselves on millions and millions of texts in a few days. While the Chatbot you interact with has discovered statistical relationships in the training data that allows it to converse with you, has it actually “read’ anything in human terms? Has it imagined the streetscape described in the novel, put itself in place of the main character and wondered, ‘what would I do; does it play a particularly poignant and evocative phrase over and over in its ‘mind’ wishing it could be so eloquent, or, on the other hand, toss the book aside in disgust and ask how such garbage could have been published?

I think that it is safe to say that it does not. This difference goes unremarked by the designers of AI because they conceive of intelligence as what their systems do: predict the future on the basis of statistical regularities and process information. I think the debate over whether or not this is actually intelligence is sterile: The real debate is why we need to invest enormous resources in artificial systems that simulate one part of what socially networked human brains do just because they can do it faster than us.

People are rightly worried about the employment effects of AI and they are right to worry about the ecological costs of supplying the energy for data centres. Maybe they are right to worry about a runaway superintelligence eliminating human beings as inferior competitors for scarce energy. However, I think the bigger problem is the way in which human beings debase their own capabilities in comparison with what they imagine AI will one day be able to do. This problem continues a long trend of human beings understanding themselves in the mirror of metaphors they take literally. In the eighteenth century under the influence of Newtonian mechanics philosophers and scientists understood humans as machines. Today, under the spell of artificial intelligence we think of the brain as a computer, and a slow and sloppy one at that.

But the brain is not a computer. Patterns of neuronal firings describe its function but does not capture our intellectual-emotional life from the inside, which is the side that matters for the meaning and value of our own lives. Human thinking has irreducible affective and normative dimensions; to consider a problem objectively or dispassionately requires deliberate effort. Ordinarily we feel the things that we think because we care about certain outcomes. That is why scientists who claim that we are just vehicles for gene reproduction or bloody computers processing binary code with our neurons sign their names to the papers they write. They want to be known, they want Noble Prizes, they want acclaim from their fellow human beings.

Technological development does seem like an inexorable force. Philosophical criticism has never prevented research programs from advancing, and I am under no illusions that mine or allied interventions will disrupt the AI agenda. But still it is not useless, I think, to pose the question why, if for no other reasons than it shows what we can do that AI cannot: care about the quality of our lives and concern ourselves with what they really require to be valuable and enjoyable.

American novelist Paul Auster’s fiction generates meaningful world’s from random encounters. Sometimes the coincidences push his work to the edge of dreamscape but never over the edge into magic realism or science fiction. His work explores the banality of the uncanny: existence is shaped by the accidental crossing of lives, coincidences that tempt us to posit metaphysical principles but which are really just the stuff of which ordinary lives are made. The outcomes seem strange only because we cannot get outside of our local space time to see the whole. But even if an effect of partial perspective, the uncanny is experientially real and reminder that not all is scrutable in life.

Sunset Park tells the stories of 4 young people who end up sharing a squat in Brooklyn for a few weeks before the experiment ends in tragedy, The four persons follow their own vectors into the squat but are linked by a fateful decision the main character, Miles Heller, made when younger. An adolescent mistake sent Heller into an Odyssey of despair across America until he thinks he finds redemption in the love of a young Florida woman. But that redemption is disrupted by the greed of her sister and Heller finds himself back in New York, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on the invitation of his old school friend, Bing Nathan, who runs the mournfully beautiful titled repair shop, The Hospital of Broken Things, where he makes a modest living repairing archaic machines. Nathan is the the only link Heller has to his past: Heller would write to Nathan at each stop on his journey and Nathan would surreptitiously inform Heller’s parents–from whom he had estranged himself– of his whereabouts.

An empty house serves as the strange attractor that draws Heller and Nathan together with two women– an old childhood friend of Nathan’s, real estate agent and failed–or is she?– artist Ellen Brice and her best friend, PhD student Alice Bergstrom. The house, or their proximity to each other in the house, serves as a mirror confronting each of them with difficult truths about themselves. But just as each is ready to grow beyond their self-imposed limitations, another series of accidents intervenes whose ultimate effects– complete disaster or temporary roadblock– Auster leaves open.

But it is not the emergence of pattern from contingency that I want to think along with, philosophically compelling a theme though it is, but a thought that occurs to Brice while she is alone in her room working on a new series of erotic– or are they pornographic– drawings. As she works and re-works the images she is struck by the “miraculous strangeness of being alive.” And I thought: yes, exactly, that is what I have been trying to explore in my most recent essays: the miraculous strangeness of being alive. But just saying it, leaving the idea to float free in the world, is so much better than inferring it as the conclusion of an argument.

“She is sometimes aroused by what her pencil does to the page in front of her … but arousal is only a minor by-product of the effort, and mostly she feels the demands of the work itself, the constant, ever-present desire to get it right. The drawings are rough and and usually left unfinished. She wants her human bodies to convey the miraculous strangeness of being alive– no more than that, as much as all that. She doesn’t concern herself with beauty. beauty can take care of itself.” (219)

So much is contained in this thought: the impossibility of creative work, the impulsion to “get it right” and the impossibility of deciding in the absence of extrinsic criteria. And the difference, implied but unstated, between life and being alive, the objective and the subjective, the machine and the ghost in the machine. The character does not say that she wants to capture the miraculous strangeness of “life,” but of being alive.  Life is a biological function, fully explicable in natural scientific terms.  Abiotic evolution might still be an open question, but the mechanics of the bio-chemical processes are well-understood.   But understanding the mechanics of bio-chemistry has nothing to do with the experience of being alive. That experience is what she was trying to capture in her drawings.  But that is wrong, too: there isn’t experience on one side and being alive on the other. being alive is the experience.

The miraculous strangeness of being alive is the oneness of the question and the questioner, the experience and the experiencer, the body and what the body feels and does. The miraculous strangeness of being alive. Is that not the best, most profound, most illuminating thought about the human condition? Strange: not that there is something rather than nothing, but that there is you, here and now, not just breathing, not just metabolizing glucose, but seeing, feeling, desiring: being alive. Miraculous, because the odds are incalculably small and yet here you are, being alive.

There is no comparator to explain the feeling of being alive. Try to explain to the stone what it is like being aware of being aware. Being alive is not like anything else.

Does all art flow from the artists feeling the miraculous strangeness of being alive, from their wanting to awaken this sense in all of us, a sense that is dulled by routine, by mundane demands, but also by the weight of social life pressing down on people, robbing them of time and space to feel the miracle of just being here. Art is first of all response to the world, and it is this openness to the world, the fact that we not only sense but are aware of sensing, aware of being disposed one way and another to the things of the universe, that motivates our sense-making activities, of which art is the most profound.

And maybe philosophy flows from the same awakening of the sense of the strangeness of being alive, its radical unlikeness from everything else in the universe. As soon as I read those lines I thought not only: “this phrase expresses exactly what I have being thinking about in my most recent work,” but also: “if I write another book i want it to be about gratitude for feeling the miraculous strangeness of being alive.” But then i thought: “you can’t write a philosophical book about this strangeness without killing the feeling which contains it.”

I need to find a way to write philosophically that does not kill the resonance of the experience, that risks not turning the evocation of the feeling into an idea and an idea into an argument. But philosophy is questioning experience, that is, precisely, not leaving it alone, exposed: What is strange about being alive?   What does ‘strange’ even mean?  Such a vague term!  And so on with demands to make sense, be clear, link one idea coherently to the other into sequences that the thinker can can control. Perhaps philosophy is fear of lack of control over ideas and literature is the courage to let them free into the world.

Once one has found an expression as perfect as “the miraculous strangeness of being alive” there is nothing to add. It does not bear commentary, one must just feel and savour it. The sense of the strangeness of being alive does not require commentary or justification, like Camus’ analysis of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus. It is more like the wonder that the much maligned Descartes says is the origin of inquiry and knowledge. His mind-body dualism might be a scientific mistake but I think, deep down, he was led to it not by Catholic dogma, not by a dry attempt to account for the foundations of knowledge, but by a deep feeling for the miraculous strangeness of being alive. It is the foundation of everything that makes life valuable and worth living. Everything we do can be explained, everything we feel about different situations can be explained, but what cannot be explained is what it feels like to have feelings, to be alive to the great spectacle of the universe not as an abstract intelligence, but as you.

But I am proving my point about the way philosophy kills the wonder at the root of being alive by trying to say too much about it.

So I will draw my thinking along with Paul Auster to a close with my own Paul Auster story. After I finished the book I causally read the author’s acknowledgements and was astounded to find out that the “miraculous strangeness of being alive” was not his phrase. The last person he thanks is one Siri Hustvedt, for “the strangeness of being alive.” I do not know who Hustvedt is or whether they said those words to Auster or whether they wrote them somewhere and he read them, but neither is important. Instead, what is uncanny, what is miraculously strange, is that this phrase, found somehow by accident by Auster, so moved him that he put it in the mouth of one of his characters, whose words then found me and made me think: “yes, exactly,” and then kept gnawing at me, motivating me to write this little essay only to realize that the more I wrote the further away I took myself and whoever reads this from the miraculous strangeness of being alive.

If news still came primarily in print form journalists trying to cover the Iran-US-Israel war would exhale, exasperated, bemoaning the fac that before the ink was dry on the headline the story would have changed. One hour the Straight of Hormuz is open, the next it is closed, the next it is open, the next it is closed; one minute Trump is going to destroy Iranian civilization, the next he claims that a deal is close, claims that have, thus far, been publicly rejected by the Iranian side. Watching the action hour by hour it is difficult to discern the “rationality” of state action that commentators and theorists of international relations assume emerges from the chaotic appearances of day to day politics. And it is a favoured conclusion of some Trump critics that he acts largely without reason, impulsively taking one position and then assuming a contradictory position a few hours or days later when that seems to him more conducive to his overriding goal of always appearing to be the winner. There is some truth to those criticisms, but I think that there is a bit more strategic rationality in his apparently wild swings than some critics give him credit for.

Fortunately for me, I am not a journalist who has to watch their story become obsolete two minutes after it has been posted because Trump has launched another 3 am word barrage on Truth Social. Philosophers play the long game: we can wait to see how events play out for … years, decades, centuries, millennia. But human lives play out over more restricted timeframes than human history. Hence, philosophy cannot dispense with attention to the day to day, even if there is truth to the claim that the patterns of practical implication of discrete historical events only emerge over long and open ended periods.

Such is certainly the case with the current conflict. It could prove to be an isolated irruption of political violence. All sides might weight their options and conclude that throwing their full weight behind maximalist solutions carries too much risk. If so, relations between the main parties to the conflict will settle back into the status quo ante. Or the conflict might prove to be a decisive turning point in the decline of American hegemony. Or it might end up as a decisive defeat for the Iranian regime and open the door to renewed struggles for fundamental social change. Or Iran could become Iraq after the first Gulf War, where the regime was left in tact but regularly bombed when it suited American domestic political purposes. It will be years before the question of which of these outcomes ultimately came to pass, and years more before a fully adequate explanation of why one prevailed over the others can be formulated. But I think that one conclusion that we can draw is that the Iran conflict provides further evidence of the limited political power of armed violence.

In the realist tradition of International Relations war is understood both as a mechanical function of the behaviour of states in an anarchic system dominated by uncertainty about the intentions of adversaries, and a rational policy option. The later point was pithily expressed by Karl von Clausewitz’s famous aphorism: war is politics by other means. What matters, according to Clausewitz, are the goals that states pursue: all means are good that ensure the realization of the goal. War is thus a rational policy option when it appears to be the most efficient means to the state’s ends.

Peace-loving critics of war will object to the pure instrumentalism of von Clausewitz and the realist tradition generally, and I count myself amongst those critics. But the most powerful form of criticism is immanent. When people disagree not only about conclusions but about premises too the critic’s burden of argument is heavier. Instead of just convincing the opponent that the conclusion does not follow, one must convince them that something about the world is different from the way they take it to be. Immanent criticism accepts the opponent’s premises but disagrees with the conclusion. I disagree with many of the premises of Realist International Relations theory if they are treated as transhistorical generalizations. But they do explain the behaviour of states in the sort of international system we actually live under. So I will accept that the existence of international law notwithstanding, the international states system is anarchic (the economically and militarily powerful can violate international law with relative impunity) and that war is a policy option that states choose when they decide that it is the most efficient means to their ends.

This general framework leads to rational strategic decisions, according to Mearsheimer and Rosato, (How States Think) when statespersons deliberate about how best to achieve their goals informed by some overall theory of states’ interests and the balance of power. While many critics argue that Trump’s seeming erratic positions betray the absence of theory, I think that we need to look beneath the apparently wild oscillations of tone and practice to the underlying unity of aim: Trump’s theory (in Mearsheimer and Rosato’s sense of the term) posits American interests as absolutely supreme. All his strategic decisions, from tariffs to the confrontation with Iran, follow from the overriding significance he attaches to unchallenged American supremacy. He shares this goal with American administrations going back to the end of World War One. All of these administrations were happy to violate international law when it suited purposes of American hegemony. Where Trump differs is on the question of the value of alliances. Free of the crusade against communism and willing to call the bluff of international law (it lacks the political galvanizing power of anti-communism or the War on Terror) Trump has not only subordinated former allies’ interests to his interpretation of the US’s, he has actively attacked those alliances. That is new, but it is a tactic that fits with his overall strategic objective, and it is not irrational, by Mearsheimer and Rosato’s understanding of strategic rationality (and it has also, so far, worked, if we judge by the snivelling behaviour of most US allies up to now).

But now let us look more carefully at the general question of whether war– politics by other means– is for the most part instrumentally rational using the Iran conflict as an example. Let us define the most instrumentally rational policy as the policy which achieves the ends of the state with the least cost. States typically only count the costs on their side such that the destruction of the lives and life-supporting infrastructure on the other side count as costs to the other side but not to one’s own. But if war is politics by other means, a way of pursuing objectives but not an end in itself, then objectives– unless they are to exterminate the other side– will have to involve the conditions of life of the adversary post-conflict. If we think of the conduct of the war and its ultimate resolution together then it is not clear to me that the evaluation of the instrumental rationality of war as politics by other means can coherently exclude the costs the other side incurs.

Let us take the initially foregrounded but now backgrounded hope of the US and Israel that a short “shock and awe” campaign would undermine the stability of the Iranian regime and allow it to be replaced by a more pliable government. The government would not only have to be responsive to US demands and interests it would also have to be stable. But the probability of a stable post-war new regime decreases in proportion to the scale of destruction and the numbers of lives lost on the Iranian side. No one will co-operate with a comprador regime put in power on the backs of tens or hundreds of thousands of dead Iranians. Even if one does not care an iota for the lives of Iranians, war might not be the most instrumentally rational choice if politics by normal political means– talking, compromising, entering into binding agreements– is possible.

In his own convoluted way Trump seems to understand this point. But he is also clearly liable to being talked into dramatic displays of power that feeds his own ego. Although erratic compared with the typical conduct of statespersons, there is by this point in his second administration a discernible pattern: as inflection points approach, Trump ramps up the threats. This tactic has served him well in trade negotiations: most trading partners have accepted higher tariff rates than they had previously enjoyed for fear of even higher ones being imposed. (I am not commenting here on the economic value of tariffs, only on Trump’s tactics). He employs the same tactics in the military field: application of extreme rhetorical pressure to create the conditions for the best deal possible (from his perspective). The tactic worked in the case of Venezuela, but is being tested by Iranian refusals to cave into Trump’s demands and accept his gross violations of international law.

So we have had war and we may indeed see a renewal of violence in the near future. Eventually, one side or the other will declare victory and convince themselves that the loss of life and destruction was “worth it.” But if some (attenuated, compromise) version of both side’s objectives could have been achieved by open-ended but good faith negotiations, then war was not even instrumentally rational. I want to make this argument because too often the “hard-headed’ realist conception of political rationality (whether articulated by the right or the left) implies that only weak-minded “bleeding hearts” factor human life as a cost worth considering when statespersons are deliberating about going to war. While I would agree with the bleeding hearts that war is substantively irrational just because it wastes so many lives, l also think it can be shown to fail the test of even instrumental rationality (war as the most efficient means to a states’ ends).

Let us return to Iran as an example to support this claim and speculate about a possible negotiated agreement. We already have a template: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the Obama administration and Iran. It provided sanctions relief in exchange for Iran’s agreement to not further enrich uranium for a specified period of time. Trump tore that agreement up in favour of his “maximum pressure campaign” whose failure has now been proven by his decision to go to war. But the war has also proven to be a political failure (at least up the this point) if success means a written and verifiable agreement between Iran and the US in which the former agrees not to take any more steps that could lead to an atomic weapon and the US agrees to provide meaningful and permanent sanctions relief. But if war is politics by other means the only relevant metric is political success. A military campaign that succeeds militarily can fail politically if the states’ objectives in going to war are not achieved. Afghanistan is a case in point: the Taliban did not defeat the US militarily, it simply waited as the political costs of continued occupation mounted in the US. The Iran conflict is different but it could follow an analogous trajectory.

The barriers standing in the way of a negotiated agreement at this point are obvious and well-known: Iran does not trust the US because Trump is inclined to move the goal posts (and not only Trump: the promised sanctions relief never really materialized under Obama because the Republican-controlled Congress impeded it). But let us set aside the problem of trust (while acknowledging its reality). How likely is it that either side is going to get a better deal by renewed resort to war? If we focus just on the deal and ignore the greater loss of life and social life-support systems that renewed violence will cause, I believe that the probability is very low. Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it has explicitly stated that it will not develop a bomb, there is a fatwa against its doing so. It could all be lies and subterfuge, true, but the available evidence suggests they do not have a bomb and were not on the threshold of building one. Since Iran has a right to develop nuclear energy for civilian purposes and the regime insists on its rights under international law, it is unlikely to make more concessions than it made under the JCPOA. For its part, the US cannot walk away from negotiations with less than it extracted from Iran during the JCPOA negotiations, but some tweaked version of that agreement would be enough to secure the objective of locking Iran into its commitments to not develop a weapon, assuming a legitimate and credible inspection regime can be put in place. Assuming that serious sanctions relief was agreed to there is no reason why Iran would (or should) balk at inspections. Israel is the wild card in this scenario, but Trump has shown that he can control Netanyahu when he really wants to control him.

But if this conflict ultimately ends in some sort of revised JCPOA then the rational question to ask is why not default towards negotiations for as long as they take? The realist answer is that states act according to a calculus of maximizing their own gains in any conflict. Gains are measured in terms of success in achieving objectives and costs evaluated only in terms of losses that affect the success of the strategy. Notably, lives lost, on either side, are not typically counted as costs unless they affect the strategic calculus. Instead of being judged the loss of something of infinite value because irreplaceable, wartime deaths are typically counted as necessary sacrifices.

But what if international relations practiced “full cost accounting” and lives were valued according to their real value: unpriceable singularities which, once lost, cannot be replaced, because the individual person is not a token of a type (‘living being’) but unique and therefore non-fungible. The estimation of the infinite value of individual life is not a function of importing arbitrary moralistic assumptions into the calculus, it is based on two incontrovertible facts: 1) death is the permanent subtraction of a human being from earthly existence, 2) the value of earthly life must be measured in earthly terms. Therefore, a future human being cannot replace the value of another human being killed unnecessarily because each human being is a self-creative and therefore unique person. When these facts are translated into moral terms we arrive at the conclusion that individual human beings are of infinite value because each has no equivalent. Art works or rare vintages of wine are valuable not because of their chemical composition or even their intrinsic aesthetic properties but because of their rarity. Prices for “hot” artists increase after the artist has died because once dead the artist cannot produce any more works. But how much more rare than a vintage wine or painting is a human being: a person cannot be faked, their value is not a function of taste and market pressures (a person remains valuable even if no one else values them) and yet what is more expendable in war than human life? Museums are emptied during wartime so that their “treasures” are not damaged by the murderous warfare raging outside their walls.

I am not a statesperson so I ask those who are or study their decision-making process: in what universe is it even instrumentally rational to destroy human life for the sake of a bit of leverage in negotiations that could have taken place before any armed conflict broke out and which will in almost every eventuality be required to bring the conflict to a stable conclusion? Which of the factual assumptions that I made above is untrue such that my translation of them into moral terms (unrepeatability+uniqueness=infinite value) is wrong?

The statesperson might respond that the moral arithmetic may be correct but it operates in abstraction from the system-pressures that forces them to act. They might argue that information deficits about the intentions of the other side mean that it is often instrumentally rational to strike first. That answer is sound if we assume that information deficits cannot be addressed any other way than by first strike offence. But information deficits can also be overcome by … talking to the enemy. But that would require trust and trust requires different sorts of people in charge of our societies- people who do not see the world in zero sum terms, who understand that political structures, ideologies, and institutions have no value apart from their material implications for people’s well-being, and who are able to properly cost the results of their decisions (having to sacrifice life for political interests is always already a loss because the dead cannot be replaced).

Violence can gain the victor a clause or two in the peace agreement that might not have been there had they not gone to war, but the violence never resolves the ultimate problems. The Treaty of Versailles did not end all wars but set in train a set of events that led to the Nazi take over of Germany in 1933– a mere fifteen years after World War One ended. Does Israel have security after 80 years of war? My point is not that the moral mind can float free of material-political realities. but it can point out faulty accounting procedures that suggest that war is almost never worth the cost in human life is properly costed. If true, the argument suggests that the world does not need saints in charge of foreign policy but better (moral, political) accountants.

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo tells an aging Kublai Khan about the fantastic cities he has visited on his travels, but as the stories unfold it becomes apparent that they are all different descriptions of Venice. Like Leibniz’s monads, which he explained metaphorically as “like the same town viewed from different perspectives,” Calvino’s “invisible city” is multiplied as many times as there are memories of and perspectives on a single place. The city is a singularity only in a geographical sense: the lived city is not one but innumerable constellations of place, memory, and fantasy projection.

The lived city is invisible because it cannot be seen from the external, third-person, observer’s perspective. When Polo gives imaginary names to his different perspectives on Venice he is not reciting facts about its appearance that Khan could go verify. But he is also not just spinning arbitrary tales: he is giving shape to the invisible cities that he has inhabited which were not built by masons and carpenters but the act of re-inhabiting in mind.

Memory: neither mechanical recall nor free invention. Memory is making present of a past lived and felt relationship to a person, place, or object. It is both universally essential to human self-understanding — everyone forges their identity through integrating their past and present through memory- and intimately bound up with the unrepeatable experiences of individuals. It humanizes the world and individualizes humanity. Two people can share space and live in different invisible cities.

A street on a map is a position relative to other streets: someone who has not visited a city can read the map as well as the person who lives there. But one does not live in a city but in a neighbourhood. Streets are not arteries but canvases of shops and smells and sounds, of local characters, of the different feels of the street at different times of the year or day. The neighbourhood is an informal community whose boundaries and members are known only to those who live there. The street is the street, the shops are the shops, but the lived place is invisible, real in its own way for each person who lives it.

Or should I say “lived it?” The invisible city is the city of memory. These reflections were prompted by a visit to Toronto last week. I was walking along Richmond Street just west of Spadina and saw that the building where I first lived when I moved to Toronto in 1986 was being torn down. Tearing down 471 Richmond Street was no crime against architecture: the building was a non-descript, but perhaps somewhat handsome, two story brick office/warehouse building. It had once housed the offices of Eldon Garnet’s Impulse magazine. I lived in the loft above the print shop that occupied the first floor with my uncle, the Toronto painter John Brown and another painter, Howard Lonn. In subsequent years it had housed small communication firms and even a trendy restaurant on the ground floor. But time and money wait for no man– and no man’s memory. So, despite the cratering market for condos, 471 Richmond was being torn down on a typical grey, damp Toronto December morning for what I assume will be more condos, adding to the boring uniformity of what was once the Queen West neighbourhood.

I could not resist a flood of memories about what the neighbourhood used to be: my invisible city. About all that is left of those days is the Cameron House (through the alley linking Richmond and Queen), the Horseshoe, the Rivoli, Steve’s Music and Kop’s Records. Long gone are most of the artists and book stores (Pages, About Books) and also the echoes of the working class quarter it used to be: the chicken butcher near John Street, Active Surplus and its gorilla mannequin, Jacob’s Hardware), but mostly the feel of the place: DIY, artsy because artists lived there, punky and alternative before “alternative” was a category.

But so what? Nostalgia is a disease: homesickness, “extreme melancholy brought on by a prolonged absence from home (OED);” an affliction to be cured by letting go. But letting go is not forgetting: memories can induce nostalgia but one can remember without longing to return. Perhaps one can only remember if one does not long to return. Re-member, put back together, but within affective mental space, not reality without.

Imagine if one had the power to stop time and keep everything as it was at the point where one felt most at home. Using that power would be an existential crime: it would preserve your past at the expense of everyone else’s future. Everyone else would become actors in your script rather than the playwrights of their own. Kant entertains a similar thought experiment in What is Enlightenment? He denounces imposed dogma because it robs future generations of the right to think for themselves. Nostalgic railing against change is similarly a crime against the future, against future generations who have the right to forge their own memories. If one neighbourhood becomes gentrified another neighbourhood is becoming cool.

One could have no imaginary cities to roam if nothing changed. So what if the Beverly is now a boutique hotel instead of a punk bar? A bar full of sixty year old punks would not be punk, it would be pathetic.

There are pleasures of anticipation, pleasures of experience, and pleasures of memory. If we are being Epicurean about life– and why shouldn’t we be– then the most pleasurable life should contain all three. We should always have a goal that enlivens us, we should be fully engaged in whatever we are doing, and we should have many invisible cites inside us whose streets we can freely stroll at our leisure. So I was not sad, exactly, to see 471 Richmond reduced to a pile of bricks and tangled metal, not indifferent, to be sure; maybe “warmed by the memories” is the best expression. As one feels cozier by the fire the colder it is outside so too one savours the memories more deeply the more one’s life has changed.

No, I was not sad, because my invisible city is safe from all wrecking balls. I did not linger but kept walking, but I was walking the streets as I once lived them: to the Salvation Army across the street (now condos) to find second hand furniture with Jack; to the lunch counter in the basement of the sweat shop next door to buy insipid coffee in a Styrofoam cups (the building is still there but the lunch counter and sweatshop are gone); to Winston’s for a bottle of coke and cigarettes, or Bon’s for a sub, or the Stem or the Nikolas for breakfast. And I was me now and I was me then, walking in my invisible city, and no one who saw me could know where I was, and I was not sad that 471 Richmond was being torn down, but warm.

I took the picture above wondering what, if anything the workers would think if they saw me taking it. Maybe in 40 (!) years the young workers will walk along Richmond Street and remember that they helped pull down an old dull building on this spot. And I hope that they do: the world will have gained other invisible cities.

I loaded my telescope in the car last week and drove about a half an hour into what we Windsorites call “The County” to a spot with reasonably dark skies to find Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon). Last week was the best time to see it at this latitude and I had to seize the chance: its orbit means that it will not be visible from earth again for 1300 years.

I and everyone else alive right now will be long gone: everything that we take to be important, the personal and political, the mundane and the existential, will have become other people’s concerns. Most of our names will have disappeared from history and those who were motivated in life to have theirs chiseled into some boring monument somewhere, or have something named after them, or be remembered for doing ‘great’ things will, like the rest of us, have returned to the anonymity of dust.

“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”/Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelly)

“I am all consuming time” Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “and to destroy these worlds I have arisen.”

In the immensity of the time and space of the universe human beings are almost nothing. The comet orbits indifferent to the doings here below; when it returns new generations will be toiling but it will not shed a tear for the billions of people, not to mention plants and animals, who will have have died between 2025 and 3325.

When I was young, I filled notebooks with astronomical facts and figures and thought that I wanted to become an astronomer. But I can see now, looking back, and having reconnected with my youthful love of the stars, that what really interested me was not the science of astronomy but the visual poetry of the heavens and the way it painted the frames of human solitude and finitude. I could never have articulated it when I was ten years old, on a cold night on a bush road looking through my uncle Joe’s telescope, but what captivated me was not just the inexpressible beauty of the star fields that even a small telescope brings into view, but the impress of a feeling of absolute existential solitude: all those stars, galaxies, open and globular clusters, nebulae, planets, and no one looking back! But then also: while it took the light millions of years to reach my eyes from distant galaxies, it concentrated itself in this moment, in my eyes.

If one said that I get from get from my telescope what religious people claim can only be got through belief in a deity they would not be wrong. But where we differ is that I am content with this moment where the light from the galaxy reaches my eyes. I do not feel drawn to the beyond of space and time but feel at home here, on earth, in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, just one of 100 000 other galaxies in the Local Supercluster, and those 100 000 just a tiny fraction of all those in the universe. Why not stay right here, under the stars that inspired wonder in Kant? What would he have felt if he had known what we know about the true spatial and temporal extent of the universe? One does not need to be religious to shudder in awe and maybe some terror about the immensity of physical reality, but one need not be dogmatically dismissive of religious belief either. I think that Richard Feynman puts the point brilliantly in a short conversation of religion- why would god create the whole universe and then only pay attention to this one little planet? How could god be, as he says, so provincial, a question which Spinoza too asked, in his own way.

But Feynman is a great scientist because he does not mock, he wonders; he seeks to understand, knowing that science does not understand everything. The difference between the scientist and the religious person is that- contrary to what many religious people think- the scientist keeps the wonder alive and searches, while the religious person closes off the wonder with the final word: God. That does not respect the mystery of universal origins, it imposes a solution by fiat. Still, I understand why people feel that explanation of origins by physical causes is not enough: without some ultimate ground, not electromagnetic radiation but some deity or eternal transcendent state, isn’t our existence meaningless? And if it is meaningless, what restraint can there be on our worst instincts?

To the first question I answer, yes, in a sense, quite so. But to the second I respond: why? Why do you need God? Restrain yourself. Or better: attune yourself to the implications of finitude and mortality. Our real conditions of life could be read as rendering life meaningless, or they could be read as making life the only ultimate value. I think that if we mediate upon the brevity of every person’s life time– not just your own, note– a mediation which the stars help me with but you might find another road works better for you– we might reframe the meaning of our lives in ways that help us with the moral restraint side of the problem.

The paradox of human being: we are, each of us and collectively, a localized and highly improbable oasis resisting entropy– but not for very long. Our poetry, politics, and philosophy affect nothing in the wider universe. But that sense of total aloneness as the telescope drew my experience out into space at the same time drew me deeper into myself: the stars are not looking down at me, but I am looking up at them. In that way one mind is superior to the universe because it is conscious of the universe in a way that the universe cannot be conscious of its own immensity and grandeur. When even one mind dies out something of irreplaceable value is lost. I think that is the everyday thought behind Leibniz’s extravagant conception of the monad.

Every human being is a paradoxical double: an improbable compound of common elements forged in the fires of ancient supernovae, and a self-consciousness absolutely unique in the universe; a universe of meaning unto themselves which, once gone, though unlamented by the stars, will never exist again.

Death is an absolute loss.

Romantic drivel? Existential bathos? Probably. But some things need to be said, even at the risk of philosophical melodrama.

The more I meditate on the paradox of human being the more I am convinced of its practical relevance. Krishna’s pronouncement to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita sounds like a threat, but he is just stating facts: every compound and constellation of energy will degrade over time. Our self, our community, our cuisine, our language, our nations, our class, our way of life, our civilization are changing imperceptibly no matter how hard we try to hold them fast.

Vedic philosophy and Buddhism inferred a value from the fact of the transience of all material compounds and constructions: since nothing lasts forever, one ought not get attached to anything. Absolute value is an ego-centric fantasy projection. Once we stop clinging to our egos we will stop clinging to material life. Once we stop clinging to material life we will have liberated ourselves from the suffering that defines it.

But for those of us who believe that material life is the only life, a meditation on the brevity of human creations in the river of cosmic time can still teach a truth of possibly profound practical significance. If every human institution, practice, belief, value, and creation will succumb to the dissolving power of time, none have absolute value. What makes them valuable is that they satisfy some human need in a definite and concrete way. The fundamental condition of anything being valuable, therefore, is not found in its particular and transient content but in the fact that it satisfies a human need. But if the value of traditions etc., is found in the way they satisfy human needs, if they cease to satisfy that need they lose their value. Moreover, if they satisfy a need of one group of human beings at the demonstrated expense of the ability of other people to satisfy the same or other equally important needs, then that practice loses value to the extent that it deprives the other group of their ability to satisfy their needs.

Behind the politics of conservative reaction and fundamentalist dogmatism is fear: fear that if traditions change the community’s moral anchor will be lost. I understand the fear. But by the time conservative forces and fundamentalist movements have arisen the traditions have already changed. If there were no competitors to the Taliban’s version of Islam alive in Afghanistan they would not need to impose their version by force. Those values would simply be the ways of the community. If Trump’s embarrassing monochrome version of American culture were still actual American culture, there would be no need for the MAGA movement. I think critics need to understand that the fears are real, but, having acknowledged the reality of the fear, need to state honestly the truth: Krishna is right: you cannot stop what time has ordained can exist only for a moment. You have to let go, time does not flow in reverse; let the new be born, find your place in what will happen with or without you.

When I sketched this sort of argument in my department’s faculty colloquium last year one of my colleagues pointed out the similarity between my argument and Rorty’s ironic ethnocentrism. I see the connection, but my claim is not that we should adopt an ironic interpretative relationship to our own culture (preferring it because it is ours while knowing that it is just one of many and that there is no universal criterion to decide which is best). My view is that we should adopt a deflationary interpretation of social and cultural meanings (the traditions and practices that generate them are just facts about how people organize their lives but not of any ultimate significance or meaning because they change and all will ultimately be erased from the universe). If they are not of any absolute value they are not worth fighting over and certainly not worth killing over. They exist to be enjoyed, shared, learned from, and abandoned if they cease to satisfy or if they can be satisfied only at the expense of the needs of others.

To deflate the meanings that we attach to social practices is not the same as being indifferent to the content of our experience and activity. I would say that it has (or could, or should have) the opposite effect: by deflating the meaning of the particular content or ritual or practice we can free ourselves from all chauvinistic beliefs in the superiority of our way of doing things and instead savor the experience as one way amongst many of cultivating our sensuous experience of the world, our feelings of valuable connection to things and others, of expanding our intellect and developing our creative powers. And if we remain mindful that everything changes and that everyone will ultimately go under we can perhaps learn to savour our experiences and activities as unrepeatable goods and leave others to savour their experiences, with everyone operating under the limitation imposed above: all ways of life are good and legitimate that do not deprive others of what they need to live and enjoy in their own ways. That approach would accommodate the plurality of human life ways while allowing for non-dogmatic, non-chauvinistic criticisms and encouraging mutual discussion and argument for the sake of mutual learning and self-directed transformation.

What it would rule out is any form of missionary zeal in the service of any particular end. Humans are most dangerous when they feel they are on a mission. Occupation of high office, the bestowing of titles, and the wearing of uniforms or insignia of power heighten the threat. There are always structural features and system pressures that produce movements like MAGA, but structural features and system pressures only cause action when they find willing executioners. The psychological, ethical, and political willingness to follow commands to attack and destroy is a material condition of the causal efficacy of structural features and system pressures. Objective social forces cannot act save through subjects willing to enact them. There would be no ICE raids on immigrant communities if no one was willing to make themselves a thuggish accomplice of the overtly racist but also fear-driven MAGA/Project 2025 agenda.

If everyone rebelled from within against the legitimacy of targeting, harassing, demonizing, invading, attacking, brutalising, and killing it would all end. The left typically causally links subjective rebellion against invidious hierarchies to the adoption of the correct ideology. But the sort of transformation people need to undergo must be much deeper than express, rationally affirmed, ideological commitments. We must all learn to reflect upon the true brevity of our existence in order to properly understanding its value. Life-destructive political movements arise when conditions are ripe, but they are also steered by people with monstrous egos who think they can hold back the time. But they cannot, and if their egos were tamed by a starlight mediation on how utterly powerless they really are wheen measured against the universe they would stop trying. And if everyone of those monstrous egos tamed themselves there would be no murderous fundamentalists of any stripe, no fearful and pathetic clinging to a past that is already downstream by the time someone tries to grab hold of it. Doomed rearguard actions to recreate what has been would be replaced by honest understanding of what life is. Instead of trying to bend the universe to one’s will, people would accommodate their thoughts and values to their place in the universe. Amongst all the things in the universe none is more valuable, Spinoza said, than another person who also understands reality. When people understand reality they know how to get along. When everyone knows how to get along they will. Together they can share the delights of our brief life on earth.

“To use things .. and take pleasure in them … is the part of the wise man. It is the part of the wise man to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theatre, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another.” (Spinoza, Ethics, Part 4, Scholium to proposition 45 -‘Hate can never be good.’).

I have just returned from a trip to Ireland with my brother. A friend and former student who now lives in Dublin informed us over drinks that our visit had been preceded by “Make Ireland Great Again” anti-immigrant protests. We missed the protests, but waiting for a bus in Galway an old timer staggered up to us and, clearly mistaking us for locals, asked “Whataya think, boys, it’s a small country, there’s too many of them,” and went on to complain about how some monument to the scared heart of Jesus or something had been taken down to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities, and how Saudi Arabia would never close down a mosque were the Irish to move en masse to Saudi Arabia. I am sure he is correct on the later score, but I doubt that it was Muslim immigrants who demanded the removal of the statue: I would bet a pint and a shot of whiskey that it was good old-fashioned white Irish liberals that took that step pre-emptively.

But make anything great again protests do pose an important question: when was the ‘x’ that has now declined great? And who were the y’s that made the x great? Was Ireland great when it was exclusively for the Irish? But when was that? Before the 9th century Viking invasions? So does the greatness of Ireland then consist in sod huts and peat digging? While street signs and official announcements are made in Irish and English and sheep there were aplenty, there was also excellent internet service and our Irish for the Irish friend in Galway did not appear to have just finished work in a bog. I am no expert, but I think that the economy in Ireland in the EU is a little better then when my ancestors left during the Great Famine.

Traditionalists wherever they are found urge history against avant garde’s and cosmopolitans. But history, like water, is a universal solvent: a continuous process of movement and change upon which politically motivated human beings project symbolic demarcations and arbitrary boundaries. Who are the Irish? The descendants of ancient Celts? But who are the Celts? They were not Irish, but originated in Central Europe. Unlike Plato’s founding myth of his kallipolis, the gods did not plant the souls of the people of country’s in the soil of the nation to which they just happen to belong. Wind the historical clock back far enough and one finds that everyone came from somewhere else.

Bloc Quebecois leader Yves Bechand argued towards the end of the most recent Canadian election that Canada was an “artificial” country. His comment set of a firestorm of outrage amongst the nouveau nationalists aroused to impassioned defence of the dignity of maple syrup and beavers by the effect of Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state. Bechand was, of course, correct, but what he failed to note is that every country is artificial. Bechand meant that Canada is not an ethnically uniform nation like Quebec, and there precisely lies the problem with all ethno-nationalisms: they must affirm an essentially exclusionary and, at the limits, racist understanding of the “nation’ (pur laine Quebecois, Irish with no trace of Viking, or Norman, or English blood) which an actually historical understanding of human development reveals to be mythological. Buddy in Galway thought that my brother and I were Irish because we look “Irish” in the way that the daughter of a Somali immigrant actually born and schooled in Ireland and therefore actually Irish does not.

Looks are deceiving.

If the Quebecois nation is “natural” as opposed to the artificially constructed Canadian nation, what exactly is Bechand to say to the Mohawks or Cree who were in “la belle provence” long before it was a province (although I am sure that it was still “belle”). Or Quebecois of Moroccan ancestory? Or a recent immigrant from Congo (or even a McGill student from Toronto)? If the Quebecois nation is natural they can at best be guest residents but never full and equal members of the nation.

Class: can anyone name another nation where this sort of ethno-chauvinism is causing some rather serious problems?

The “natural” Quebecois nation is the legacy of colonial conquest that started not all that long ago, 1628, when Champlain founded a permanent French settlement at Tadoussac at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay rivers. Therefore, if Quebec is natural, the actual pre-European history of the peoples who lived there for thousands of years must be, by Bechand’s logic, an artificial graft onto the Quebecois nation: a complete inversion of reality. If one thinks historically, the naturalness of the “Quebecois” identity is exposed as an ex post facto construct of the descendants of people who were not Quebecois, but French. And the French nation that today people in North American regard as an ethno-national whole only dates from 1789 and was the product of a state-led struggle against regional identities and languages.

And so it goes. Unless one’s family has lived in the Rift Valley of eastern African where modern human beings evolved for the past 3 million years, one is the descendant of people who at one time moved from somewhere else. And even if your people have never moved from the spot where Lucy once roamed, our earliest ancestors were not people at all, but pre-human primates. And pre-human primates were once mammallian quadrupeds, and mammalian quadrupeds were once fish, and fish were once prokaryotic cells, and prokaryotic cells were once self-replicating amino acids, and self-replicating amino acids were once heavy elements blasted through space by supernovae eruptions, and stars were once swirls of hydrogen gas, and swirls of hydrogen gas were once …. nothing, the quantum vacuum.

The politically involved person is apt to think at this point: the philosophical mind has become untethered from human reality. History cannot be understood on cosmic time-scales and requires symbolic attachment, rootedness, community, identity. I respond: I used to think that way, and part of me still does, but the persistence of hatred and violence in the world perhaps calls for a more radical revision of how human beings understand themselves and their societies. The environmental movement has been trying to dislodge anthropocentric perspectives for decades, but what is more anthropocentric than the belief that the whole evolution of the universe was steered by the goal of planting one group of people on one patch of ground and another group on another patch? When we consider such ideas from the higher-level perspective of the evolution of matter and energy they appear as they really are: ludicrous.

The clock really does wind back to time t-0 and nothingness. I am becoming more and more convinced that there cannot be any solution to the most pressing social problems– including especially the violence generated by ideas about the fixity and naturalness of ethno-national identities – unless political thinking– left and right– understands the implications of deeply historical thinking.

Deeply historical thinking sets human history in the context of the history of the universe. It is anti-anthropocentric and anti-ethno-centric but at the same time humanist. From my perspective humanism begins from honest contemplation of the realities of human life: it is an evolutionary accident, had initial conditions been different we would not be here; after a certain (hopefully long) period of time we will not be here; we have developed certain capacities for world-building which are constrained, ultimately, only by the laws of physics, and so must figure out what to do with them. The problem with past answers to the question of what we should do with our world-building powers is that different human groups have taken the question of the truth of their worldviews far too seriously. Absurdities like gods become grounds for mass killing; instead of sharing the resources we all need some groups consider themselves uniquely entitled to the fruits of the earth; instead of seeing the human genius underlying different ways of life some groups exalt themselves as uniquely cultured, intelligent, scientific, indeed, human.

How stupid this chauvinism is from even one hundred miles above the earth, where not a single human artifact can be seen and no border lines are visible. Who cares who invented borscht or hummus? They are foods to eat not artefacts to be fought over. The only question is whether they are well-made or not. Whomever can read a recipe can cook. I am not preaching Esperanto abstract uniformity. I preach the gospel of invention, creativity, novelty, and iconoclasm. Before traditions were traditions they were inventions. If the logic insisted upon by defenders of tradition and “cultural authenticity” were followed strictly there would be no traditions, cultures, or human beings. The traditionalist says: do thing the way they have always been done. But deeply historical thinking, winding the clock all the way back, proves that in the beginning nothing was done, and so, if we were to do things the way they have were done in the past, we would have to do nothing at all.

Seeing the stupidity of fetishizing traditions and worshiping an imaginary authenticity we should laugh, not in love and malice, as Nietzsche argued, but in love and friendship, as the once celebrated but now too-ignored Epicurus argued. All were welcome in his garden: women, slaves, all were friends. The only rule was that they were not to talk about politics, because they rightly understood that life is too short for bickering about who should decided how it should be lived. each should decide for themselves. The only real problem is need-satisfaction which, if approached from the standpoint of friendship, in the midst of natural abundance and a minimally disciplined understanding of real needs, is no problem at all. Take what you need and leave as much and as good for others, as Locke argued the law of nature enjoined.

But, my politically-engaged friend will argue, “your deeply historical view abstracts from the structure of conflicts that make friendship impossible. How can the Gazan be friend to the Israeli, the worker to the boss, the black man to the racist?” I answer: “By ceasing to think of themselves as “Gazan” “Israeli” “worker,” “boss” “black man” “racist.” “But that is too abstract!” my comrade rejoins. And then I remind him that my thought that we should address each other as “friend” simply extends the logic of revolutionary modes of address: French revolutionaries called each other “citizen” and communists “comrade” precisely because these names abstracted from the social differences the revolution was trying to overthrow. I simply radicalize this spirit of egalitarian friendship.

“But what about justice,” my political friend insists. Well, what about it? What does the victim demand, vengeance, or access to the means of living well? I say that vengeance is one thing and justice is something else. Justice is (as I put it in the previous post) getting what one deserves. Vengeance is punishing an enemy for the wrongs that they have done. Vengeance is irrational because when one side satisfies its demand for vengeance it gives the other side grounds for demanding the same, and a never ending cycle of violence is unleashed. Justice is not about punishment but ensuring that the victims get what they deserve: secure access to the resources that they need to live and live well. Justice promotes friendly relations between former enemies, vengeance locks people into hate-fueled cycles of violence.

Contrary to the slogan on the wall in Galway pictured above, I argue that people need to remember to forget rather than not forget to remember. The best thing about a painful yesterday is that it is over. If one broods on the pain one will never be free from it, no matter what the circumstances of one’s life are. As Ursula LeGuin said somewhere, “To oppose is to maintain.” Forget, move on, take what you need and make a contribution to the common wealth. What problem would these ways of living and relating not solve if everyone were to put them into practice? Life-enjoyment is possible only in the present and progress demands that we look forward.

The cry for justice is as old as recorded human thought. When people believe that they have been treated unfairly, they cry to their god or their comrades that justice must be served. In the most generic sense, justice exists when there is reciprocity between what the agent has done and the circumstances of their life. When circumstances are out of balance with the character and actions of the agents, then the cry of injustice is raised. The deep assumption that underlies the demand for justice that everyone should get what they deserve. This demand underlies the law of karma and the laws of the land; it informs ideas of the fairness of contracts and the legitimacy of democratic law-making.

Considered from a social perspective, justice in general takes on different concrete forms: criminal justice, economic justice, etc. Although theories differ, the sense of fairness at work in theories of social justice is easy enough to understand in terms of reciprocity between action and outcome. I follow the law, I should not be arrested; I upheld my side of the contract, I should get paid. But what about when there is no action on the part of the agent as the basis of the claim that they deserve something in return? Do human beings deserve anything simply in virtue of being born? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then I think we can talk meaningfully about “existential” justice.

I have been turning the idea of existential justice over in my head for years without really committing myself to trying to systematically unpack it. These reflections might be the beginning of a commitment to formally develop the idea, or they might be the end. In any case, they are offered here in the spirit of thinking out loud. But sometimes the thinking out loud is more important than rigorous argument. It can be the source of the intellectual energy of a philosophical idea that opens up a new perspective on an old problem.

Let us take a couple of concrete examples to begin the exploration of existential justice. Everyone will agree that there is such a thing as economic justice or criminal justice. Different political perspectives will provide different answers to what arrangement is actually just, but no one would agree that it is meaningless to ask what a defendant accused of a crime deserves or what a fair economic arrangement is. We might say that those charged with an offence deserve a fair trial and that those who work deserve to reap the fruit of their labours. In these concrete cases, ‘justice” is a function of interests generated by participation in a social institution. If there were no crime there would be no criminal justice system, and if we did not have to work on nature in order to produce the goods that we need and devise a means to distribute the products there would be no economic system and therefore no question about what economic agents deserve.

But since there are laws and we do have to produce and distribute the product of collective labour there are important questions about justice in these domains. But what would “existential” justice mean? If there is such a thing, then it would be the answer to the question of whether there is something human beings deserve simply in virtue of being born, i.e., coming into existence. I think that there is a meaningful answer to this question.

Since we do not choose to be born or to be the sort of organisms that we are, we come into the world requiring access to certain non-optional resources and goods. Thus, I think that it is meaningful to say that everyone born deserves to come into existence in social circumstances that ensure that their basic human life-requirements can be met. Those include the biologically obvious: nurture, shelter, clothing, but also the less physically quantifiable: care and love. Since we do not choose the identity that others will recognize us by I think one can also say that people deserve to be born into social and cultural contexts in which they will not suffer from belonging to a demonized and oppressed group. We are owed these things by the circumstances of life because no one chooses these life-requirements and they cannot, at least initially, satisfied them by their own individual efforts. Infants are not capable of working for the sake of satisfying their own needs or changing who they are. People who are born into situations of social collapse, war, systematic poverty and oppression against the group that they belong to are victims, I think, of existential injustice.

By calling it existential injustice I intend to put the stress on the circumstances and not the parents. Some people might reasonably argue that parents who conceive and give birth in war zones or racist regimes are causally responsible for the harms that their babies will suffer. But even if that response has some truth to it, it focuses on the parents and not the infant. Whatever the parents were doing or intending, once the infant exists it faces a set of problems it did not choose to face and cannot solve on its own: the very circumstances of its existence, therefor, are unjust. Whomever or whatever is causally responsible does not matter from the infant’s point of view. It emerges into a world that it cannot control but which poses serious threats to its present and future well-being. It does not deserve to suffer for social problems it had no role in creating. Everyone is therefore born, if this argument is correct, with a basic set of legitimate claims on life-protecting and health-promoting resources, institutions, and relationships. Any circumstances which systematically restrict access to these goods are existentially unjust.

Another way of putting that point would be to say that some social circumstances are inhuman because they impede the ability of parents or surrogates to care for the new life that is constantly coming into the world. There might be justice in punishing a criminal if they are guilty of a crime, but there can be no justification at all, ever, for imposing harms on infants who did not and could not choose to come into being. There can be no defence for existential injustice on grounds of political expediency or guilt on the part of the victim when the victims are one second old infants. They cannot be causally responsible for their emergence into existentially unjust, inhuman circumstances. Therefore, I conclude, every birth is a protest against existential injustice and a demand to transform the world so as to ensure that every child is born into a nurturing, caring, loving world,

Parents must of course think about the world into which they are bringing new humans, but if the human project is to continue then new people must be born. No group should be prevented or prevent themselves from bringing new life into the world because current conditions are existentially unjust. Birth is also a protest against inhuman conditions and hope in the problem solving capacities of human beings. Unless we want to voluntarily declare an end to the human project, agree to stop reproducing, and let ourselves peacefully die out, the solution to the inhuman conditions into which some people are born is to solve the problems, not to scold parents for bringing new life into the world. While the critters might be happy if human beings disappeared, our disappearance would risk allowing the only fully self-conscious beings in the universe to disappear thus cause a loss that might be a sort of existential injustice in its own right

In a sense, we are nature’s highest ‘creation.’ If there are other fully self-conscious beings in the universe, we have not discovered each other. If we go, we risk contributing to a universe in which there is no entity capable of fully valuing and honouring it. Only human beings, so far as we know, can value the universe aesthetically and scientifically and build higher unities of beauty and understanding through the creative work we alone are capable of doing. While it makes no sense to argue that we owe a debt to the Big Bang and blind evolutionary forces, we can impose an obligation on ourselves to work to solve our problems and keep going, not only for the sake of our individual and collective enjoyment, but also because our extinction would remove capacities which are perhaps so improbable that they have never fully evolved before and might never again.

If that argument seems a rather long way around to a banal political conclusion– do not allow inhuman, existentially unjust social situations to fester– consider it a means of expanding the circle of our care and concern beyond the little patch of earth each individual occupies from moment to moment. It is true that just as no individual is born deserving to suffer, so too no individual is born owing already existing people anything. Human beings are not born guilty in any sense. Neither the brutally oppressed nor the privileged chose the life they are born into. Everyone comes into the world with the same legitimate claim on sufficient resources for the purposes of living meaningful, valuable and valued lives. Each is also a being with the potential to develop into a social-self-conscious intelligence that can encompass the whole expanse of time and space in mind: to both feel and know themselves part of a greater reality; not a heaven beyond, but the real, physical heavens above. One can realize that and say: “great, now pass my beer.” Or one can realize that they just as well could have been born in a rubbish heap, hunted and despised, and conclude: there is nothing special about me other than the undeserved luck to be born in a safe environment, with people who did enough to care for me and a society that educated me to the point where I can comprehend my living connections to everything else.

From that recognition it does not follow that the fortunate individual owes every other individual a personal debt. What does follow, I suggest, is a general obligation to try to understand why the world is as it is and contribute to the progressive solution of the causes of existential injustice. The undeserved benefits of birth here rather than there should not rob anyone of the capacity to enjoy life. First, wallowing in guilt but otherwise doing nothing does not solve the problems, but even more deeply, everyone has just this one life to live. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the life that you did not choose to begin. At the same time, we are all in the world together, with senses and minds that bring us into contact with the circumstances of others’ lives. We cannot, reasonably, turn totally away from reality, but we are also not individually responsible for how reality came to be the way it is or for changing it. I do not think that Simone Weil, who starved herself to death because she could not bear the thought eating while others went hungry is an example of saintliness. However much one can learn from her otherwise, self-mortification to the point of death is not existential justice but moralistic irrationality.

Yet if we are born blameless we are not born without implicit responsibilities. As we develop we incur debts to those whose labour sustained us and the the natural world which supports all life. We cannot eat and claim that others are not harmed by starvation. We cannot enjoy the protections of law and deny that others equally need its protection. When we see situations which manifestly deny other’s access to what they need as social-self-conscious intelligences, our own intelligence must rebel. As Gandhi once wrote to Rabindranath Tagore “When war comes the poet must put down his lyre.” In other words, we have responsibilities to our time. No one is obligated to sacrifice every moment of their lives for the sake of others, but no one is free to completely ignore the realities of the world either. Existential injustice sensitizes us to the implications of the circumstances of birth. We do not choose to be born or where we are born, so the initial circumstances of life are not deserved. But as we mature we become aware of our surroundings, first in our immediate environment, and then outward in expanding circles. We cannot not be aware of our world (whether narrowly or broadly construed), but we can choose and work to ignore information.

No one is guilty for being born, but we are responsible, and therefore are guilty, for the choices we make to ignore the reality of existential injustice. We are parts of a world, not monadic worlds unto ourselves. We can wall ourselves off and be happy– ignorance is bliss- but no one is ignorant naturally, one must make themselves so. As the great neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang Ming wrote, if we open ourselves to it, we can recognize the humanity (jen) that connects all people (and all people to all animals and inanimate things). This recognition requires no special intelligence. “Even the mind of the small (uneducated) man is no different,” he says, “he himself makes it small.” Making our minds small, cultivated ignorance about what other people must somehow live through does, is culpable. When the war is over the poet can return to their beautiful harmonies, Gandhi adds, but when others are fighting one must join the cause.

But the problems of the world are vast and the powers of individuals small. But individuals do not live in the ‘world,’ they live in concrete times and places. We are not responsible for each other in the moralistic abstract. We are responsible for recognizing our shared humanity and acting in accordance with capacity. Those of us who live in democracies act responsibly by electing politicians who refuse to fan the flames of war, life-destructive violence, and environmental degradation. Those of us who think for a living must work to find the connections between whatever it is that interests us and the existence of the wider world that enables us to be active philosophically or scientifically. Everyone who becomes aware of what actually goes on in the world can at the very least state clearly what goes on, whether or not they have a full grasp of the causes and even if they do not (and no one does) have an immediately workable solution. And what goes on in the world is that some infants are in reality and through no fault of their own born on rubbish heaps, starved, and bombed, and killed.