Like a river, philosophy flows through time transforming the landscape in its wake, but on a scale outside of the experience bounded by a human lifetime. To engage with philosophy honestly is therefore also to play with history, and when it comes to aesthetics the water flows from Aristotle, to Thomas Aquinas, to Kant, and then out into the estuary of so-called ‘modernism’, where tradition becomes that which is to be opposed and not that which is to be maintained. In parallel, this conflict provides the bedrock of all contemporary political dichotomies in part because aesthetics is the beating pulse of life, and politics is simply the murder of the beautiful in the pursuit of desire.

James Joyce’s literary house stands on the mouth of the estuary of modernism. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses are considered essential modernist novels, which is to say that they express through engagement with traditional forms the chaotic break with tradition that the twentieth century definitively represents. Too much has been said about these novels for there to be anything I can add worth saying, but in terms of the river of art, Joyce’s first published novel is perfectly positioned to reveal the water’s passage.

Stephen Dedalus is Joyce’s only protagonist. It is remarkable for a writer to have written only three novels and to have had only one protagonist, but it is not at all surprising since Dedalus is clearly a surrogate for Joyce himself and this means that Joyce is only writing about himself. In Portrait where he is, as the title says, ‘a young man’, we get a coming of age story that mirrors what the French existentialists will explore decades later because parallel cultural forces are at work for all the great thinkers of the early twentieth century. In choosing the name ‘Dedalus’ and not ‘Icarus’ for his literary mirror image, we get a sense of Joyce’s artistic vanity.

Dedalus makes for himself a moral system that is a bastardised version of the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, art allowed for contemplation woven in with emotion. Dedalus flattens this into a rigid binary: art is either arresting the mind and thus static and ‘proper’ or it is evoking desire and it is kinetic and ‘improper’. The narrative purpose of evoking Aquinas’ thirteenth century aesthetics is that Joyce’s protagonist makes it into a simplified binary to justify his rejection of all tradition, whether of religion, nation, or of family. This is the same impulse that animates the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus in the 1940s.

Yet there is an important difference here, since Joyce clearly mocks his younger self. Dedalus is convinced his contrast of proper and improper art is a universal aesthetic law in the manner of Immanuel Kant (who does not get a mention by name), yet the novelist shows the reader that Dedalus is attempting to justify his own behaviour via an appeal to grand principles. Presumably, this is an accurate reflection of Joyce’s own younger experiences in and around Dublin.

Published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man captures the rupture with tradition that had been building throughout the nineteenth century and that became the defining philosophical theme of the twentieth. From our vantage point one century further we can see rather too clearly that what was aesthetic rebellion for Joyce and the French existentialists has become mere lazy dogmatism for new traditions just as stifling as Catholicism felt to Joyce. The great river of art has long since flowed into the sea, yet we can still see a light glowing in the window of Joyce’s house on the estuary.

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Time to tack against the wind and sail into the ocean of the artistic! For September, the theme is The Estuary on the Great River of Art. What the heck does that mean…?

This month’s reflections emerged out of a brief conversation I had with Stranger Traveller Thomas Balazs about James Joyce. When I linked that up with Michael Moorcock, a series of pieces came together about art and aesthetics that capture the transformation of artistry in the twentieth century and, downstream of this, the corruption of politics in the twenty first.

The first part is about Joyce himself, and will be with you in an hour.

PS: 4th September 2026 would have been Ivan Illich’s one hundredth birthday. I had hoped to have an Illich serial ready for this, but alas it will have to wait.

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For Michel Foucault (mee-shell foo-koh), paradigms must pass through certain thresholds to become established, and it is this that dovetails with Kuhn’s (koon) theme of scientific revolution. The first threshold is crossed whenever someone speaks of a topic in a manner impossible under the old paradigm, as with Darwin at the dawn of biology. The second threshold marks when the paradigm establishes ways to systematically arrange or rearrange its claims – crossing this threshold makes what was previously just a way of speaking into a knowledge practice, the ‘knowledge’ here being the internal knowledge of these practices (which may later be deemed utterly wrong). There is an element of domination involved in this transition; a way of thinking about a given topic becomes bound by new regularities, and certain kinds of statements become excluded in the process.

Foucault’s third threshold is scientificity, and crossing it establishes a scientific practice. Such paradigms have even greater systematic structure, since its practitioners have formulated the rules by which statements in the given field are constructed. To move from a knowledge practice to a scientific practice requires laws that govern it. Such laws need not be “the language of nature” – they could be completely specious and arbitrary provided they serve the role of governing claims firmly. Natural History was a scientific practice, in Foucault’s terms, because its methods were clearly law‑governed. That our understanding of life changed our understanding of its claims after biology had formed a new practice does not mean Natural History was not also a scientific practice (a view that resonates with Kuhn’s approach).

Lastly, Foucault describes the threshold of formal practices, when a paradigm can state its own principles and axioms. Mathematics is the key example, and Foucault noted that for mathematics the four thresholds were crossed all at once: the moment there was a paradigm that could make statements about relationships between numbers, it also became a formal practice. There is no pattern to the ways paradigms may pass through these four thresholds – and nothing says that any given knowledge practice can cross the threshold into scientific or formal practice. The presumed march of the sciences towards ever greater truth‑giving gravely distorts their history.

In the case of Natural History and biology, Foucault stated that the former had crossed the threshold of the scientific. When biology crossed the threshold of positivity and became a new way of speaking about life, it simultaneously crossed the thresholds of knowledge and scientificity. Other fields have crossed each threshold at different times, sometimes with a century or more between stages, and Foucault cautioned against thinking of these thresholds as necessary developments, like the life cycle of a butterfly.

Crucially, whether or not a knowledge practice ‘brands’ itself as a science has no bearing on whether it will be able to cross into law‑governed scientific practice! I concur with Foucault’s scepticism that economics and psychology are capable of becoming scientific or formal practices in his terms. Psychology is not law‑bound in anything like the ways of Natural History or biology. Its methods are largely limited to the statistical. The situation is worse in spin‑off fields like parapsychology and evolutionary psychology, whose internal knowledge either struggles to describe its own findings or lacks plausible methods of verification.

In Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, just as with Kuhn’s history of science, the lesson is not that the sciences lack methods for uncovering the workings of the material world. It is that the sciences are not evolving towards perfection or ever greater truth. Some fields, like optics, will cross the threshold of formalization and become robust systems of knowledge. Others might never cross into law‑governed scientific practices at all.

The mythology of science as a single ever‑perfecting system distorts both the complexity of scientific methods and the achievements of scientists in making objects ‘talk’. Besides, from everything learned about biological evolution, it would be naïve to think of anything evolving towards something, since the accumulation of advantages is always the result of adaptation to prevailing conditions. So it is with the sciences. Each is unique, with its own strengths, limitations, regularities, and constraints shaped by prevailing conditions of knowledge. What will become of them is not something anyone can truly know.

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The basis of Michel Foucault’s (mee-shell foo-koh) archaeological method for examining the conditions of knowledge is that the paradigms of discourse are networks of interrelated statements displaying both regularity and constraints. Because networks of paradigms cannot simply be traced like lines on a map, it is necessary to perform a kind of detective work to expose their boundaries. For this, Foucault relied extensively upon examining contradictions – indeed, he took contradictions themselves as markers of interest, areas to investigate.

By taking contradictions as objects to be described, this archaeological analysis doesn’t try to discover a common form or theme. Rather, it attempts to determine the extent and form of the gap that separates disagreements. Foucault sharply distinguished his method from “the history of ideas,” which would paint the development of thought as a narrative of progress. In contrast to such a history’s attempts to melt contradictions into a unified figure or transmute them into an abstract principle of interpretation, Foucault’s archaeology describes different spaces of dissension.

Here lies the key to Foucault’s method: the contradiction is the marker of a boundary between one paradigm and the next and the engine of discussion and disagreement within each paradigm. Each discourse is a “space of multiple dissensions,” modelled by the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a single proposition. Distinguishing paradigms becomes a matter of establishing whether any given contradiction has occurred under the same “conditions of enunciation,” or whether a different network of statements governs the claims being made.

A frequent example Foucault invokes is the distinction between the seventeenth‑ and eighteenth‑century scientific discourse of Natural History and the science of biology that follows it in the nineteenth century. Identifying these two discourses as distinct does not imply that Natural History was the precursor of biology. Natural History approached the world in terms of statements about resemblances and differences, visible structures, and specific and generic characters. It was a discipline of taxonomy, classification, and ordering, based on an assumption of a created, ordered universe. It was not conceivable for Natural History to engage in the kind of discussion of life that takes place under biology, because the general concept of “life” was not generalized until biology. Casting Natural History as the precursor to biology is merely an act of retroactive continuity: the roots of biology lie in multiple discourses, and its methods and regularities are not at all like those of Natural History.

In Natural History, a key intrinsic contradiction was between systematic and methodical natural philosophers. Systematic natural philosophy understood nature as an ordered pattern, a table of positions within which all animals and plants could be placed. This approach, practiced by Linnaeus (lee-nay-us), used a rigorous perceptual and conceptual code to describe flora and fauna and was united with a view of fixism: all creatures came from an egg and each egg produced something like its parents. Conversely, methodical natural philosophy examined the details of each plant or animal, abstracting connections into a common genus.

The opposition between systematic and methodical natural philosophy was not terminal, for they did not produce contradictory claims about the same object. Rather, their disagreements were characteristic of Natural History, and many attempts were made to resolve them. This contrasts with the extrinsic contradiction between Linnaeus’ fixism and Darwin’s descent-with-modification, which marks two distinct paradigms. Statements made in biology after Darwin refer to different objects and make contradictory statements when applied to the objects of Natural History. Evolutionism prior to Darwin was based on ideas of successive creations or internal progressive qualities; Darwin expressly avoided the term ‘evolution’ for fear of misunderstandings.

Biology did not simply result from Darwin’s observations concerning descent-with-modification. It was not a case of Natural History becoming biology, but of multiple concepts converging into a new paradigm. Pasteur’s work, for example, led to microbiology, which was inconceivable to natural philosophers of preceding centuries yet central to biology. Something new came about with the discourse of biology, a certain threshold had been crossed, and an entirely new conversation had begun.

Next week, the final part: A Scientific Threshold

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For Michel Foucault (mee-shell foo-koh), the language goes beyond a simple mediator between thought and reality. Rather, the statements within a discourse are related to one another in ways governed by the prevailing conditions of speech – the restrictions on what can be said, which can be understood as parallel to Thomas Kuhn’s (koon) paradigms. Analysing discourses reveals the that the apparent rigid connections between words and things change over time, conditioned by unspoken rules unique to discursive practice. These implicit rules define not the existence of a reality nor the canonical use of vocabulary, but the ordering of objects. For Foucault, “words and things” is the serious title of a problem, one that treats discourses not as groups of fixed signs, but as practices systematically forming the objects of which they speak.

The method at the heart of Foucault’s archaeology entails tracking the relationships between statements within any given enunciative field e.g. a statement in biology today can be related to a vast reserve of other statements that are part of the practices of biologists. Within and among these statements are patterns of constraint that give meaning to biology as a discourse. This is what Foucault terms a historical a priori, that is, the required conditions for a statement to be meaningful. Since this parallels Kuhn’s paradigm, we can say that in any discourse the statements form a network of relationships governed by a paradigm that establishes what is or is not knowledge within that discourse.

At the core of his method, Foucault places the statement as the “elementary unit of discourse.” From this perspective, the importance of individual authors is reduced in favour of tracking relationships between statements, since statements in any given book relate to many different sets of statements. A “statement” is not just a sentence, a proposition, or a speech act. Statements are not sentences because many different sentences can express the same statement, even in different languages. They are not logical propositions because two sentences expressing the same proposition can have different meanings depending on how and where they are stated. And they are not reducible to speech acts, because a speech act consists of many statements. “Gold is a simple body” is an example of a statement from classical chemistry, while “the beaver belongs to the class of quadrupeds” in a statement in classical natural history.

Throughout his analysis of discourse, Foucault stresses two points: statements are related to one another in a network, and paradigms (Foucault’s “discursive formations”) are descriptions of practices. Because we usually think of discourse as communication between people, Foucault suggests that analysis of discursive practices became obscured. Yet paradigms persist as networks of statements, as well as the practices that relate those statements. These relations constitute “an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple relations,” forming a complex web. In The Archaeology of Knowledge we see a foreshadowing of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (jeel duh‑looz), who praised Foucault’s book as “the most decisive step yet taken in the theory‑practice of multiplicities.”

Foucault’s archaeological method entails examining the discourse of a subject area as both a network of statements and as a practice, guided by the recognition that these two things are part of the same conditions. He insisted that a statement belongs to a paradigm as a sentence belongs to a text or a proposition to a deductive whole. But whereas the regularity of a sentence is defined by the laws of language, and that of a proposition by the laws of logic, the regularity of statements is defined by the paradigm itself. The fact of belonging to a given paradigm and the laws that govern it are one and the same.

Each paradigm thus has its own forms of regularity and its own systems of constraint. It is this that determines which statements constitute knowledge and which must be excluded. Both internally and externally, every paradigm is revealed by those contradictions that either give form to the discourse through interior tensions or establish boundaries by contrasting it with something else. It is where these contradictions erupt that we can see most clearly the landscape formed by the paradigms of discourse.

Next week: Contradictions in Knowledge

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What gives a statement its meaning? The words act as signs with certain implications, and the grammar of the language establishes how those signs can be combined, while the logic of any proposition gives a formal means of relating statements. Yet each of these aspects of discourse is insufficient on its own to explain what happens between and among the statements that are made. What is it that makes some statements into knowledge?

The 1960s saw the publication of two books that took a critical view of the reigning mythos concerning scientific knowledge. The first was Thomas Kuhn’s (koon) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, which undermined the idea that the sciences should be understood as progressing towards truth. Kuhn examined the nature of change and constancy in scientific fields and concluded that the rhetoric of inevitable progress was part of the mythology of science. He presented changes in scientific fields as shifts in what he termed a paradigm, suggesting that the appearance of progress was a result of post‑hoc reinterpretations of older theories in terms of those that replaced them.

Scientific techniques do indeed become better adapted to their chosen problems, but just as with biological evolution there is no ‘evolving towards’, only an accumulation of advantages through ‘adapting to’. The danger for post‑Enlightenment myths of progress is that it becomes difficult to separate knowledge from the conditions of its establishment. The idea that scientific knowledge becomes steadily ‘more true’ fails to consider which of the infinite array of possible truths have been selected for investigation. The nature of scientific activity itself becomes obscured.

In 1966, Michel Foucault’s (mee-shell foo-koh) The Order of Things suggested that there had been a series of what he termed epistemes that set the general conditions for knowledge for any given period of time. Kuhn’s paradigms and Foucault’s epistemes are frequently compared, and with good reason. While their specifics differ, both express the idea that the way we understand knowledge is never universal but always historically situated, always conditional upon the prevailing conditions and practices of institutions. One important difference is that Kuhn’s paradigm represents the prevailing conditions of knowledge within a scientific practice, while Foucault’s episteme is a wider construct, the pattern of relations between all paradigms, including those outside the sciences.

In 1969, Foucault followed up The Order of Things with The Archaeology of Knowledge, his only methodological work. In it, he attempted to derive his own methods for historical analysis while expanding upon the concept of episteme. However, The Archaeology of Knowledge was not primarily concerned with epistemes; rather, Foucault focus was discursive formations – the patterns, relations, and networks of practices that connect any given discourse. These are governed by the conditions of knowledge at any given time, and are functionally analogous to Kuhn’s paradigms. For both Foucault and Kuhn, the mythological image of the sciences advancing towards truth obscures the way the sciences renovate their methods and thus their discourse.

I took a particular interest in Foucault’s discursive formations because his analysis took practices as primary. According to Foucault, every practice could be understood in terms of the statements it accepts as knowledge, a process framed by the current episteme but constituted by a complex network of relations peculiar to each field. While he primarily used examples from the sciences, he suggested his method could be extended to politics, ethics, and the arts – anywhere there are practices and conditions governing which statements constitute knowledge.

This serial explores how Foucault’s methods expose the constitution of knowledge in any given context, while representing his ideas in slightly simpler terminology. To begin, we must understand what Foucault’s term ‘discursive formation’ means, which requires dissecting discourse and uncovering the regularities that position some statements (and not others) as knowledge. But because ‘discursive formation’ is painfully obtuse, I shall borrow Kuhn’s term paradigm – not because what Foucault meant was identical to what Kuhn meant, but because Kuhn’s approach is widely understood and Foucault’s is not. By translating Foucault ‘into Kuhn’ (while acknowledging that “all translation is betrayal”, as the Italians say!) I hope to make Foucault’s insights into knowledge accessible to a wider readership.

Next week: Paradigms of Discourse

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After spending a month digging into reality, I thought I might re-run this serial from June 2015 on the topic of Foucault’s Archaeology, that is, his methodology for examining the relationships between statements of knowledge. Michel Foucault (mee-shell foo-koh) was notoriously obtuse in his choice of language, but very insightful once you get over this barrier. This serial was part of a pair (the other applied Foucault to games) and focussed primarily on making his work easier to access. My chief method entailed comparing Foucault (who is hard to grasp) to Thomas Kuhn (who is widely understood).

In revising these pieces for Stranger Worlds I have added epigrams and tightened the prose when it overran my 750 word constraint, as well as making some substitutions in Foucault’s terminology to improve the legibility. Hope you enjoy our latest journey into scientific knowledge!

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Chris.

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If the real is ‘out there’, then we are trapped within our subjective opinions. Such is the consequence of the attempt by a curmudgeonly alliance of philosophers in Bertrand Russell’s generation to eliminate metaphysics (out of hostility to religion, which is unavoidably metaphysical). This has had the unfortunate consequence of obscuring the metaphysical roots of the sciences. We are left with the fossilised remains of Immanuel Kant’s distinction between phenomena and the ‘thing-in-itself’ expressed as the subjective prison of ‘opinion’ coupled with a venerated magical objectivity.

Yet there is another path opened by Kant. At the same time that Ernst Cassirer was trying to rescue Kant’s original insights, another German philosopher was founding a new philosophical movement called phenomenology. Edmund Husserl (hoos-erl), pictured above left, initiated an approach with an evident debt to Kant that should be immediately clear: while Russell and his crew were lusting after the thing-in-itself as ‘objective truth’, Husserl focussed instead upon Kant’s phenomena. Both had the same aim – eliminate metaphysical speculation – but Husserl’s phenomenology aimed at being a science of consciousness, one that studied the topic from the inside, as it were.

Husserl inspired an entire generation of brilliant philosophers, including all the French existentialists – Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Satre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (mer-loh pon-tee). Each rejected Husserl’s dream of an internal science of consciousness in favour of a foundational idea of being-in-the-world. Whereas de Beauvoir and Satre’s philosophy emphasised the freedom to create ourselves, Merleau-Ponty mounted a bold attack on an even older philosophy that that of Kant: Descartes’ splitting of existence into a dualism of mind and body. For Merleau-Ponty, Kant was correct that our subjectivity is the very framework by which we experience existence, but this means objectivity is something we constitute together.

For Merleau-Ponty, pictured above right, we are first and foremost embodied. Down Russell’s road, Descartes dualism of mind and body became mind versus matter, and then an attempt to pretend there was no mind, only matter. Down Merleau-Ponty’s road, mind cannot be removed from body because we were always within the real, directly experiencing it, albeit with our own deceptions and mistakes. Whatever claims the sciences assemble require an intersubjectivity, the engagement of multiple perspectives that triangulate the truth through verification (and a parallel argument can be made for the arts too).

At the heart of our experiences is a kind of vortex of the real that we all live within at all times. As the opening quote illustrates, our sensory functions connect us to other beings irresistibly. When another human is around us, we cannot ignore them. Rather, we are drawn into the whirlpool that forms around our perception of their bodies, one that pulls us inexorably together, such that “my world is no longer merely mind, it is no longer present only to me”. This is the fundamental truth of shared reality that is utterly obscured by the metaphysics of one objective reality and infinite subjective realities. Other people’s bodies live within “the same structure as my own.”

Children find human objects “like meteorites from another planet”, and do not question that everyone engages with these items in the same ways. It takes the bad habits of an adult to forget this. The sciences have been singularly uninterested in spoons and doors and chairs, but the essence of shared reality is that these things-at-hand are what make up the worlds we live in and necessarily share. Languages are also tools, requiring our embodiment to use (yes, even when mediated by computers, even if wired up by neuralink!). The intersubjective world is a problem for adults, and yet completely natural for children!

Like monks withdrawing from contact with other people, those drawn to the scientific become like metaphysical ascetics, pretending they live alone, worshipping a great machine whose gears and pistons deliver up the real. But it is we who live in the real, and we live there together. Once we can look upon their work honesty, the successes of the sciences are the great achievement of our shared reality, something that literally could never have happened had we truly been imprisoned alone within our subjective opinions.

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Are numbers real? Our gut reaction is to say that they must be, because whether or not there are a dozen words in a sentence is not a question of an individual’s sense impressions (hallucinations notwithstanding), but rather what we are conditioned to call an objective fact. Bertrand Russell (pictured left), a brilliant philosopher of mathematics and co-author with Alfred North Whitehead of the ground-breaking Principia Mathematica, remained resolute throughout his life that numbers must be real entities. Was he correct?

Russell was a step along the path of the degradation from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of phenomena and ‘the thing-in-itself’, to the lazy distinction between objective truth and subjective opinion we are lumbered with today. The immense resistance to the idea that reality is a shared project rather than something ‘out there’ entirely independent of the human is rooted in the understandable desire to place reality beyond the human experience. Russell felt this strongly, hence the quote about ‘postulating’ being tantamount to theft. The real, he believed, could not merely be robustly formulated, it had to be ‘out there’ and logical analysis had to be capable of providing methods for verifying its content. Objectivity, according to Russell, was a matter of logic.

The last major defender of Kant’s approach of accepting limits to the real was Ernst Cassirer (pictured right). Whereas Kant claimed the world of phenomena was constituted through conceptual functions inherent to our mental faculties, Cassirer emphasised the role of symbolic and cultural constructions. We experience the real via our methods of understanding what is real, which we share with others through common symbols. Cassirer understood that what Kant had highlighted were the very conditions for knowing, and not a metaphysical split between an objective world ‘out there’ and subjective worlds of individuals.

To understand Cassirer’s approach, we need only look at the example of numbers. Russell was convinced that numbers had to be real, logical objects, definable within a system of logic, claiming that the number ‘two’ (for instance) is the class of all two-membered sets. Cassirer held that there was no need to postulate a metaphysical existence for numbers, since they could be understood as mere functional concepts, symbolic forms whose robustness depended upon their role within a defined system of relationships. For Russell, numbers were real entities that could be ‘discovered’ through logical analysis. For Cassirer, numbers were not like objects at all but simply functional constructs.

These two ways of understanding numbers are evidently incompatible. Russell’s approach made sets primary and real, with numbers derived from sets. Cassirer made ordinal structure (the sequence of counting) primary, with numbers being mere positions in a serial order generated by symbolic rules. Contemporary mathematics has completely vindicated Cassirer’s approach, and the dominant structuralist approach placing numbers into a sequential structure, rejecting Russell’s idea that a number is an object with an intrinsic nature. It is now taken for granted that using set theory to define numbers is essentially arbitrary, since it is the pattern of relations that matters. Numbers, in other words, are not real.

Yet despite Cassirer’s victory over Russell, we remain lumbered with the crude objective-subjective divide, with Russell’s philosophy having further eroded Kant’s insight into the limits of reality. Why? The desire to place reality outside of the human mind while allowing for a privileged back door (logic for Russell, the authority of scientists today) was rooted in hostility to religion. Russell was wildly opposed to Christianity, and expressly desired an end to all kinds of religious belief. Without any trace of irony, he stood on street corners handing out atheist leaflets like a boorish street preacher. Conversely, Cassirer’s philosophy allowed that religious symbols might capture something real... this for Russell (and any others who cannot bear religious viewpoints) would be an intolerable admission.

The fact that we feel so strongly that numbers are real ought to give us pause. It invites us to reconsider the way we think about reality, to acknowledge that our capacity to share mathematical ideas with others constitutes one of the most remarkable (and reliable!) aspects of our shared reality. Cassirer understood this in a way that Russell, for all his genius, never could.

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The idea that reality is shared is something that has become alien. It is now taken as a given that the experiences of any one individual are subjective, and consist of sense impressions and mere opinions about them, whereas the true state of a situation is objective, and transcends individual experience. This contrast between subjective and objective is a learned framework, one that cannot plausibly be considered ‘objective’ and yet one which we stubbornly refuse to recognise as ‘subjective’ in its own terms.

Here, in this confrontation with the tangible effects of philosophy upon experienced reality, lies everything required to recognise that reality is a shared endeavour... yet this will almost never go through in one step. The habit is too engrained, the hardening of thought patterns too inflexible. As Ludwig Wittgenstein (vit-gen-shtine). liked to say “a picture held us captive”, and there is no more captivating picture than the contrast between subjective and objective, the assumed grounding principle of scientific investigation. Yet ‘subjective’ is a term we use to describe those others while what is ‘objective’ is something we ourselves have magically acquired for ourselves. We are scientists, you are pseudoscientists, always and forever, for nobody could ever chose the label ‘pseudoscientific’ for themselves!

The trouble with cutting the onion in half to examine it like this is that if all you’ve ever seen is the brown outer skin, the interior looks nothing like an onion! Instead, we might have to patiently peel away one layer at a time, from the wrinkled skin of subjective-objective, to Bertrand Russell’s logical analysis versus sense-data, through the philosophical machinations of Victorian scientists, the pivotal contribution of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, and all the way back to Plato’s cave where we started.

The path between Plato and where we are now, trapped in a picture of ‘the subjective’, passes inevitably though Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, a monumental rethinking of ancient philosophy that was required reading until at least Einstein’s time. After World War II, however, neither Kant nor philosophy were considered ‘necessary’, and if I cannot prove that this in itself might explain the degradation of the sciences since, it is still noteworthy that the breakthroughs in physics happened amidst a generation trained on Kant, and little has progressed since.

It’s not necessarily to fully comprehend Kant’s transcendental philosophy to appreciate how it served as a waystation for where we ended up. The core idea behind his project was to investigate the a priori conditions for knowledge, that is, to work out the qualities of our mental capabilities that constrain our capacity to know. Kant proposed that what we experience must necessarily be shaped by the cognitive structures of our own minds. As such, he drew a Plato-like distinction between appearances (phenomena) and the thing-in-itself (noumena) that remain forever unknown for us.

In the intervening centuries, this distinction between appearances and the thing-in-itself became a “dualism of worlds”, as Ernst Cassirer put the matter, the subjective world of appearances, and the objective world of true objects. But Cassirer understood that this was not Kant’s conception at all: the purpose of drawing the distinction was to make it clear that we do not have access to the thing-in-itself and that it therefore represents a limit case upon what we can know. If you squint, you can see how this decayed into the subjective-objective distinction, largely by throwing out Kant’s key point: if knowledge of the thing-in-itself is what we call ‘objective knowledge’ then we never possess objective knowledge, only subjective knowledge that aims to approximate the objective.

Calling the entirety of the things-in-themselves ‘reality’ would be admitting there is no reality for us. Rather, we live in shared realities, and the thing-in-itself is what the sciences strive to model within our human limitations. Sadly, in the centuries after Kant, philosophy of science squirmed itself free from Kant’s limits to reality by creating excuses to ignore it. Now, we live within a shared reality where billions of people’s experiences are shaped by a faith in objectivity that has finally devolved into simply denying Kant’s insights. The difficulty in accepting this situation is that the picture still holds us captive. It will continue to do so as long as we treat the realm of the scientific as magical rather than methodical.

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We all know what reality is, or at least, we are all adamant that we understand what is meant by reality. Reality is the domain of the real, the stuff that behaves predictably, the world ‘out there’ that we experience only indirectly through our senses. How curious it is, then, that this image of a real world ‘out there’ descends directly from Plato’s allegory of the cave, where the people in the cave treat the flickering shadows on the walls as what is real, and only the philosopher who escapes the cave knows the real existence of a world above, illuminated by the sun.

If our sense of what is real depends upon a metaphor that is two and a half millennia old, and if what people have believed was real has changed radically over that interval, why are we so wildly confident that we understand what reality is? We might equivalently ask: what did people consider reality to be prior to Plato’s allegory of the cave? You do not have to spend a great deal of time thinking about this topic to be forced into confronting the unreality of reality, the sense in which our certainty that we know ‘what reality is’ lacks both honesty and depth.

Faith in the real is universal. What constitutes the real is anything but. In 1826, a mere two centuries ago, aspects of reality included light traversing a luminiferous ether, flammable objects containing phlogiston, continents as immobile features of our planet, and a universe that was eternal and unchanging. Not one of these things constitutes reality today. Yet despite these evident and recurring revisions of the real, the vast majority of people today still stubbornly insist in presuming that ‘scientific truth’ (itself an ill-defined concept) provides the indisputable benchmark of reality.

The boondoggle that allows us to defend these preposterously untenable beliefs about the real runs something like this. My sense impressions and experiences are subjective encounters with the objective and real world ‘out there’. My subjective life is not real, but it is conditioned by the objectively real. It doesn’t matter that scientific beliefs change over time, because at any given time that specific collection of beliefs provides the best available models for understanding the objective world.

Now pause and consider this chain of reasoning carefully, for it conceals numerous dependencies and assumptions. It assumes for a start that ‘scientific beliefs’ are not tainted by the ‘mere subjective’ that supposedly makes our personal experiences unreliable. It presumes that subjectively modelling the objective world escapes the supposed limitations of subjectivity, even though nothing in this account provides a reason why this should be so. It papers over the ever-changing models that constitute scientific claims (and before that, natural philosophical claims) with the appealing wallpaper of ‘the best available’, thus entirely ignoring that ‘the best available models’ are necessarily elements of our subjectivity, which is precisely why they are liable to change over time.

In 2026 BC, the shared reality for Egyptians was that the Pharoah maintained the cosmic order and the Sun God Ra traversed the sky each day in his chariot renewing creation. In 2026 AD, the shared reality for nearly all of us is that scientists objectively discover the cosmic order. These situations are functionally analogous – each is a metaphysical model purporting to secure an image of what reality is and how it functions. You are free to assert that our contemporary metaphysics are superior... but as beliefs about what can be claimed as ‘real’ drift ever further from replicable empirical practice, there is plenty of evidence that our contemporary metaphysical model of reality is now causing more harm than good.

Reality is little more than the name we give to our unshakeable beliefs. It is not so much the name of a world ‘out there’, we just believe in the world ‘out there’ because we have millennia of habituation into doing so. Any unvarnished examination of what we mean when we say ‘reality’ must confront the inescapable fact that every attempt to stabilise the real by appealing to a higher authority, whether the sciences or the Pharoah, situates the real as little more than our shared habits of thought. Once we acknowledge that the sciences are a collective human framework for establishing what is real, it becomes impossible to deny that reality is always shared.

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Once again, my wonderful conversations with Frank have given me a theme to pursue, and this time it’s The Rough Guide to Shared Reality. These were tougher to write than I expected (I only just finished the last one a few minutes ago, whereas I usually have the next month drafted well in advance). They may also be a difficult journey to undertake too, I’m not sure, but they will certainly be intriguing and worth pondering. Join me as we sketch a line from Plato to Immanuel Kant, and from there down two radically different paths from a fork in the road – one that leads via Bertrand Russell to the objective-subjective divide that I largely repudiate, and one that leads into the vortex of shared reality. I hope you enjoy the ride!

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With unlimited love,

Chris.

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There is a particular way of viewing international politics that takes hold of people like a fever, and once you are in its grip it is difficult to recover. It entails looking at what happens on the stage of our planet and seeing the banks and financial institutions as one node in a network of power, the military-industrial complex of the United States and its allies-slash-vassals as another such node, and the most powerful industries as a third such node. Once you begin to see political shenanigans from such an angle, it becomes difficult to believe in democracy or any other means by which individuals might influence the Great Game.

Compelling though this perspective might be, it falls prey to one of the two most common failures of critical thinking, namely conspiratorial thinking: the predilection for interpreting all events as the machinations of shadowy individuals. Whether this is the Illuminati or a grotesque projection onto Judaism makes little practical difference: once you see everything as pawns in the hand of a hidden power, you have lost your ability to understand what’s actually going on. The parallel failure of critical thinking is presuming wealthy people aren’t perpetually trying to stack the deck in their own favour by pre-emptively dismissing every interpretation that draws attention to this as mere conspiracy.

The truth, as ever, lies between the extremes. I have written before about ‘dragon sickness’, the corrupting effect of the accumulation of money expressed through the metaphor of J.R.R Tolkien. This concern is scarcely a new one, as the quote from Sir Francis Bacon, above, attests: money (like excrement) is no good unless it is spread around. It is absolutely true that the dragon hoards possess disproportionate political power, since money can bribe corrupt politicians and influence the media who would otherwise bring down those beset with dragon sickness. But despite this vast power, international events are never entirely in the hands of the dragon-hoarders. Conspiracy theorists radically overestimate the extent that the wealthy can control the chain of events, while those who dismiss conspiracies radically underestimate this.

However, the surest sign that Big Money does not control everything are the efforts expended to massage popular thought. If the command of events attained by the nodes of wealth were as perfect as conspiratorial thinking imagines, there would be no need for the preponderance of propaganda and pretense. On the contrary, precisely because these monetary nodes are neither unitary nor united, nobody has anywhere near the degree of control that is fantasised about. This indeed is why so much fear is spread about so-called populist movements. If democratic institutions could not affect events, it simply couldn’t matter if nations were overtaken by outsider political parties.

The fear engendered against populism is a sign that nobody controls everything, and in part for the reasons that Hannah Arendt elucidated: you may decide to take action, but you cannot control the consequences of that commitment. Events unfold beyond anybody’s power to control. Influence, yes, but like bad pinball players all you can do is flail about and hope to keep the ball in play. Literally anybody can be knocked out of the game at almost any time, for reasons impossible to predict – and remember that it is solely the influential that it’s worth anyone collecting kompromat for…

All dragon hoards provide political power to those that squat upon them, but every dragon, like Smaug, has a chink in their armour that political knights can exploit to bring them down. It is precisely popular movements that terrify those who flatter themselves that they’re in control, because the many have an inherent power against the few that can never be erased. We are all players in the Great Game, and what the future brings can be neither foretold nor controlled. Be suspicious of Big Money by all means, it is wise to be so... but never doubt that ruination is always mere inches away from us all – even the dragons.

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The incredible thing about reading essays by George Orwell is that problems you have come to think of as characterising our own time appear in his writing nearly a century earlier. So it is with his 1945 piece “Notes on Nationalism”, which admittedly has one fatal flaw: his choice of the term ‘nationalism’. Orwell admitted that what he is describing “can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other”, yet regardless picked ‘nationalism’, which now only causes confusion because of widespread condemnation of something else called ‘nationalism’. Since ‘nationalism’ was chosen merely as “the nearest existing equivalent” term, I shall substitute here with ‘tribalism’.

Thus, in the quote above, to fall prey of cherry picking preferred political or military interpretations, we need merely be committed to any one tribe, be it the blue team or the red team in the United States, Jews, Christians, Muslims, or ‘the oppressed’. Orwell defined this tribalism firstly as “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.” Secondly, as the habit of identifying with a single unitary grouping and therefore “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Those who fall prey to this tendency are obsessed with securing power and prestige for “the nation or other unit” into which they have “chosen to sink” their individuality.

For Orwell, this tribalistic habit is “power hunger tempered by self-deception”, and everyone who falls under its spell “is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty”, not to mention being “unshakeably certain of being in the right.” A better description of contemporary news reporting is hard to find! Indeed, he identified three principal characteristics of tribalism: obsession with the object of their loyalty, indifference to reality, and instability – since despite the intensity of those loyalties, they are surprisingly transferable.

This transferable tribalism can be expressed both positively and negatively. We can take as a sterling example the intense hatred directed at Donald Trump – not only wishing him dead but also a ghoulish celebratory attitude towards his murder. Immediately prior to 2016, those who fell prey to this loathing for Trump were passionately committed to what was called at the time ‘social justice’. Wishing someone dead forms no part of any conceivable version of social justice, yet this is precisely the transferable quality Orwell drew attention towards. Many other examples from any sector of the political spectrum are possible, but this one stands out since it involves such an evident switch from positive loyalty to negative hostility.

Orwell was clear that these tribalistic loves and hates are “part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not.” Tribalism, in other words, is an inevitable part of the human condition. He was uncertain if we could get rid of this, but suggested that we could at least struggle against it, which entails “a moral effort”. Once you recognise the demons that possess you, you have a chance to “prevent them from contaminating your mental processes”. Our inescapable emotional desire for commitment for or against a certain tribe ought, Orwell suggested, to exist in parallel with sober “acceptance of reality”.

In his time, Orwell lamented how few people were prepared to make the effort to break the reality-skewing habits of tribalism. Eighty years later, the situation is unchanged. We could easily feel depressed about this sad state of affairs, but there is another approach. Why should we expect this to have improved...? The human condition, after all, is essentially eternal. If tribalism is inevitable, the duty that falls upon your shoulders remains unchanged. You must strive to recognise this impulse in yourself, and to transcend its blinkering effects upon your perceptions. This moral challenge from 1945 has not lost its relevance today.

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Over at Writing Home, the magnificent Dougald Hine (who recently joined the Stranger Travellers here) has this piece, “A Convivial Conspiracy”, inviting a celebration of what would have been Ivan Illich’s one hundredth birthday:

This September – on Friday 4th, to be precise – Illich would have turned 100. As I wrote a few weeks ago, my friend Ayşem Mert suggested that we ought to hold a gathering here in Östervåla that weekend, and we’re going to do so. But out of that conversation, a rumour started, a convivial conspiracy, the whisper of a scattering of gatherings around kitchen tables and picnic blankets and in bookshops and theatre spaces and homesteads, where people get together to remember Illich’s work or to learn more about it.

If you are one of the many like me who have been powerfully influenced by Illich’s writings (or would like to be!), I urge you to get involved in these events.

It is really burning me up that I do not believe I will be able to participate, although in truth this is merely a continuation of my personal reckoning with the circumstances that have left me ‘nomad without a clan’.

With unlimited love,

Chris.

PS: I have not managed a Bazaar in June owing to a lack of time, but I have more than enough material for one if ever the tides of chaos should recede.

The central idea of the Enlightenment was that each human being was capable of governing themselves, both as an individual in their conduct, and collectively in their engagement with democratic republics. This is the crux of Immanuel Kant’s moral and political philosophy, and the origin of the term ‘autonomy’ (which he coined). These themes also played out independently in the foundation of the United States of America, since Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were well-versed in the work of John Locke, who also influenced Kant’s political perspectives. There is an immensely powerful idea here – not only of our capacity to run our own lives free of interference, as enshrined in the founding documents of the US, but in the ancient ideal of democracy as government by the citizens.

But what if the people cannot govern themselves...?

Every sane person wrestles with doubts. It is indeed characteristic of our time that an absence of doubt is so prevalent that our cultures are being driven gradually insane by dogmatisms that makes the medieval Church seem positively quaint in comparison. These dogmatisms converge by different routes upon the idea that the people cannot govern themselves, most often because of their presumed ignorance. Intelligent, well-educated people are in a better position to govern (the argument goes) and everyone else should submit to their judgement. Hence the despicable phrase ‘low-information voter’, a term that in my experience is wielded by political zealots who are themselves wildly ill-informed, victims (as are we all) of the problem that humanity would rather have certainty than seek the truth.

But this is not the only way to doubt that the people cannot govern themselves. I am tormented with another doubt of this kind: the idea that our abject politicians remain in control of the levers by which power is attained because the people lack the will to govern themselves. In short, people are content with a system in which democracy is falsely equated with a choice between candidates because it relieves them of any deeper responsibility. Being citizens, being informed, having the discussions which are the lifeblood of democratic rule – this is undeniably hard work! My fear is that the people lack any willingness to take on this burden.

Yet if I pause long enough to examine this doubt, I begin to see it differently. When I think about Kennedy’s remarks that the ignorance of one voter impairs the security of all, or Jefferson’s (and Kant’s) faith that the people can be enlightened, I begin to suspect the problem is not so much a lack of will for self-government (for on the issues that matter to them, the people have never remained silent). Rather, the problem is precisely this ignorance, this lack of enlightenment, and this is tied to the idea that our terrible political class is maintained through control of the mechanism by which their electoral success is secured. That suggests what we face is not a failure of the people at all, but a failure of the media.

The near-universal ignorance on almost every political topic I can think of exists because it has been cultivated. If a journalist’s job is to uncover the truth and to share it, in all its messy details, then we ceased to have journalists in the last decade (perhaps long before this point). What we have instead is an expensive and pernicious ignorance machine, a parade of purveyors of partisan propaganda who have made the mantra ‘certainty over truth!’ their operating principle. The moment the presumption of a ‘post-truth world’ was meekly accepted (for originally this phrase was a warning), we were condemned to ignorance.

Ignorance is indeed the danger to democracy that Kennedy feared. Yet when those who are supposed to inform the people of the tangle of ambiguity that surrounds current events deploy the news media merely to prop up their own certainties, widespread ignorance is inevitable. If the media refuses to engage in the necessary disagreements that democracy depends upon, the people cannot be blamed for a lack of participation for there is nothing to participate in when journalists cease to seek the truth. The media has become the enemy of democracy. The fact that their credibility now lies in tatters is the surest proof that the people might actually be more than capable of governing themselves, if only they were given the chance.

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Prior to having coherent models of how our brains worked we believed that the images/sounds in our minds were real. A few hundred years ago a few of us began to realize that this could not be so. Since then, we’ve steadily accumulated evidence that our perceptions of what’s out there are created by our brains, just as are the perceptions of other earth-bound life forms with brains. The brains of each of these kinds of life-forms are, except for some details, similar.

Nature has seen to it that the perceptions of each kind of higher-order animal life-form are essentially identical for that life-form, and are sufficient for enabling that life-form to successfully interact with what’s-out-there to survive and thrive. In this regard the subjective realities of each kind of such life form probably are nearly identical, but probably not unique.

I am writing a series of pieces for July on the subject of ‘shared reality’ in direct response to my discussion with Frank that will provide an extension of our discussion. In the meantime, if you have an interest in ontology (thinking about the real), check out Frank’s “Reality Destroyed by ‘Explosive Solipsism’?”

In the 1950s, Hannah Arendt wrestled with the unravelling of the space of politics, where disparate people could come together to discuss what might be done. In a clash between the past and the future, she saw the political right as concerned with an attempt to maintain the connection between religion, authority, and tradition, while the political left rejected some combination of all three in the name of a possible future liberation. Then, the impasse of politics was merely a failure of discourse. Three quarters of a century later, this crisis has expanded beyond the battlegrounds of the political parties and erupts into deadly violence. Previously, we couldn’t manage a productive political discourse... now we must seriously wonder if we can even live together.

Over the decades since, Enlightenment conceptions of freedom became a tradition, and this seems to have disrupted the political order far more than we’ve realised. Half the reason the old categories of ‘left and right’ seem to be breaking down is that traditional liberal freedom is now opposed by young anti-traditionalists, who object to free speech as ‘unkind’ (which indeed it is!) and denounce equality as merely maintaining the status quo. The other half is that the parties representing the political left have become obsessed with authority. Rather than pursuing ideals of freedom (their banner since the French Revolution, when the division into left and right was established), all left-of-centre parties have adopted a specific bundle of ideals – internationalism, existentialism, technocracy – and zealously demonise anyone rejecting any aspect of that package.

Converging forces moulded the contemporary illiberal left. Technologically, it flowed from search-driven internet access and algorithmically-curated ‘social’ media. Whoever controls search controls thought, and this has created a powerful new source of authority to seize. Meanwhile, the rupturing of the Rainbow Alliance provided the cultural engine for conflict, forcing previous generations of lesbian feminists to ally with religious conservatives in defending freedoms that might represent the very last achievement of the Enlightenment’s liberation movements. Older left-leaning folk simply cannot understand the prominence now given to trans issues, but make no mistake: gender metaphysics now mark a schism in the left deeper than Protestant vs Catholic or Sunni vs Shiite, fostering demands to suppress free speech ‘in the name of kindness’.

We now face two cultural and political factions that, thanks to the ubiquity of internet manipulation, characterise all polities not governed by old school tyranny. Defenders of tradition and religion attempt to preserve the nation state, and this faction now bizarrely intersects anyone still defending Enlightenment liberal ideals (like me). Against them stands a monoculture of internationalist existentialists who associate nationhood with racism and free speech with cruelty, whilst seemingly being incapable of recognising how cruel and racist they can be since they’re unable to talk to anyone who disagrees with them.

Every nation not already under the yoke of oppression now faces rising authoritarianism on all sides. The Progressive Empire of Kindness declares in the name of tolerance that it will tolerate no disagreement, forcing nationalists to recruit overbearing ‘strong leaders’ as an act of political desperation. Since these two factions cannot plausibly be reconciled, we’re forced to ask: what if we cannot live together? What if the common fabric of society that bound us together is doomed to unravel? Well, good news! This already happened, and yet here we remain – uncivil but far from the brink of civil war. What binds us together, our common humanity, is evidently far stronger than mere political fever dreams.

If four millennia of religious factionalism revealed anything, it’s that claiming ‘we cannot live together’ is merely a cloak for our deep desire that others adopt our own beliefs. Supporters of the new left’s orthodoxy believe they’ve created something new, and in a sense they are right since we’ve never had an internationalist-existentialist technocracy before. But even the emergence of digital thought control cannot change the conditions on the ground. People will go to war to defend a nation, but no-one fights for nebulous authority. That’s precisely why this is merely a culture war. Alas, there will be further assassinations as long as this factional conflict escalates, but it is easy to kill a stranger and we are not strangers. We live together. It’s about time we stopped questioning that.

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Trust in institutions stands at an all time low, and the response to this comes in depressing forms. There is the so-called ‘black pill’, to simply give up on everything and salve this loss with bitter cynicism. There is the ‘retreat to the past’, in which dreams of a golden age when the nation was ‘Great’ empower demagogues to smash entrenched systems. There is ‘saving democracy by destroying democracy’, in which fever dreams about an indistinct bogeyman named ‘fascism’ empower a rising totalitarianism via a panic that obscures (through ignorance or fear) the authentic political risks of violence and censorship.

All three share in common an abandonment of democratic ideals. The black pill because in exposing political parties that claim to be rivals as a ‘uniparty’ they undermine the motive to vote. The retreat to the past because the smashing of systems cannot plausibly be a path to restoring trust in those systems. The self-proclaimed saviours of democracy because they manage to combine propping up the status quo with worsening the very anti-democratic tendencies they claim to oppose.

Despite the armada of propaganda martialled against the retreat to the past, the saviours of democracy represent the chief engine of contemporary democratic unravelling (since yearning for lost Greatness emerged as its populist counterpoint, and remains inescapably bound to it in opposition). This is difficult to recognise if your view of current events comes from those aligned with the partisan factions of the pseudo-saviours (including, but in no way restricted to, the near-entirety of legacy media). We can glimpse the utter disaster represented by this camp, however, in the willingness to excuse, endorse, or celebrate violence and murder in the cause of ‘saving democracy’. It is true that people have resorted to violence to institute democracy, the American Revolution being the most famous example. But nobody has ever saved anything this way: revolution destroys the old order to create a new regime. Apologists for violence within a democracy necessarily have a sham idea of democracy, which exists as a political form precisely to curtail the resort to violence.

Yet the existence of political partisans who hoist the wolf’s banner of tyranny while clad in democratic clothing does not prove that democracy itself is a sham. The very fact that such factions can operate at all is a stark reminder we have not yet lost democracy. If we had, this unrest could not occur, since the forms of government that lie mere inches from the democratic are all authoritarian nightmares, whether of the tyrant run amok or the encirclement of thought by the totalitarian system. The very fact that we can publicly accuse a politician of tyranny is the necessary evidence we remain within democracy.

What makes contemporary democracy feel like a sham (thus making the black pill tempting) is our failure to heed Frank Herbert’s warning. The Dune novels are reflections upon political power played out on an intergalactic stage, but their cautions are timeless. They speak just as much of the failures of the Roman Republic as of the dangers facing contemporary democracies. Power, as Herbert’s characters shrewdly reflect, attracts the most corruptible. This includes the cravenly crooked, but also those who cloak their skulduggery in a cloak of false virtue, believing that their own crusade grants them license to transgress. The common factor in all cases is a refusal to uphold principle, either because of base self-interest or because partisan delirium justifies any excess.

The locus of the political sham we face is not the ideal of democracy, which still survives despite myriad attempts to poison it with censorship or unravel it with lawfare. The true fraud lies with those factions that cannot defend principles. Parties, not people, pose the great anti-democratic threat. For when a political party justifies silencing its opposition, gerrymanders voting districts, and turns a blind eye to corruption as long as it’s ‘on our side’, it ceases to be a democratic organisation and becomes a crime syndicate. The black pill’s uniparty is merely the recognition that in protecting their fellow corruptible politicians from justice, publicly rival parties are allied in self-preservation. If we wish to save democracy, we might try abandoning all parties incapable of upholding democratic principles.

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June’s theme is political philosophy, all organised around ‘What If…’ questions. But these aren’t fanciful imaginary scenarios I’m pondering, but rather an eclectic gaggle of hopes and fears expressed as questions like “What if Democracy is a Sham?” or “What if We Cannot Live Together?” In each case, I hope to take a depressing ‘what if’ question and turn it into a diagnosis for the root cause of this particular despair. With luck, each piece should leave you with some hope that the situation might not be as dreadful as it seems. In the miserable world of the political, this is always a dream worth pondering!

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It takes around 250 hours each year to run this philosophy project, so please support Stranger Worlds with a paid subscription if you can. Paid subscribers can also join the discussions in the comment here, and new voices are always welcome.

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Or if you have the will and the time for the conversation but lack the money, I am always open to ‘creative barter’ in exchange for a paid subscription, and will accept almost anything in this regard.

With unlimited love,

Chris.

Comments to this post are open, so please let me know if you wish to join the Stranger Travellers through creative barter (instead of a paid subscription) or if have any questions.

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