Dear Members of the Board,

I am sure that by now you are aware of a large contingent of people across the philosophy discipline urging you to reconsider your decision to close your philosophy department. The thought occurred to me that you might not be aware of the magnitude of the reaction. I’d like to try to contextualise this. The response from the worldwide philosophy community is roughly every major figure in Continental Philosophy — which is what your philosophy department excels in — along with a a high number of major figures from other branches of contemporary philosophy such as Analytic Philosophy. These responses should be seen as a strong indication that the closure of Middlesex’s philosophy department is a strong regression in philosophy research.

However, I believe there is a more important issue here: no institution can truly be a university without philosophy. The majority of doctoral degrees are, as you are no doubt aware, Doctors of Philosophy. This isn’t something cheeky, or a hold over from an outdated academic ideology. The truth is, most theoretical research is philosophical by its very nature. Philosophy is the life-blood of a university; without philosophy, Middlesex is a technical school or, worse still, a factory that outputs a mass-produced item for consumption. And, let’s face it: your students will still encounter philosophy, they will still discuss philosophy. The major difference is that they will do so without the expertise of a philosophy department to help refine their thoughts.

Finally, I would like to express my disapproval of the suspension of philosophy students and staff members. One of the greatest aspects of the academy is the freedom given to staff members and students in order that they are able to research, write, and discuss without the fear of censure. The suspension of these persons without a viable reason is, yet again, a disservice to the university and academia at large. It is not a wise decision to emulate what some corporations have done recently in order to prevent meaningful negotiations. These suspensions show that Middlesex should remove the word ‘university’ from its title, as it has shown yet again that it is not an institution of academic excellence but a ‘sweat shop’ mass producing an overpriced product for the sake of capital. Middlesex is not even a business venture, if for the very least that no business in their right mind would kill off its best-selling product. What, then, is Middlesex?

Regards,
Christopher Roussel
PhD Student
Department of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Glasgow

This kind of crying foul that the government should not help the less fortunate is faulty on two counts. It rests on the assumption that ‘social justice’ is something that should be voluntary. This is particularly difficult for religious conservatives who tend to accept that humans are inherently ‘bad’ (whether it be moral corruption through Calvinism’s ‘Total Depravity’ or something similar). If humans are inherently bad (or at the very least morally cuplable), why should we accept that humans will reach through this fault and give willingly and unselfishly? In other words, humans are selfish (and I believe this is something implicit in my previous post on social justice). If it weren’t for humanity’s selfish nature, I could accept voluntary giving as a viable alternative.

The second assumption this line of thinking rests on is the assumption that ‘social justice’ is not part of the government’s role. This is problematic because equality for all people and the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ is written both explicitly and implicitly throughout the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. However, it has changed over the last century as the public sphere has degraded into a culture of opposition and war. In fact, I would go so far as to say that notions of the ‘common good’ have been superceded by the notion of the private consumer (the four part BBC documentary Century of the Self has a good analysis here). We can see this in a historical look at actions such as exorcism in which people were removed from communities because they were harmful to the community has become a battle between the many fragments of Self and Other within individuals. We’ve tried to erase the public sphere in order to protect our isolations, to protect our Selves from the Others. What we did not expect was to find that even individuals have many Selves and Others already from which an identity emerges. And now, we isolate ourselves so that we do not meet the Other face-to-face, we turn the mirrors away so that we do not see the Other within. Instead, we seek exorcism of the individual in the hopes that we will find a complete Self beneath the rubble, equally afraid that we will only see fragments! From this, we have transformed government into our own pet that should console us, pamper ourselves as individual Selves, and hide the Others from our sights. This is most evident in the lack of cooperation between political parties as all major votes now fall to partisan lines: as long as Our Party is in power, we can have our way and excise the Others from our midsts! ‘Social justice’ and ‘equality’ are within government’s role only if they benefit us! We don’t truly care for democracy, equality, liberty, or freedom; we only care for our own as we pay for it! We, as social-political creatures, have become consumers of rights! We should only have the right to buy; if one cannot pay the costs, one does not deserve it! If one does not deserve it, then that one is not of Us! — And all outsiders should be rejected lest they reveal our own inadequacies! The role of government is to continue to isolate Us from Them, equality and freedom be damned! Perhaps these opponents are using entitlement in terms of rights, but do they seriously want to contend that people have no rights whatsoever to healthcare? Only the right to consume is needed in our perverse consumer society where those unable to consume are less than human and worthless…

I think this kind of view turns government into a capitalist corporation. For the kind of thinking above, the best government is one which operates like a for-profit industry, subjugating people by marketing — as our present day capitalist corporations do — and to do so without concern or apathy. The documentary The Corporation did a good job in arguing that if capitalist corporations are persons (which the Supreme Court of the US just ruled), then they are amoral psychopaths. We want fascist dictators — not the kind that tell us directly what politics are right but the ones that tell us what to buy and use product placement to tell us which politics are good to buy!

This is, I believe the heart of the matter when it comes to criticising something as ‘entitlement’: it runs against the grain of capitalist consumerism. People are provided necessities not on the basis of their status as a consumer but on their status as a human who is part of the public sphere which haunts the consumer market. We’ve created many illusions of the public sphere (such as the American Idol phenomena in which we believe we get direct representation for once!) because we fear there may be a reality ‘out there’ in which not everything fits our utopian fantasy. Movies like Avatar are horrific because they’ve turn the Real into a fantasy which we consume as a brief foray into entertainment (‘it was a good movie with awesome effects, but the story’s been done before in Fern Gully or Pocahontas‘) before returning to our own fantasies that we mistake for the Real! Programmes like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and welfare need to be opposed because they don’t fit our fantasy of consumerism — and that is why many conservatives criticise the healthcare insurance reform as it interrupts our utopian consumerist fantasy and makes us look at Others for what they are: human beings.

During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.

From the perspective of social change, Christianity — especially that in America — has largely lost its humanitarian mission to the world to show love. This isn’t to say that American Christians do not participate in mission work or give to humanitarian causes. However, Christianity has done so largely to ‘save lost souls’, or out of a fear of some kind of tormented Hell. The pockets of people that do humanitarian projects solely because of some profound ‘love’ or for humanitarian reasons happen to largely be nonreligious. Christianity has been succeeded by the post-Christian, secular world which has promoted ‘Christian’ values better than the Christians. To put this in a more provocative way: in order to love humanity because of divine love, one must be an atheist.

Right after 9/11, the ‘trendy’ thing was to be conservative and ‘patriotic’. When the Dixie Chicks spoke their opinions about President Bush, they wound up committing public suicide because, from one perspective, they were out-of-sync with the ‘trendy’ political stance. At this point, conservatism was marketed as the minority fighting against the overwhelming liberal majority. They were the sane part of the government who were thankfully in power at the time. In the Autumn of 2008, these conservatives joined with their ‘liberal’ counterparts and pumped millions of dollars into large corporations to keep them afloat. Yes, at that moment in time, ‘socialism’ was the trendy thing. It was happening throughout developed nations. Now, as Obama and the Democrats (NB: that would be a cool band name) are trying to reform healthcare, the trendy product has been to reject that healthcare because it is ‘socialist’ (ignoring that other ‘socialist’ thing that happened before the election even took place). Right now, the hot, trendy political ideology is  right-wing Republicanism (both traditional conservatism and neoconservatism), probably in part to the consumption of right-wing leaning products such as FoxNews, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times (two of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch).

With ideologies being consumed like products, there is no independent thought even though most would agree one of the hallmarks of modernity was thought independent of any overbearing institution (be it king or church). Perhaps that should read ‘there has never been independent thought’. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that our thoughts are truly independent, even if they reverberate clearly with the marketed political products. These products have been so successful at fading into the background that we have long forgotten they ever existed as products and accept them as our own core beliefs. I am deliberately echoing Nietzsche’s definition of ‘Truth’ here because we take our political products as things based on some unshakeable Truth. We no longer see ourselves as members of a political party towing the party line but as independent observers who happen to agree with the party lines. We’ll argue that if the party were to change a particular set of beliefs, we would disagree with them, but so far no action in any party has been sufficiently large to really provoke this. Even Arlen Specter’s jumping ship to another party was, for all intents, a non-event.

We have succumbed to the siren song of truth in politics. Even politics has its own advertisements–not just for candidates during election but for every ‘major’ issue. These advertisements succeed in the same way Wikipedia does: cite something, give a source, and hope that nobody reads it well enough. The problem with this comparison, however, is that people on Wikipedia do (sometimes) read things well enough to see the forest for the trees and change it. That doesn’t happen in politics. At best, we get more non-events (like David Cameron publicly rebuking Daniel Hannan while also drumming up support for the same things he’s rebuking Hannan) that are always void of substance. That’s because the substance was never there to begin. It’s always been an empty façade hiding an empty void. The ‘Truth’ in politics is that there is no Truth beyond that which is fabricated for the product…and we all have purchased it.

Our second set of visitors is my wife’s mother and youngest sister. They arrive on the Friday of that same week (giving us a few days to finish off work, clean up, and tie up any loose ends). It also happens that our anniversary (has it only been four years??) falls between these two visits, so I hope to do something for that in the in-between time. Their first weekend will be a little tamer than our first visitor’s, as we’ll be staying around Glasgow for that weekend. However, once the weekend’s over, we’re heading up north into the Scottish Highlands. We’ll spend a night in Carbisdale Castle, followed by a run through Loch Ness, Skye, Oban (with a photo stop at Castle Stalker), Iona, and Loch Lomond before returning to Glasgow a few days later. We’ll spend the weekend recovering from that run, but it won’t last long.

Part three of our month will be a raid into English territory (finally). We’ll first make a run to London through the eastern part of England, passing through Leeds and Nottingham to see Fountains Abbey, Herriot country, and Nottingham Castle (with the Sherwood Forest). After a few days in London, we’ll begin our journey back through the western part of England (sorry, no Wales this trip), passing through Stonehenge, Avebury, Bath, Manchester, Carlisle (and the Lake District), Hadrian’s Wall, and possibly Edinburgh before returning to Glasgow. With July over, our visitors will return to the New World and leave us to hibernate in the quickly growing night that is winter in the north (we’ll lose two hours of daylight between now and the time they leave in August).

Needless to say, I’ll be very sparse in July.

I take the main focus of the film to be that religious faith and objective science is incompatible. In fact, religious faith is now an absurdity in these modern times. Maher travels quite a bit throughout the US, Europe, and Israel interviewing people who would generally be classified as fundamentalists in their approaches to theology. At one point, he is interviewing Ken Ham (of Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum fame). He takes Ham to task in resolving huge differences between scientific evidence and the “common sense” literal reading of creation espoused by young Earth creationism. From my perspective, Ham’s creationism here has already lost its sense of direction by adopting the language and system of scienctific observation that negates the teleological goal of creationism. In oversimplified terms, Ham’s creation science is much like trying to raise freshwater fish in salt water; the freshwater fish behave at the cellular/organic level differently than saltwater fish. The language and goals of the creation story in Genesis, much like the stories of Christ in the Gospels, are not meant to adhere to modern-day scientific (or biographical) literature. In this respect, Maher is spot on with his critique of faith. If one holds religious faith to be coterminal with empirical science, faith will always lose because it centers on phenomena that exceed the bounds empirical science has made for itself.

On the other hand, Maher’s critique is the the “atheist version” of the very thing he critiques. In one segment, he is asking a few Muslims (including an imam) about the Qur’an. His questions fall along the lines of “the Qur’an says to kill infidels, is this true?” Every Muslim asked answers the question along the lines of “that is not how we interpret that text because it was linked to a particular historical context that no longer exists.” Maher pushes his point by denying the possibility of interpretation, setting himself up as the more accurate interpreter than the believers who study the text! This is the same thing that he critiques people such as Ken Ham (and others). In other words, Maher wants religious/theological hermeneutics to be a closed event ripped from any context and made into an absolute ideological framework in order to reject religion. He then rationalises his work by claiming its standpoint of doubt is the best position.

Ironically, it is here that Maher again falls prey to the very thing he criticises. If doubt is the best place to stand, he hasn’t doubted enough! The “true” sceptic is the one that doubts everything, not just what one is prejudiced against. Maher emphasis empirical science as the strongest evidence for his position, yet he never doubts the framework of assumptions that undergird the empirical sciences. He never suggests that empirical evidence itself may be already tainted by a predisposition to certain beliefs (namely, that an external world exists and is discernable). Obviously, then, Maher should insist that some kind of belief is “acceptable” without entering into fundamentalism or scepticism. It seems, then, that the rational position is somewhere between the fundamentalism he decries while using and the scepticism he touts while evading.

One last thing of interesting note is that Maher suggests in his film that science has discovered a gene that is linked to belief in God. Ironically, the original researcher said that it was linked to spirituality and “feeling God’s presense” and not to simple belief in God. Further, these findings were never published in peer-reviewed literature. Even more striking is that this gene can also be associated with the feeling of beloning to a political party. In other words, it isn’t a very strong theory and it doesn’t suggest that belief in God is a genetic trait. Perhaps if Maher had utilised more of his “scepticism,” he would have noticed that.

24 April 2009: Speculative Materialism and Speculative Realism in Bristol. Conferees include Ray Brassier, Graham Harman, and Iain Hamilton Grant.  Quentin Meillassoux was originally scheduled for the conference but is unable to attend in person; however, he will still be sending his paper.  This is highly recommended for anyone who has a blog reading list that is similar to mine on the side ( –>).

3 – 7 August 2009: Deleuze Camp. This is a warm-up to…
10-12 August 2009: CONNECTDeleuze.  Both are in Köln, Germany (Cologne). This is the annual Deleuze Studies conference and features a mostly “who’s who” of Deleuze scholarship (minus John Protevi?).  Highly recommended for anyone interested in Deleuzian thought.  The CFP for the conference is open through April.

22-24 April 2010: Resonance(s) in Istanbul.  This conference’s focus is on philosophy, arts, and politics.  While not as huge as the above conference, it will be headlining a healthy dosage of Deleuzians.  The CFP is open through August.