The War Against Humanity
A war has been raging for decades. It is a war affecting or involving nearly anyone. As such, it could very well be the first real “world” war, not in the least because this war also decides the future of this world and everything that lives on it. There are relatively few “soldiers” fighting this war, however, and certainly on our side. Almost all of the violence – and certainly all of the structural violence – is inflicted upon us by the enemy. That enemy is waging a war against humanity. The enemy goes by many different names: the “super-rich”,...
If structural violence is so entrenched that personal violence is the only effective response, then personal violence is an appropriate response.
That (i.e., the title of this short piece) is really all I wanted to say, but probably, some explanation is in order. Let’s start with the notions of “structural” and “personal violence”, which were introduced by Johan Galtung in 1969: Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. It corresponds to our ideas of what drama is, and it is personal because there are persons committing the violence. […] Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but...
Uchiyama, Marx, and Gramsci on Ideological Superstitions
In 2019 typhoon Hagibis destroyed part of the railroad that leads to Hakone, a small town near a volcanic lake in Japan that has a long history as a resort town. One of the stops on the line that can no longer be reached by train is Ōhiradai. About fifty meter south of the station there is a small and inconspicuous temple named Rinsenji. In 1909, during the railroad’s construction, the police searched that temple. They found dynamite used for building the railroad that was temporarily stored there. They also found an illegal printing press under the main altar. A...
The Possibility of a Revolution
(This is part 6 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In The Ethics of Climate Insurgency I argued that an insurgency aimed at overthrowing the enemies of our children is not morally justified because it is unlikely that – in the present situation – such an insurgency can succeed. It may seem that that conclusion also makes a discussion of the possibility of some kind of revolution to avoid catastrophe and establish something like the Lesser Dystopia is moot, but that is not exactly the case for (at least) two reasons. Firstly, in considering the possibility of a revolution...
The Ethics of Climate Insurgency
(This is part 5 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Let’s say that you want to avoid the Mad-Maxian hell of societal collapse that climate change is making increasing likely, then how can and should you try to do that? You’d have an incredibly powerful and well-connected enemy, and just asking them to give up their short-term profits in order to save the planet isn’t likely to have any effect – at least, it hasn’t had any effect thus far. Then what? Very many different answers can be given to that last question, but I want to focus here...
You Are a Zombie
For reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, zombie movies remain fairly popular. There has been a notable change in the genre, however. A few decades ago, zombie movies were probably best classified as a sub-genre of horror, while nowadays they seem to be a variety of disaster movie – particularly, a variety of end-of-the-world disaster movie. Picking up on this subtle, but telling genre shift, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux write in Disposable Futures, a book on the role of (depictions of) violence in contemporary society, that the zombie figure “speaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes...
Crisis and Inertia (4) – Economic, Political, and Cultural Crises
(This is part 4 in the “Crisis and Inertia” series.) While climate change constitutes a major if not terminal crisis for civilization (and possibly even for mankind) and certain technologies may also become existential threats in the wrong hands, there are many other crises and threats that seem to be less severe. All economic, political, and cultural crises appear to fall in this “less severe” category, for example – at least, it doesn’t seem likely that another economic crisis or the gradual collapse of democracy will lead to the end of civilization. Nevertheless, they are crises in the sense adopted...
The (Self-) Corruption of Critique
This is a lightly edited excerpt from my book/pamphlet The Hegemony of Psychopathy. * * * Hegemony is the spread of ideas (such as values and beliefs) that support and maintain the socio-political status quo. Alternative sources of ideas can (at least in principle) undermine hegemony, but if hegemony is effective, then alternative ideas are often not taken seriously, or may even undermine themselves. If hegemony is effective, then the belief that there is no alternative becomes common sense, turning proposed alternatives (i.e. alternatives for common sense) into obvious non-sense. This is how hegemony undermines critique: by making it “irrational.”...
The Hegemony of Psychopathy (Excerpt)
This is an edited collection of excerpts from my book/pamphlet The Hegemony of Psychopathy that was just published. (It can be purchased in paperback or downloaded for free in PDF format at the publisher’s website.) * * * The Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention from social and political philosophers. This is surprising because the scale and extent of the atrocities involved in the Holocaust should be impossible to ignore. If we humans can do that, then that makes a difference — or should make a difference — for our beliefs about the ideal society, for example. At the very...