New Possibilities

I admit that it took me a while to get into this article because of some of the rhetoric, which reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's declaration that he wrote English 'as a musical instrument.' That can be fun to read, but is hard to take seriously. 

However, there are serious points made. Several of them dovetail with some of our longstanding discussions. 

He opens with some points that are not new. One is a point that Eric Blair used to make here regularly even a decade ago -- that there's actually more good art and music than ever now, and you can find it if you look outside of mass culture. Then he makes a point about expertise that was the heart of the Blog Era of ~2002-2012 (before Social Media began to capture this into corporate-controlled spaces): that real experts of practical experience can now contest credentialed 'experts' and demonstrate the superiority of genuine expertise. 

Then he acknowledges a dangerous downside, one that the post about the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance also shows is not brand new:

The limits of this positive picture must also be acknowledged, as there is a darker underside of increasing State control to this story, as described in these pages previously. But we are only at the start of this new age and there may be ways to address the risks to individual freedoms even while the world continues down the path of individual “sovereignty”.

What follows rhymes nicely -- to borrow the music metaphor for a moment -- with our 'anarchist as far as possible' discussions, the last of which ended with an exploration in the comments of various science fiction accounts of how technology might allow for more human freedom than has ever been possible before. He goes on to note that some kind of vast change is inevitable anyway: the old systems simply cannot survive the present challenge.

He concludes: 

Completely new thinking is required. Radical thinking that goes beyond ideas about “simply” rearranging or reforming the state, including its constitutional arrangements – hard as even that may be. But yet even more boldness is required to match the vast and profound challenges – societal as well as human challenges – that are actually facing us, and that we are still, collectively, in broad ignorance of. 

The best place to start, perhaps, is with the individual and his “sovereign” transformation that is already de facto underway. Political and philosophical work is required to understand how – or indeed whether – this process can shape wider changes in how we govern ourselves and the new rules and rights we might want to put in place in order to deal with what is coming in technology as well as societally. Truly novel thinking on first principles is hard and rare, but the present generation must rise to the task. 

That, indeed, is quite aligned with the project of the Hall. Yet I will say again what I have often said about attempts at genuine novelty: you can't do it from inside the system you're trying to criticize. You have to find a way to get outside of it in order to get enough perspective; and you have to have some alternatives to what you know in order to spark imagination. One way to do this is to study history: the past really was different, and seeing which things surprise you in understanding those differences will go along way to giving you ideas about what could be different in a future world. Science fiction, already mentioned, is another way: but then think about how many famous Sci-Fi or Fantasy efforts have relied upon incorporating elements of ancient or Medieval history into the future. 

The study of the history of philosophy in a sense combines these approaches. I think it is often the case that in the transition to the Modern world, we lost some insights of the ancient and Medieval that were valuable and even true. Even when they were false or wrong ideas, however, they were different approaches: being able to contrast how Aristotle thought about something versus how Kant thought about the same thing, how Plato did versus how Hegel or Marx did, these kinds of abilities to understand different systematic philosophies gives you a capacity to think about what else might be different. It's another road to thinking through truly novel ideas.