202. PROGRESSING EVER BACKWARDS - Why This World and Not Another?

It’s a tough time to be a philosopher concerned about truth. On Monday, like many, I watched the new president of the United States get sworn in. The convicted felon who encouraged the January 6th insurrection and the possible lynching of his last Vice President swore (in the very same building where it happened) to uphold the very constitution he has repeatedly undermined in a ceremony whose theme was ‘the peaceful transfer of power’. Gaslighting of the highest order. Even before he then pardoned the insurrectionists themselves.

The second election of President Donald Trump stings particularly hard for someone like me. Someone who, since my teenage years, for over three decades, has been trying to fight the good fight against repressive authoritarianism and oppressive regimes. When you get into revolutionary politics you do so with the fundamental notion that things can get better as your guiding principle. But these days I often find myself thinking about all the things which were pretty progressive and wonderful back in the 1990s that we used to think were not enough. Things which, today, would be immediate targets of the far right’s endless culture wars had they not already been lost.

Instead of getting better, things seem to have been getting progressively worse. Whether it’s the environment, equality rights, inclusion, threat of war…everything seems closer to the precipice of being undone than it did three decades ago. Norms have been eroded or broken. The social contract, if ever there was one, left null and void. No one seems to agree on the terms or remember why they signed it anymore.

There’s no denying that the internet it part of it. A huge part. Instead of being embedded in our communities and the society on whose term the social contract must be written, we got swept up in a sensationalist and clickbait driven global conversation. Agenda-led ‘concerns’ and ‘issues’ became adopted as our own because that was what the discourse told us was important. And we divorced ourselves from physical reality, preferring the mediated experience of living life through a screen instead of interacting with real people. Neighbourhoods retreated to WhatsApp groups. Friends became a number on Facebook instead of a real life network of meaningful connections. We shared memes instead of ourselves. And we scrolled and scrolled instead of paying attention to what was happening in front of us. Is it any wonder that we forgot our shared norms and goals for evolving our societies and plunged, instead, back into warring tribes, primed for manipulation?

Trump is a symptom, not the sickness itself. There are other possible worlds where his overt peddling of misinformation and self-evident unfitness for office were immediate disqualifiers for an informed voting public. Where his allusions to Nazism and explicit fascistic authoritarianism were repulsive to us instead of something which won him votes. Where the intention disrupting of democratic institutions and surrounding himself with an oligarchy of tech billionaires rang alarm bells instead of raised cheers of support.

That we do not live in one of those worlds should be the thing we ask the most questions about. How, despite all the previous warnings from history, did we allow ourselves to end up here? Not just with Trump, but with the rise of far right authoritarianism around the globe?

There is no telos to our existence. No guarantee that this ends well. The world is what we make it. So the central question for philosophy today must be: why have we made it like this?

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.

My own book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book.

My academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ is out in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here.

My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. 

I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.

Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com