"Much of mechanistic-reductionist science, and the narrowly deterministic technology it has produced, is...about exerting coercive power and control by fragmenting the universe into decontextualized, simplified, categorical entities that can be named and put to use (aka entropic "I-It" relations, which cannot yield life), without concern for the needs and interests of these entities, their individuality, identity, or history. It involves destroying the pluripotential value of these complex unpredictable entities and the relations they help to create and sustain, in service of predictability and its progeny (death, consumption, convenience, desire, power, control, and status). Evolving biological systems transcend scientific determinism because their expanding complexity and optionality create novel boundary conditions that prohibit accurate description by differential equations and outstrip any capacity for truly accurate modelling. The Syntropic I-Thou relations necessary for autopoiesis and persistence of complex non-equilibrium systems (living things), entails the mystery of myriad accidents and choices - woven through space and time. We can participate in this, and thereby understand more of it''.

The demand and the desire for “deeper causes” and theories that explain "what is" is a flight from the “shock of reality.” It is a refusal to simply tell what is, which in its stark inexplicability has “never been welcomed and often not been tolerated at all.”

Roger Berkowitz

 “In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.”

Ernest Becker

Marx

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another...The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

Karl Marx

The mere telling of facts, leads to no actions whatever; even tends under normal circumstances, toward acceptance of things as they are...Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities. Only when a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting forces of power and interest, become a political factor of the first order. Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world.

Hanna Arendt

"Beginning may be “a feature of all events,” but it is more in the way of a potential that must be actualized by democratic citizens than a substance that inheres in all events. What makes one occurrence count as an event that calls for our response is how citizens take it up. Beginning as a feature of all events must be actualized, and this turns on whether others take up any particular event as an occasion for response. “There is no way to undo what has been done, no way not to suffer it—but you can do more than merely suffer it: you can take it as your point of departure” (10), writes Markell''.

 Linda M. G. Zerilli

FROM WILLING TO JUDGING: WHAT ARENDT FOUND IN NIETZSCHE

 Linda M. G. Zerilli

At the end of “Willing” (Volume 2 of The Life of the Mind), Hannah Arendt explicitly announces the need to write a section on “judging” in order to respond to the impasses in “every philosophy of the will,” especially as it bears on democratic theory and practice.[1] Why? Why move from willing to judging? What problem does the will raise that the turn to the “faculty of Judgment” (LMW, 217) might solve? And what on earth does Nietzsche have to do with it?

These are large questions, some of which have been raised by commentators before me, but allow me to suggest one possible line of response that takes into account Nietzsche’s place in Arendt’s political thought. In the philosophy of the will Arendt identified the central aporia of democratic action: how to think and affirm plurality and a nonsovereign concept of freedom. Indeed, aporia, which comes from the Greek aporos and means literally “without passage,” best describes what Arendt discovered in her reflections on the faculty of the will: There is no way to move from the idea of the will as free (which is to say, sovereign) to the idea of membership in a democratic community. For the freedom of the will, as Nietzsche on Arendt’s own telling recognized, is irreducibly bound to the logic of obedience and command: “What is called ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially a passionate superiority toward a someone who must obey. ‘I am free’; “he” must obey’—the consciousness of this is the very willing.”[2] It is “strange indeed,” she remarks, that “the faculty of the will whose essential activity consists in dictate and command should be [so it is said] the harborer of freedom.”[3] And not only strange but bearing “fatal consequences for political theory;… this equation of freedom with the human capacity to will,” she writes, is “one of the causes why even today we almost automatically equate power with oppression or, at least, with rule over others.”[4] Freedom as freedom of the will/freedom as sovereignty, she writes elsewhere, is bound up with the idea of power as rule/force—“making others act as I choose” (OV, 36).

Arendt’s writings attempt to break with the entire modern philosophy of the will in which the twin ideas of power as rule/force and freedom as sovereignty have been housed. This break is far more radical than anything proposed by either so-called agonistic democrats or the otherwise mostly neo-Kantian tradition of modern and contemporary democratic theory. Whereas the former celebrates the productive role of conflict in politics but more or less ignores the continuing influence of the philosophy of the will on democratic theory and practice, the latter would manage such conflict by rearticulating democratic will-formation as rational will-formation. This latter tradition, represented in different ways by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, questions not the faculty of the will as having a legitimate role to play in democratic politics but its mute, solitary character and groundless exercise or what is known as decisionism: a position that is associated with legal and political theorists such as Carl Schmitt but also with those who come under the sway of Nietzsche and his critical genealogy of values.

Arendt’s turn to Nietzsche is critical but also appreciative: he figures in her larger project to reveal the dangerous illusion of freedom as sovereignty, the idea that every “I-will” is also an “I-can” that has no need for others. And not only no need, but no tolerance of others, for they are mere obstacles to one’s freedom understood as the direct exercise of one’s will. “Nothing indeed can be more frightening than the notion of solipsistic freedom—the ‘feeling’ that my standing apart, isolated from everyone else, is due to free will” (195-196), she writes. It is this idea of freedom as sovereignty and not the problem of rational collective will-formation that is at the heart of Arendt’s critical democratic project. This project neither dismisses nor invites decisionism—that is, the notion that political actions and principles require no valid reasons but are simply the expressions of a groundless will—because, in breaking with the philosophy of the will, Arendt breaks with the very idea of democratic politics as will-formation tout court, rational or not.

Arendt breaks not only with the idea of the will that yields the permanent threat of decisionism (just as rationalism yields the permanent threat of skepticism; and objectivism yields subjectivism) but also with certain assumptions about human action, criticized but not thought through in any political sense by Nietzsche, that keep the possibility of beginning tied to the power of the will. Refuting the will as the origin of action and human freedom in the distinctively political sense that she understood the power of beginning (i.e., precisely not as Kantian spontaneity, which is the ambivalent achievement of “Man in the singular,” but as being with “men in the plural” in word and deed), Arendt goes on to refigure this possibility in relation to the power of judgment.[5]

Once we question, with Arendt, the idea that rational will-formation is the aim of democratic politics, decisionism ceases to present itself as a genuine political problem. Her often noted failure to generate the normative criteria according to which democratic politics involves the formation not just of a common will but a will that is rational could be read as part of a genuine innovation, an innovation, I suggest, that amounts to a virtual Copernican Revolution in political theorizing: namely, an unprecedented break with the philosophy of the will in the history of political thought. This break is Copernican in spirit because it reveals that the very claim to free action that the will arrogates to itself depends on the power of judgment. Although foregrounded in the work of philosophers such as Bergson, Heidegger, and especially Nietzsche, each of whom questioned the will as the locus of freedom, it was Hannah Arendt herself who first recognized the implications of such a break for our understanding of democratic politics.

In the volume on willing, Arendt explicitly addresses what Kant called “the embarrassment of ‘speculative reason in dealing with the question of the freedom of the will . . . [namely with] a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states” (LMW, 20). In the third antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sets this power of spontaneously beginning against the idea that “there is no freedom in the world; everything in the world takes place in accordance with the laws of nature.”[6] “What is so very troublesome is the notion of an absolute beginning,” writes Arendt citing Kant, “for ‘a series occurring in the world can have only a relatively first beginning, being always preceded by some other state of things” (LMW, 29). Save divine creation ex nihilio, beginning must always be relative: it is a beginning only in relation to something that came before it. This is another way of saying that beginning, at least for human beings, is always conditioned. The problem is how to think of beginning as conditioned but not determined.

Arendt insists that “[a] characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new, and this does not mean that it is ever permitted to start ab ovo, to create ex nihilio”[7] This point has been lost on many of her interpreters, who tend to read her theory of action as an attempt to redeem the idea of spontaneity that Kant found “embarrassing” and to make it relevant for the political realm. And once you make Kantian spontaneity, which is the act of a groundless will, the model of Arendtian action, it is easy to see how you might begin to think about action in terms of the problem of rational will-formation. The task would be to make what is spontaneous and groundless (decisionistic) into something rational.

But the main problem with “the politics of the will as politics of unconstrained creatio ex nihilio,” as Nadia Urbinati explains, “is that it assumes constitution-making as an act of freedom renunciation rather than freedom constitution or the institution of the space and time of politics.”[8] According to the idea of politics that equates freedom, the will, and sovereignty, freedom is a prepolitical condition that coexists with politics only in the moment of founding or constitution-making. Whatever comes later is by definition not political action in the strong sense. We are left with the impossible choice of the “authentic” extra-ordinary politics of permanent revolution or the “inauthentic” ordinary politics of electoral democracy.

Although he does not directly address the will, Patchen Markell has suggested that the dilemma just described can be addressed by rethinking the relationship of democratic rule to political freedom.[9] In a close reading that I cannot reproduce here, Markell persuasively argues that, for Arendt, “novelty inheres in all events, even those that are expected or predicted” (2). This interpretation turns on thinking about beginning less as a radical break with all that came before (e.g., the instituted political forms and practices of democracy) and more as a certain responsiveness or attunement to the irrevocability of an event. What has happened and cannot be changed—the event itself–becomes “a new point of departure,” writes Markell (7).

What would it mean to think about beginning as “a feature of all events” (6), rather than as a “particular subset of human acts” (6) such as founding or constitution making? Surely Markell does not want to counter the idea of beginning as a rarified feature of some events with the idea of beginning as a property that inheres in all events qua events. How do we determine whether something counts as a beginning? Markell’s answer lies in the idea of “attunement,” which he describes as a certain perspective or stance one takes towards what has happened.[10] Beginning may be “a feature of all events,” but it is more in the way of a potential that must be actualized by democratic citizens than a substance that inheres in all events. What makes one occurrence count as an event that calls for our response is how citizens take it up. Beginning as a feature of all events must be actualized, and this turns on whether others take up any particular event as an occasion for response. “There is no way to undo what has been done, no way not to suffer it—but you can do more than merely suffer it: you can take it as your point of departure” (10), writes Markell.

This attempt to undo what has been done is the option that Nietzsche diagnosed as belonging to the experience of the will as it confronts the “It was.” The will’s relationship to the stubborn “It was” takes the destructive because impossible form of a wish to will backwards, which treats events not as points of departure but as occasions for rancor. I agree with Markell that “the novelty of beginning . . . turns on an agent’s attunement to its [the act’s or event’s] character as an irrevocable event, and therefore as a new point of departure.” But, if Nietzsche is right, such attunement is quite difficult. If we want to avoid treating attunement as a kind of mental state and think about it rather as an activity or a practice, then we must ask: what kind of activity or practice enables me to treat an event as “irrevocable” and as a “point of departure,” rather than as undoable and as an occasion for what Nietzsche called ressentiment?

Whether something counts as an instance of beginning depends not on some intrinsic property of the event qua event, then, but on how we respond. Whether we respond in a way that affirms an event as irrevocable and as a beginning, rather than, say, as an occasion to try to undo what has been done—as I would now interpret Arendt’s critical but also appreciative reading of Kantian spontaneity via an equally critical but also appreciative turn to Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Recurrence—depends on the capacity to judge or, more specifically, to judge an event in its freedom. In such a judgment an event calls forth an acceptance of the “It was” (what has been given and cannot be changed), rather than the impossible wish to will backwards. For Nietzsche, to be genuine the acceptance must take the form of an affirmation: “To redeem what is past and transform every ‘It was’ into ‘Thus I would have it”—that’s what I take to be redemption.” To redeem the past (Nietzsche) or to treat it as a point of departure rather than merely suffer it (Markell’s Arendt) is not to discover something that inheres in the event qua event but rather to alter one’s relationship to it.

Judgment is needed if events are not to serve as an occasion for rancor in the way Nietzsche diagnosed. “Clearly, what is needful is not to change the world or men but to change their way of ‘evaluating’ it” (LMW, 170), as Arendt describes Nietzsche’s solution to the rancor unleashed by an unchangeable “It-Was.” And though clearly critical of his Epictetian leanings and lack of the political conception of judgment that she would associate with Kant (and his third Critique), Arendt also sees that Nietzsche has identified a pathway that can lead beyond the philosophy of the will and its many aporias. Perhaps that is why she ends her discussion of him by concluding that “Nietzsche’s last word on the subject . . . spells a repudiation of the Will and the willing ego, whose internal experiences have misled thinking men into assuming that there are such things a cause and effect, intention and goal, in reality” (172).

Judgment, then, is necessary because the transition from “the not-yet” to the “already” that all events share brings with it the specter of causality. This is the illusion that Nietzsche so brilliantly diagnosed as animating the illusion of free will. Our ability to take an event as a departure point is related to our ability to see in it something that could have been otherwise, to see contingency rather than necessity.[11] If Eternal Recurrence cannot quite get us there in Arendt’s view, that is because, as a response to the aporias of the will, it remains the thinking man’s answer to a problem invented by “thinking men.” It has no more space for others than did the thinkers of “philosophic freedom” and its “freedom of the will, [a freedom that] is relevant only to people who live outside political communities, as solitary individuals” (LMW, 199). It is, after all, these others who take up our action in ways that we can neither predict nor control that lends action its contingent character and that leads the philosophers to turn away from the whole realm of human affairs. And so Arendt leaves Nietzsche and other “professional thinkers” aside and turns to “men of action” (199), though they too, as it turns out, cannot quite escape the spell of the philosophy of the will.

Notes

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1-vol. edition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), vol. 2, “Willing,” 217, 23. Hereafter cited as LMW with page references. Philosophies of the will—which I shall refer to as belonging more generally to the philosophy of the will, though this should not be understood as composing a unified body of thought—do not emerge until the rise of Christianity, says Arendt, as “the faculty of the Will was unknown to Greek antiquity” (LMW, 3). Whatever their differences, most philosophers of the will—the first being Augustine in Arendt’s view—were entangled in denying that the will was free. Showing how the philosophers denied such freedom, Arendt can easily be taken to be defending the freedom of the will. In fact, she contests it, for freedom of the will is associated with sovereignty and politics as rule.

[2] Quoted in LMW, 161.

[3] Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?,” 145.

[4] Ibid., 162.

[5] Although Arendt invokes the Kantian notion of spontaneity understood as the ability to begin a new series in time in her account of freedom, she did not think that the idea of an absolute beginning was possible. More important, the Kantian idea of spontaneity was not political. She may have been led to invoke Kant’s idea of spontaneity as an alternative to the other idea of freedom as liberum arbitrium (the choice between two or more existing objects), which Arendt found to be the preferred idea in the philosophy of the will (which mostly denied freedom). By contrast with Kantian spontaneity, political freedom consists for Arendt in the exchange of word and deed and requires the presence of others, that is, plurality. Freedom understood in the political sense does not produce anything (as does the spontaneity of the artist) and it is not a property of the subject (as it is in the philosophy of the will). See Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 93-200, esp. 127-128.

[6] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 484-485.

[7] Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972); quotation is from p. 5.

[8] Nadia Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 97.

[9] Patchen Markell, “The Rule of the People: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy, American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (February 2006): 1-14; quotation is from p. 2. Hereafter cited as Markell with page references.

[10] “Recall that what makes a beginning a beginning for Arendt, what lends it its eruptiveness, is not its degree of departure from what preceded it, but rather our attunement to its character as an irrevocable event, which also means: as an occasion for response” (Markell, 10).

[11] It is precisely this affirmation of contingency that Arendt cites as one of the greatest challenges to thinking about occurrences as events and events as beginnings. Seen from the perspective of consciousness, Arendt writes, what is appears as “absolutely necessary.”

A thing may have happened quite at random, but, once it has come into existence and assumed reality, it loses its aspect of contingency and presents itself to us in the guise of necessity. And even if the event is of our own making, or at least we are one of its contributing causes—as in contracting marriage or committing a crime—the simple existential fact that it now is as it has become (for whatever reasons) is likely to withstand all reflections on its original randomness. Once the contingent has happened, we can no longer unravel the strands that entangled it until it became an event—as though it could still be or not be. (LMW, 138)

The power that enables us to affirm an event as at once irrevocable and contingent, an occasion for beginning, is the power of judgment.

West

There has never been a race problem, there has been catastrophe visited upon black people and indigenous people and Asian people; there has never been a woman's problem except from the vantage point of the establishment gaze - to reduce the catastrophic to the problematic is to give the professional managerial class problems that they can manage. But it's not like that; there are different levels to catastrophe - ecological, nuclear, economic, social, psychic and cultural. And so the question becomes: is there really way out? What am I to do? What are we to do? What kind of courage are we going to exert given the structures of conformity and complacency and cowardliness that are shot through most of the professional managerial class in all of its various forms?

Cornel West

Witcher

"Down the centuries there have been many answers to the perennial question: “How do you solve a problem like disabled people?”. Some didn’t mess about. The ancient Romans drowned children with impairments in the Tiber. The Nazis took a similarly uncompromising view of us, as ‘useless eaters’, unworthy of life. So they killed an estimated 240,000 of us, out of public view when the public protested. We’ve been segregated into hospitals and mad-houses, put into ‘idiot-cages’ in town centres, branded as evil, cursed, unnatural changelings. Conversely, others saw us as objects for charity, to be pitied and cared for. They even on occasion elevated disability to a holy state. We have found ourselves cast as heroic (yet still tragic) survivors; our purpose to entertain non-disabled people and make them feel good about themselves; eternally grateful they’re not us!

The answers to the problem that we clearly are have ranged from care, control, contain, through to kill. Whether sinners or saints, a focus for contempt, amusement or inspiration...we have always been ‘other’; different; not ‘normal’, and certainly not equal. It’s almost as if they don’t like us very much.

However...Disabled people worked out that maybe they weren’t the problem that needed to be solved! Instead, the problem was that society doesn’t accommodate people with impairments. It wasn’t having impairments that necessarily disable people but things like negative attitudes towards us, inaccessible buildings, communications, transport, and the inflexible way employment and services are organised. If those ‘social barriers’ were removed, even though we’d still have our impairments, would we necessarily be disabled? Known as the social model of disability, it was a lightbulb moment in disability history, that illuminated a new understanding of disability, a vision to aspire to, and route to getting there by removing social barriers. There was an alternative to care/ contain/ control/ kill. Now equality was firmly on the agenda (or so we thought).

To realise that you’re not the problem, that you’re constrained by oppression not by your own innate inferiority, is where liberation begins. Without belief in your own worth you become complicit with those whose interests it serves to deny that worth. So, ‘rights not charity’ became our mantra. And we got some rights too, with the Disability Discrimination Act (now the Equality Act), which brought rights to reasonable adjustments to remove social barriers. It means that those causing the barriers found themselves cast as the problem, which they then had to take action to solve by changing their practices. Strangely, that didn’t seem to mean they liked us any better!

We emphatically still have not won the war for equality. In fact, perhaps we have given our enemies, sometimes masquerading as our friends, some new weapons to attack us with and some new words with which to rebrand our oppression.

In the days before the social model, and for some years after, as far as the welfare state was concerned disabled people were the ‘deserving poor’. Unlike the undeserving non-disabled who could (allegedly) help themselves if they only chose to pull their socks up, disability rendered us helpless. It was our misfortune, not our fault. Of course we could never work and would therefore always need to be looked after and protected.

That’s not what many of us wanted and it wasn’t true. The social model had revealed that what stopped us working was not necessarily our impairments, but discriminatory attitudes, inaccessible workplaces and inflexible working practices. We had seen how even well-meaning protection could become unjustifiable disempowerment.

Now we’ve made reasonable adjustments to remove social barriers, they said, what’s to stop you working? We’ve been swayed by the force of your argument. We agree you can work, just like you always said. What puzzles us is why now you don’t believe it. Maybe you never really did want to work in the first place. Or is it lack of skills and job-readiness. Maybe you just lack confidence and what you need is a firm-but-fair push. Sometimes it’s kind to be cruel.

Unfortunately, confidence cannot raze to the ground the many social barriers that still patently exist. Failing to acknowledge that isn’t kindness. Just cruelty.

At the heart of the problem lies the fact that they still think we are the problem. It’s us who have to show why we can’t work, not employers why they can’t do more to enable us to work. It’s us in the glare of the interrogatory spotlight, forced to perform our incapacity and dance to their tune. It’s not employers...who are minutely grilled as to why adjustments aren’t reasonable, on peril of losing the income they need to survive.

How can it be that whenever we think we’re moving towards equality, and new tools make it more possible, somehow we seem to end up further away?

When we’re told that governments have to make difficult decisions at times of ‘austerity’, some of us may suspect it’s not them for whom their decisions will prove to be difficult. What inevitably comes next is the drive to focus public resources on ‘the most vulnerable’. The entrance criteria become ever harsher for membership of this club no one wants to join. To qualify you must have plunged so far down into the abyss of destitution there’s no way back. To qualify for ‘help’, those teetering on the brink must first fall – or jump – in. To desperately grapple to climb out only takes you further away from support. To not desperately grapple to climb out only makes destitution your choice.

As the frontiers of the state are rolled back, as wealth fails to trickle down but instead floods upwards and outwards to off-shore tax havens, essential public...support systems collapse before our eyes...While the numbers apparently judged deserving to be poor sky-rocket, the numbers of the poor deserving of support conversely dwindle – and not just because of the tightening of definitions. Poverty kills. So too does despair. The Disability News Service reported...on research linking the Work Capability Assessment to 600 suicides.

Is self-destruction to be the only way out from the living hell created for disabled people by failure to remove social barriers, support independent living and honour our human rights?

It may be hard to accept that, while disabled people may no longer be drowned in the river, that doesn’t seem to mean killing us is necessarily a thing of the past.

It’s high time we reminded ourselves that another way is still possible. There’s nothing inevitable about disabled people’s poverty, inequality or ‘vulnerability’. They are imposed on us by a society that has the tools and the resources to prevent them but chooses not to use them.

However, in Scotland, we’ve seen a glimmer of hope for a very different approach. The Scottish Government has committed itself to delivering a devolved benefits system based on dignity, fairness and respect. The founding principles of the system include that it is a human right and must be designed with the people of Scotland. And warm words seem, for once, to be translating into action. People who rely on benefits have not just been consultees but directly involved in shaping the system and its component parts, via ‘Experience panels’ of over 2400 people. They were co-designers of a Charter, with annual performance reports to Parliament and an independent oversight body. By directly involving the people who use social security in setting expectations, designing the monitoring framework and assessing whether those expectations have been met in practice, standards are driven from the ground up. Their most recent verdict on performance was positive.

Ultimately what this represents is a rebalancing of power. Because the very unequal distribution of power is, at root, what the problem is all about and that is what must be solved.

But will devolved social security solve poverty? Can it deliver dignity, fairness and respect, not just in terms of how benefit is delivered but through providing an adequate income. Over the years we’ve seen how longstanding themes throughout disability history – care/ contain/ control/ kill – don’t necessarily go away but get repackaged in ways that make them publicly plausible and acceptable. Where that isn’t possible, they can still happen, behind closed doors, by inaction as much as by action, out of public sight and mind.

It is important to understand that while much of it plays out as cruelty, that is not necessarily the intention. Discrimination can still result from a positive desire to help, and often out of a complete lack of awareness of the consequences. That’s why there really is hope that co-production and collaboration as equal partners can offer a way forward. But it does mean a rebalancing of power and resources. It also means acknowledging that we are all interdependent on each other. Yes, a disabled person could even be your boss! It means an end to disabled people being forced to make wildly unreasonable adjustments while those responsible for our exclusion fail to make adjustments they could often easily and cheaply make. It also means all of us accepting that, even if everyone concerned makes reasonable adjustments, some people are never going to work. And that doesn’t mean that those people are not equally human and should not have equal human rights. Until that acceptance comes, the holy grail of equality will never be attained. Until then all we are ever likely to get is the reframing and rebranding of oppression.

That is why we have come to distrust governmental warm words, even those that are familiar because they are ours! We’ve seen how words like ‘independence’, ‘care’, ‘work pays’ can play out as the polar opposite. We’ve also seen how their governmental words do not always translate into action, and how our own actions can be massively misinterpreted, in ways that would be hilarious if the consequences weren’t so devastating.

You can wave your arms about? If only you believed in yourself perhaps a glorious career awaits you as an international orchestral conductor! Or maybe a lollipop lady. Or scarecrow? There are so many ways you can make a useful contribution to society. If you can, it’s only fair you should.

Convincingly demonstrate your incapacity? You should be an actor! You’d win awards!! An Oscar, maybe. Obviously not an award of benefit. You clearly don’t need any more help to survive. You’re not dead, are you. You are literally the living proof''.


Dr Sally Witcher

 

de tocqueville

 

"So if people with depression show classic sickness behaviour and sick people feel a lot like people with depression – might there be a common cause that accounts for both? The answer to that seems to be yes, and the best candidate so far is inflammation – a part of the immune system that acts as a burglar alarm to close wounds and call other parts of the immune system into action. A family of proteins called cytokines sets off inflammation in the body, and switches the brain into sickness mode...it starts to look as if depression is a kind of allergy to modern life''

Caroline Williams

Arendt

 

'As discussed, the hippocampus plays a key role in declarative memory. As will become quite pertinent when we turn to depression, glucocorticoid exposure can impair LTP in the hippocampus and can even cause atrophy of neurons there. This phenomenon constitutes the opposite of the stress response in the amygdala. Severe stress can harm the hippocampus, preventing the consolidation of a conscious, explicit memory of the event; at the same time, new neuronal branches and enhanced LTP facilitate the amygdala’s implicit memory machinery. In subsequent situations, the amygdala might respond to preconscious information—but conscious awareness or memory may never follow...such a mechanism could underlie forms of free-floating anxiety. It is interesting that these structural changes come about, in part, because of hormones secreted by the adrenal glands, a source well outside the brain. As mentioned, the amygdala’s perception of stress ultimately leads to the secretion of epinephrine and glucocorticoids. The glucocorticoids then activate a brain region called the locus coeruleus. This structure, in turn, sends a powerfully activating projection back to the amygdala, making use of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine (a close relative of epinephrine). The amygdala then sends out more CRH, which leads to the secretion of more glucocorticoids. A vicious circle of mind-body feedback can result'.

Sapolsky

"I DO NOT WANT to conclude this article having given the impression that anxiety and depression are “all” or “only” about stress. Obviously, they are not. Both illnesses have substantial genetic components as well. Genes code for the receptors for dopamine, serotonin and glucocorticoids. They also code for the enzymes that synthesize and degrade those chemical messengers, for the pumps that remove them from the synapses, for growth factors like BDNF, and so on. But those genetic influences are not inevitable. Remember, if an individual has one of the major psychiatric disorders, her identical twin has only about a 50 percent chance of having it. Instead the genetic influences seem to be most about vulnerability: how the brain and body react to certain environments, including how readily the brain and body reequilibrate after stress. Experience, beginning remarkably early in life, also influences how one responds to stressful environments. The amount of stress a female rat is exposed to during pregnancy influences the amount of glucocorticoids that cross the placenta and reach the fetus; that exposure can then alter the structure and function of that fetus’s hippocampus in adulthood. Separate a newborn rat from its mother for a sustained period and it will have increased levels of CRH as an adult. Seymour Levine, one of the giants of psychobiology, illustrates this point with a quotation from William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.” An understanding of the role of stress in psychiatric disorders offers much. It teaches us that a genetic legacy of anxiety or depression does not confer a life sentence on sufferers of these tragic diseases. It is paving the way for some new therapies that may help millions. Given that there is a continuum between the biology of these disorders and that of the “normal” aspects of emotion, these findings are not only pertinent to “them and their diseases” but to all of us in our everyday lives. Perhaps most important, such insight carries with it a social imperative: namely, that we find ways to heal a world in which so many people learn that they must always feel watchful and on guard or that they must always feel helpless''

Sapolsky.

Marx

The executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its wide-ranging and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million – this terrifying parasitic body which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores sprang up in the time of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system which it had helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the motley patterns of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a factory.

Finally the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it. The parties, which alternately contended for domination, regarded the possession of this huge state structure as the chief spoils of the victor.

Karl Marx 

"Colors confuse, pulling my eyes and mind in too many directions at once. Shadowy sight is less demanding, less shrill. But night has its own demands of total dark, a stillness too still. Depression pushes me farther in distrust of living toward no living at all''.

JFW

Parsons

"I say, who cared for those heartaches and pains? You were only a tramp now, to be execrated and denounced as a "worthless tramp and a vagrant" by that very class who had been engaged all those years in robbing you and yours. Then can you not see that the "good boss" or the "bad boss" cuts no figure whatever?...Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM and not the "boss" which must be changed?''

Lucy Parsons

"The eighteenth century is the century of letters. The eighteenth century best seller Pamela, for example, is a novel with letters. Letters are experiments in subjectivity precisely because a letter always  presupposes an audience who reads it. In turn, individuals would meet in public to discuss what they had read. One might argue that subjectivity communicated with itself to gain clarity about itself''.

Haag on Habermas

 

"Synthetic a priori proposition, in logic, a proposition the predicate of which is not logically or analytically contained in the subject—i.e., synthetic—and the truth of which is verifiable independently of experience—i.e., a priori".

"In general the truth or falsity of synthetic statements is proved only by whether or not they conform to the way the world is and not by virtue of the meaning of the words they contain. Synthetic a priori knowledge is central to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who argued that some such a priori concepts are presupposed by the very possibility of experience''.