Edited by GPT

For Will Conway, horrors arise when we attempt to untangle mobiles; to dehumanize is to orthopedically exterminate the erring that is human. Pervasive, hair-trigger biopolitical circuitries do not merely detect error and those who err—they create them. These circuits seek to eliminate the novelty that is error, attacking unpredictability, variation, and multiplicity. The result is a world in which we must either justify ourselves immediately and flawlessly or face lethal disregard.

Conway’s analysis, drawn from Agamben and Foucault, exposes how gatherings founded on practical reason and its moralisms are sustained through the violent exclusion of those deemed incapable of such reason. This exclusion is not incidental; it is generative. It produces the hoi polloi, the stupid, the errant, and the anomic—figures that judicious assemblies define themselves against. Before dialogue and governance can appear “sensible,” certain hindrances must first be swept aside, though not entirely erased, since they must persist as a foundational other. Those who perform this purification—self-styled arbiters of good sense—often happen to be ourselves and our accomplices, so long as we have inherited or accumulated sufficient authority to participate in authoring civilized limits.

Arendt, in a charitable reading, takes on the perspective of colonizers when she notes that to them, native savages were “as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse.” The customary phrase we are reasonable people silently marks out who is not included within reason’s embrace. But ‘we’ are always, in some sense, constituted by those we vanquish. As Bayo Akomolafe puts it, “Each individual citizen is the majestic product/outcome and yet ongoing exertion of the hidden public. The blood of the vanquished.”

The establishment of nomoi, laden with moral value, necessitates the simultaneous creation of zones of indistinction between bios and zoē—between politically qualified life and life reduced to bare existence. Civilization, in this schema, requires the continual production and extermination of savages, impurities, and brutes. Citizenship is sustained through the subjugation of its “useful” and through the abandonment and extermination of its “useless”  alter-egos.

If eudaimonia is achieved through leading a virtuous life in accordance with moral law, then failure to achieve it is easily reinterpreted as sin, a lack of individual virtue, or a failure of practical reason. In The Echoes of Utility, Conway quotes The Republic, where Plato describes a just society as one in which:

"Those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves."

Plato’s passive, fluid shift from the pathological to the moral is striking. Illness becomes corruption; suffering becomes a justification for elimination. The seemingly noble call to cleanse society of its disorderly elements masks the foundational violence upon which that very nobility depends.

Binarized social orders demand that suffering be made productive. It becomes the unsensed sacrificial labor constituting the eudaimonic and hedonic subjectivities of others. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, described his garden adjacent to the death camp as “a paradise of flowers.” The horror here is not the contradiction, but the coherence: the garden is cultivated precisely because the machinery of death is so meticulously maintained. The polis, too, has always depended on its hidden zones of elimination.

As Ernest Becker reminds us, it is in the places where “the goats are torn apart” that the “pathetic cowardliness” of it all is revealed. Civilization’s wager has always been this: some will live as reason, while others will die for it.

In his lecture The New Global Mobility Regime, Achille Mbembe states:

"According to the new and old security rationale, although everybody is potentially dangerous until proven otherwise, some categories of bodies and persons carry, almost by definition, more risks than others. Even in their most vulnerable state, they fundamentally endanger our lives. As such they must be the object of renewed profiling, classification, and isolation. Or even eliminated in line with a long history in modernity that ties together the targeting, quarantining, restriction, and even extermination of populations that have been marked as abnormal or have been profoundly dishonored."

The most effective way to reduce risk, then, is to render so-called risk-bearing persons docile—if necessary, by destroying their minds and bodies. John Rawls argues that the natural distribution of talents "...is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. They are natural facts." But both historical injustices (which persist in the present) and sheer chance exist, and Rawls downplays the former. If one were to punch someone in the face and then offer them a band-aid, it would be offensive to expect gratitude or to insist that their injury was merely bad luck rather than a result of prior injustice. If we follow Rawls' appeal to nature and his flawed reasoning, then, to simplify, restitution, restoration, and reparations are rendered unnecessary.

Discussing the reconciliation process between Indigenous people and settlers in Canada, Nick Estes observes:

"How messed up is it that the very perpetrators of that violence are now the ones who are going to remediate that violence, provide the care for those victims of violence? Hey, I’m sorry we kidnapped all of your children, sent them to residential schools, killed a lot of them, raped a lot of them, abused a lot of them. Now we’re going to say sorry, but instead of actually giving back land or giving back the resources for you to build yourselves as nations, we’re just going to provide the social services for you to get the help that you need from us. It’s this mentality of crying on the shoulder of the man who stole your land."

At least in this instance there is nominal recognition of past and present injustices. It is, without a doubt, often extremely unjust that persons are born into society at particular positions, and not all talents are acquired "naturally." No talent could conceivably be cultivated entirely outside of human and non-human societies and ecologies. As Matt Segall asserts:

"Agency is always co-agency, it's always discovered with those adjacent to you...You enter into symbiosis with those fellow agents and realize purposes beyond what any independent individual can even fathom."

Injuries to agency, like agency itself, are also co-discovered.  Jack D. Forbes provides a stark illustration of this kind of "discovery"—as he argues in Columbus and Other Cannibals, colonialism and civilization themselves operate through a process he called wétiko meaning a cannibalistic psychosis that consumes the agency and vitality of others for its own sustenance. Restoration and justice are called for—not the moral sleight of hand that presents state, private, or personal charity as adequate redress. Not the sleight of hand that the injured are often in too weak a position not to grudgingly accept on pain of death.