A hammer is a means to an end. As in the famous example used by Heidegger, when you use a hammer, you are only aware of it insofar as it helps you to achieve your goal. The more proficient you are at using hammers (perhaps you've been a workman for thirty years), the less likely you are to actually perceive the hammer at all. It becomes an extension of yourself.
But the hammer still has its own reality, much more complex than your vision of the hammer as tool-to-put-shelves-up takes into consideration. You're reminded of this when, as you're just about to slam the final blow on that nail, and you're caught up in fantasies of how nice it'll be to have all your books on this shelf, the head of the hammer breaks off, and you hit your thumb with the wooden handle.
This brings you back to reality. You look around at the room. You see the fracture in the handle, and you curse yourself for not seeing it before.
When we view any aspect of the universe as a means to an end, we are engaging in a narrative project. We imagine the beginning of the story (pick up hammer), the middle (hit nails), and the end (nice shelf). When we do this, we simplify the innate complexity of the object, and we create a vulnerable construct. A narrative can be interrupted. Because we were so focussed on the story of the hammer as a thing that hits nails, we suppressed the possibility of the plot twist: that the hammer might not be capable of hitting nails at all. The twist doesn't even need to come from the hammer itself - perhaps the nail was placed wrong, or you hear the phone ring in another room and you have to stop hammering to answer it.
This blog is about "ontological democracy" - a term I've invented to describe a new way of interacting with the real world around us. "Ontological" just means "the study of being" - in other words, the branch of philosophy that investigates the 'real world'. That tries to work out what things really exist. I have attached this term to the concept of "democracy" because I think our politics should be ontological. Our democracy should be concerned with trying to work out what is real.
It's not just tools that can be seen as a means to an end. In fact, we tend to see our entire global surroundings as means to an end. Logging companies see forests as a means to profit; Shell sees oil reserves as a means to profit; the International Monetary Fund sees natural disasters as opportunities to force privatisation programmes on vulnerable countries (in order to arrive at the cliché end of: profit).
When people block oil refineries, or Indigenous communities campaign, successfully, to block oil drilling in parts of the Amazon, or even when one person merely says to another: "I think we should probably do something about global warming", they interrupt the narrative of oil as a means to profit. They push back against the hammer.
This interruption is the basis of democracy. As a principle, democracy is the notion that interruptions should be taken seriously, regardless of where they come from, or how disruptive they are.
This principle isn't limited to the lofty realm of societal politics. Narrative constructions, and interruptions, occur within our most intimate relationships. You might see the kitchen counter as a means through which to relieve yourself of the burden of loading the dishwasher ('I'll just pop this bowl on here). Your partner might interrupt this narrative by reminding you of your obligation to do your fair share of the chores around the house, please.
An authoritarian disregards the interruption and carries on. If the interruption continues ("oi! I'm talking to you!") the authoritarian suppresses it ("shut up or else") until able to continue.
The democratic approach to this interruption would be to listen to it, to factor it into your understanding of the world, to measure it against your own beliefs and knowledge, and address its root cause. In other words, to do the dishes, unless you've got a very good excuse.
But there's a problem here. Isn't it a bit unfair that someone or something has to physically interrupt what we're doing before we listen to it? Shouldn't we just know we've got to do the dishes? Shouldn't oil companies just accept that their environmental impact is catastrophic and stop, without having to be regulated?
Mitch Hedberg has a joke: "I got a parrot. The parrot talked, but it did not say 'I'm hungry', so it died."
Perhaps democracy is inherently violent, because it is reactive, rather than predictive. If we define democracy as something that 'takes interruptions seriously', what happens when it is interrupted by something incomprehensible? Or when it's doing violence to something incapable of interrupting forcefully enough? What happens when those with all the power to feed the parrot have no idea that it needs feeding, but because it's a parrot, it cannot communicate hunger in a language we understand?
Non-human animals are incapable of human speech. This means that they are unable to advocate against their own slaughter through 'proper democratic channels'. Pigs can't lobby government, or march in large numbers in front of Westminster, demanding proper treatment. The result is that billions of pigs are trapped in horrific chambers of misery for their entire lives, and are electrocuted, gassed and raped in their billions every year.
One possible response to this violence is withdrawal. Once you've seen the sheer magnitude of violence that human beings are capable of doing to other beings, while considering themselves moral agents, and you realise that you, too, are a human being, then - oh, god - who knows what violence you're doing, right now, that you're completely unaware of, or entirely suppressing? How much harm are you causing purely because the beings being harmed either can't, or won't, tell you about it? You can't trust your own morality. It's blind to so much. Best to do absolutely nothing. You don't know enough about the global food network to know what's been ethically sourced and what hasn't - best just not to eat anything. You don't know enough about trans people to know what's a harmful question and what's innocent - best just not to ask. You don't know how much bacteria lives in the air you're breathing right now, nor what it thinks about being sucked into your lungs - best just not to breathe.
Yeah, fair enough. Not the best option.
An alternative is the opposite: ignorance. You can't possibly know everything about everything, but you still need to go on living. Who knows, maybe pigs squeal because they like being tortured? We just don't know enough. Might as well get on with it. Do whatever you want, because nobody knows enough to say that what you're doing is wrong.
The answer lies somewhere between these two positions. Maybe an apple feels pain when we bite into it, in a way science is yet incapable of detecting. We still need to eat. Maybe a pig really does enjoy being confined to a small box, living in its own filth, waiting for a small iron rod to crunch through its skull. But the risk that it probably doesn't is too high, in my humble opinion, to justify industrial meat.
How do we navigate this tightrope of contradictions? How do we justify hammering the nails, if we don't know enough about hammers to know whether this one's gonna break and hurt our thumb in the process? I think the answer "just use your common sense" is cheap and ineffective. What constitutes "common sense" for a human rights lawyer is vastly different from the "common sense" of a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Fortunately, there is a well-developed, rigorously-tested guidebook through this labyrinth. A means through which to approach the world with confidence that you know enough, but with a continuous willingness to revise everything you've ever believed, if presented with irrefutable interruption. It's called the scientific method.
You learn from observation. The crucial thing is, that observation cannot be entirely your own. Modern day theoretical physicists must trust, to a certain extent, the accuracy of the observations Galileo made centuries ago. We have to take certain things for granted if we are to move forward. We can't keep repeating Galileo's experiments in case he got it wrong - if we do, we miss out on quantum physics, relativity and who knows what else.
Science has a pretty reliable way of determining what should be taken for granted. First, it must be 'falsifiable'; i.e., we have to be able to prove it wrong. Newton's theory of gravity is falsifiable. It can be proven, through experimentation, that gravity is an incorrect explanation of the behaviour of a falling apple. The existence of God is not (yet) a falsifiable hypothesis, which is why God remains within the realm of belief. We can't prove God doesn't exist - it therefore does not make sense, according to the scientific method, to assume God's existence.
Once we've assumed something falsifiable about the world, we need to put it to the test. You think it's gravity that makes that apple fall? Okay, prove it.
And once we've run an experiment, we then must interpret that experiment, to check if it confirms or contradicts our hypothesis. We must run the experiment many times, to ensure reliability of results.
We must then publish our results, for others to scrutinise. We must listen to their criticisms, and decide which should be taken into consideration, and which disregarded. We must do so according to how much those criticisms themselves adhere to the scientific method. Are they falsifiable? Are they supported by empirical evidence?
Then, taking everything we have learned into account, we must press forward, with more, altered, nuanced hypotheses, more precise assumptions.
We must be continually aware that the picture of the world science has given us so far is reliable enough that we have been to the moon, developed quantum computing and sequenced the entire human genome. It's pretty solid stuff. If something radically contradicts the scientific consensus, it's very likely wrong.
But not always. We must also be open to the possibility of Einsteins, of those experiments that reveal our boldest prejudices to have been wrong all along. Recent findings in quantum theory, for example, prove the entire concept of time to be a bit of a mirage.
This is an ethical position, a political position, as much as a scientific one. Your ethical position might be that eating meat causes no suffering, and is therefore justifiable. That is a falsifiable claim. A scientific approach would be to set about proving your hypothesis. Perhaps you look for information about the conditions in which animals are kept prior to slaughter for consumption.
You must, then, publish your findings. This might look like talking to others about what you have looked into. Seek out as vast an array of opinions as possible. Listen to those opinions. Are they valid critiques or agreements, according to the scientific method, or are they attacks / ego-stroking?
Perhaps you discover something that drastically alters your self-perception, something that radically contradicts your view of your own morality. An Einsteinian moral leap of understanding, that makes you rethink everything about who you are and what your impact is on the world. Remember, Einsteins don't come along too often; if your self-perception and your morality has always been founded upon rigorous introspection, self-doubt, experimentation and learning, then things that shake your fundamental assumptions are likely wrong.
But not always. Your job is to stress-test this new discovery, to take it seriously, and if it stands the test of scrutiny, you must then follow its implications. If not, you're a scientist in the 21st century denying relativity, desperately clinging on to Newtonian gravity. Or a Republican in 2023 denying the reality of global warming. You've seen how the pigs live; rethink the ham sandwich.
Let's scale this up to the realm of the political. Social organisation should posit only falsifiable assumptions. Not that "fossil fuel production is bad", but that "the continuation of fossil fuel extraction and consumption will lead to societal collapse". The latter can be tested, at least through modelling and simulation. It can be refuted. The fact that it hasn't been compellingly refuted is the only reason we should act. And it's a pretty good motivator.
This is why it's taken decades for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to actually say that global warming is "unequivocally" human-caused. Science is allergic to the notion of the irrefutable.
The voices of those in the Global South who were only recently colonial subjects of us in the Global North provide majorly disruptive evidence to refute the hypothesis that 'Western civilisation' is a moral institution. Our history must be re-evaluated in light of their perspective.
What I am saying is this: in order to live, we must commit to being proven wrong. Consistently. We need to eat to live, and so, however biased our personal perspective, we must eat whatever we think is right. This puts us in a position of potentially being violent. Perhaps we only think something is okay to eat because we are incapable of hearing it cry out. We cannot, therefore, merely wait for our food to say "stop eating me" before we consider the possibility of our harm-doing. We must be conscious of this potential violence at all times. We must say of our food: "eating this will not cause it to suffer", because that is a falsifiable claim, and we must therefore put that claim to the test. And when we have put that claim to the test, we must tell others about our method, findings, and interpretation, and listen critically to what they have to say. We must then act according to what we have discovered, whatever that may be. This is the basic method through which we should navigate relationships, politics and everything else in our lives.
This is what I call Ontological Democracy. It is why we can use hammers even though we know they might break.
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