Violence & Protest | Philosophy Tube

achilles wrath to grease the diet full spring of woes unnumbered heavenly goddess sing that wrath which hurled to hades gloomy rain the souls of heroes to untimely slain declare o muse in what ill-fated hour sprung that fierce strife from what offended power in 2016 four thousand environmentalists in germany shut down a coal mine germany has a lot of coal mines in fact they account for seven of the ten biggest co2 emitters in europe so activists from the enda galander movement blockaded the gosu

la mine and the power station next door to it which is called which is called swage pimp i think i saw a sword performing at harpies last week they broke down a few fences and sprayed some graffiti but mainly they just stood in the way of the machinery and shut the plant down for two days they attracted a lot of criticism the ceo of vardenfall the company who owned the mine at the time described it as massive in criminellin gavel tartan i think i saw miss even criminal and gold tartan performing

at electroworks last week and it's interesting that he used the word violence because the activists didn't hurt anybody they were unarmed they didn't even damage the machinery despite being attacked and then arrested by police and despite being attacked by members of the far-right party alternative for deutschland whose only problem with german coal is that it's brown so this is the context in which i would like us to consider today's topic the iliad is one of humanity's oldest stories i studie

d it in high school at the same time as i was going through a big anime phase it tells the story of the invincible warrior achilles and his friends trying to rescue the lady helen from lord frieza and then some androids show up with a bug man and there's a sequel where they go into space but the french philosopher simone vale says the true protagonist of the iliad isn't achilles or goku it's actually violence itself it's almost omnipresent throughout the poem both glorified and described quite b

itterly almost as if homer couldn't make up his mind about it a lot of people seem to be in two minds about violence especially political violence the ecologist andreas marm was one of the people involved in the action against suage poomp he's been an environmentalist since the early 90s literally longer than i've been alive in that time millions of people have gone on marches millions of children have taken part in schools strikes for climate there's been letter writing campaigns and extinction

rebellion and with the exception of the unabomber and a few others all of that's been completely non-violent mama and others say that's pretty remarkable it is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism after all terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world's most effective form of political action and climate change is an issue about which people feel just as strongly as about say animal rights this is especially noticeable when you b

ear in mind the ease of things like blowing up petrol stations or vandalizing suvs in cities suvs are loathed by almost everyone except the people who drive them and in a city the size of london a few dozen people could in a short space of time make the ownership of these cars effectively impossible just by running keys down the side of them at a cost to the owner of several thousand pounds a time say 50 people vandalizing four cars each every night for a month that's 6 000 trashed suvs in a mon

th and the chelsea tractors would soon be disappearing from our streets so why don't these things happen mom also says that this inspiring tradition of non-violence has failed in my lifetime co2 emissions have accelerated and there is now more money being invested in fossil fuel infrastructure if civilization as we know it is to survive those investments need to be written off that means there needs to be no more fossil fuel infrastructure commissioned and some of what we've already got needs to

be dismantled mom says the free market ain't going to do that because investors expect profit and governments have so far been reluctant to make the first move so mom and here i must stress that the views of doctor mom are not necessarily the views of philosophy tube free speech free speech academic cancer culture turn around touch the ground skin cheese mom explicitly recommends sabotage massive in criminal and devil tartan as the endogelander slogan puts it we are the investment risk at what

point do we escalate when do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different when do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands is there a good reason we have waited this long greta thundberg turning up at cop27 like right [ __ ] to be clear mom doesn't want violence against people he advocates targeted sabotage of fossil fuel emitting devices like suvs and power plants as part of a mass movement that remains overwhelmi

ngly non-violent so he doesn't want guillotines but he does want people to consider moving from protest to direct action given that the vast majority of environmental action is non-violent a lot of people obviously find that idea a little bit too spicy it's one thing to express yourself by going on a march it's another to actually try and do something about it some environmental movements including extinction rebellion and enda galander in 2016 explicitly rule out the kind of thing that mom thin

ks is necessary he and others say this ruling out of direct action often ignores the history of it working people remember mlk they ignore the black panthers they remember gandhi they ignore the indian mutiny they remember the suffragettes but they ignored the suffragettes who planted bombs and threw rocks at winston churchill can you imagine the reaction you would get throwing stones even at the statue of winston churchill now we wouldn't need nuclear energy we could power the whole country on

the fury of telegraph columnists and i include myself here the stonewall riot was one of the catalysts for lgbt rights in the english-speaking world and it wasn't peaceful police turned up at the stonewall inn in new york and started systematically rounding up and sexually assaulting trans and gay people so they defended themselves they threw loose change and then bricks at the police i'm glad they did that my life is almost certainly better as a result and yet i have political goals now things

that would make my life better again and i'm not using those kinds of tactics to pursue them now you might say abigail that's because you're a hypocrite and a coward and you'd rather lie around in a hammock eating french cheese then get off your ass and actually try and do something and i'd say well i don't think that's entirely fair it's not a hammock it's a divan but this is philosophy tube and on this show we know that the interesting intellectual and emotional stuff comes out when people try

to defend the tensions in what they think so why do so many people have this discomfort almost hypocrisy around violence maybe what we need is a clear-cut case to sharpen our critical skills so let's take it to the extreme let's talk about guillotines [Music] france in the 19th century was an absolute monarchy that's a political system in which the monarch is not bound by any written law so they have a right to do anything you can't stop them from doing they had a lot of debt and poor people pa

id more taxes than rich people because rich people wrote all the laws and rich people had so captured the state that meaningful reform just wasn't happening pluses the people of france decided they'd had enough so they wrote strongly worded letters and held peaceful protests until the people in charge felt so bad they changed their ways i'm just kidding they cut the king's goddamn head off and almost immediately several european politicians and philosophers their [ __ ] pants but one man could a

lways be relied upon to keep his pants firmly unshitted and that was prussian philosopher emmanuel kant can't read a lot of famous books like the critique of pure reason groundwork of the metaphysics of morals harry potter and the metaphysics of justice all of which philosophy students will know but today i want to look at some of his lesser-known albums his later stuff his b sides because kant actually lived through the french revolution i say lived through he never actually went to france but

he read about it on 19th century twitter and he had some thoughts that have puzzled philosophers since because even kant had some seemingly contradictory ideas about political violence on the one hand kant was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolutionary cause so much so that he acquired the nickname the old jacobin the jacobins were the more radical wing of the revolution when things first got going it looked like france might become a constitutional monarchy like britain where you keep the m

onarch but they have to follow some laws and the jacobins were like and eventually they won kant thought republicanism was great the most rational form of government on the other hand he condemned killing the king and any kind of violence and even breaking the law he was very explicit about that all resistance against the supreme legislative power all incitement of the subjects to violent expressions of discontent all defiance which breaks out into rebellion is the greatest and most punishable c

rime in a commonwealth for it destroys its very foundations this prohibition is absolute and even if the power of the state or its agent the head of state has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act tyrannically and has thereby in the eyes of the subject forfeited to the right to legislate the subject is still not entitled to offer counter-resistance and philosophers since can't have tried to figure out how he squared these two apparently contradictory ideas liking th

e french revolution but opposing the french revolution kant was quite into what philosophers call social contract theory it was really big in the enlightenment there's lots of different versions but the basic idea is imagine a time before society called the state of nature where there are no laws it's not a real time like the dark ages or the roman empire it's a rhetorical figure like the age of heroes or the time of gods and monsters in the state of nature everybody has authority over themselve

s so in that sense they have a certain freedom but because people's interests conflict everybody's fighting all the time so they come together and they transfer their individual authority to a government so they can decide what to do when people's interests conflict that way we replace violence with politics in return the government might promise to do some stuff like follow the law depends which version of the theory you're talking about the problem of organizing a state however hard it may see

m can be solved even for a race of devils if only they are intelligent the problem is given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them to establish a constitution in such a way that although their private intentions conflict they check each other with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions and this is why kant thought that citizens have no right to ris

e up against their governments or even to question them suppose the people of a country felt their government was too harsh so they started rebelling the government could turn around and say the only reason we're being harsh is to quash the rebellion and who's to decide who's in the right you can't have another government above the government to decide who's right when the people in the government disagree the whole point of having a government is they decide what happens when people disagree no

w at this point it might be tempting to say that kant is not only licking boot he's wrapping the boot in pate and baking it in pastry a kind of wellington boot if you will but the key here is he's not saying challenging the government would necessarily result in disaster just that it would be intellectually inconsistent you want to have a social contract but you also don't want to give up your individual authority what sorry but that doesn't make sense you can't have both this is a classic cante

en move to insist that the thing you want must not be contradictory if you can grasp what he's doing here then a lot of the rest of his stuff will start making sense and generations of philosophy students have felt that same frustration you might be feeling where it's like come on can't what are you a [ __ ] vulcan people aren't 100 rational all the time we're not consistent and he'd say yeah i know but you should try if you're going to use brain you got to use all brains and it might not be qui

te as weird as it appears at first this idea is actually reflected in international law we might not like that other countries don't have democracy but you're not supposed to invade and make them have democracy you can't want a system of sovereign nations and also want to tell other people what to do that's a contradiction although it does still happen so given all this why did kant support the french revolution an uprising that quite clearly breaks his rules can't thought that by watching a rev

olution and cheering it on but not taking part in the violence we create a community of onlookers the revolutionary goes beyond morality deliberately breaks the rules of the game and obviously morality can't ever tell you that it's acceptable to do that but the spectators stay in the moral zone and engage with the questions that the revolution throws up by doing so they develop morally and intellectually and so humanity progresses kant thought that by watching the revolution people would be insp

ired to recognize the virtues of republicanism and so out of evil cometh good okay and it might be tempting to just say that kant is being a coward what you'd sit on your ass and watch while other people try and build a better world but he was hundreds of miles away and he was an old man he wasn't going to be storming the bastille and the same is sometimes true today not everyone has the opportunity or the ability to blockade a power plant engaging with the questions that political violence thro

ws up is not necessarily cowardice it's kind of the premise of political philosophy so let's get engaged i was not personally involved in the ender galander occupation of swoosh poomp and statistically you probably weren't either and even if you were you weren't we were spectators this time we have allegedly witnessed some mass even criminal and geralt tartan and we can engage with the questions that it throws up one of which might be when the police attacked the activists that wasn't generally

called violent why not the philosopher walter benjamin had a lot of thoughts on the police he was living in weimar germany in 1921 when he wrote his famous essay critique of violence critiquing means investigation rather than criticism and he certainly had a lot to investigate germany had just lost world war one so the rest of europe was sending them venmo requests for reparations they had a lot of debt they had food shortages they had political deadlock pluses the year before 1920 german police

murdered 42 left-wing protesters outside the reichstag the german parliament there was a right-wing coup called the cup putch which was overthrown after a few days by a general strike the striking workers decided hey we quite like being in charge of our own lives so they took over an area of germany called the ruler before being absolutely brutally put down by the government they had just saved working with some of the right-wing forces that launched the coup so if the social contract was suppo

sed to be replacing violence with politics it didn't seem like it was working a lot of people were starting to suspect that actually the government was fine with violence as long as it's against communists and as the old poem goes first they came for the communists benjamin distinguishes between a few different types of violence the first is law preserving violence like when the police tackle somebody and arrest them in an ideal world we could talk to people and persuade them not to hurt each ot

her but philosophers and normal people have pointed out that sometimes words aren't enough so the government and their agents the police maintain a monopoly on violence so people can live in peace even when they might prefer not to however that might be a little bit too simple i don't know about you but whenever i see people talk about the police what they do is rarely described as violent it would be one thing if they said oh the police used violence on the end of galander activists but it was

justified but through things like using the passive voice in headlines and only describing what the activists did as gabal it seems like what the police do doesn't even count as violence benjamin has an explanation for this he says the police don't do law preserving violence at least not exclusively their real job is to use what he calls law making or mythic violence which is itself illegal but is the foundation of a new legal order for example the french revolution he says cops regularly do thi

ngs for security reasons that are completely illegal and in so doing they create law on the spot in the interests of the state without democratic oversight benjamin really did not like cops kind of understandable given what he'd seen them do mythic violence is a bit of a departure from the old social contract idea where people get together and form a government that represents the general will to limit violence rather benjamin says that creating a legal order is itself a violent act when a gover

nment is formed it gathers all the violence into itself and says right this violence is acceptable and this violence isn't and the way it decides isn't a rational decision-making process so much as vibes for example blockading a coal mine bad vibes police beating the unarmed people doing the occupying well that passes the vibe check batman commits violence against criminals the gotham police also commit violence against criminals and probably a lot of people who aren't criminals but bennyman say

s they chase batman because his violence isn't officially sanctioned it's a threat to the system not because it is violent but because it's the wrong vibes if you wanted to commit illegal violence against people who haven't been proven to do anything wrong you should have joined the police oh god it's finally happened i've been reduced to making philosophical analyses of pop culture you either die philosophy tube or you live long enough to see yourself become jordan peterson mythic violence is o

ften mythologized even romanticized by associating it with symbols like uniforms and flags if you adopt those symbols you can give people the impression your violence is sanctioned even though officially it might not be and you may even get away with it exactly what violence is and isn't sanctioned is deliberately not written down in the law it's meant to be vague because then they have a right to do anything you can't stop them from doing we really are a long way from seeing society as a social

contract between rational individuals aimed at limiting violence rather benjamin sees society as founded in and maintained by violence he has another kind up his sleeve though divine violence the exact meaning of this has been hotly debated but he says that divine violence doesn't establish a new legal order rather it destroys legal order and achieves justice he's thinking about that general strike that defeated the cup putch maybe he would say that the endogalander action was divine violence t

oo there are lots of fictional stories about heroes going beyond the law to dish out divine violence there's batman and james bond and the classic 1966 cowboy film django which i hear is being adapted into a tv series you should watch that when it comes out next year it's got a lot of very good actors in it and also me but a lot of people have wondered whether divine violence is possible in the real world can it be done nor will you just end up sparking a cycle of revenge will you just end up es

tablishing a new system with its own injustices in which case what you've actually done is mythic violence like the french revolution one of the big differences between benjamin and kant is that whereas kant sees violence as almost always prohibited benjamin's like oh well you know sometimes it's based you got to look at who's doing it and why and that leads us on to something even more interesting another question that we could engage with when spectating the ender galander action is was that a

ctually violence it was miss even and it was criminally but was it gerbil tartan a lot of legal texts define violence as involving some kind of physical force or damage but then threatening somebody is often seen as violent two in law the oxford online dictionary defines violence as your subscription to the oxford online dictionary has expired please click here to renew every time i get a dictionary joke every time this is potentially a very important issue because the meaning of violence affect

s how we use other words like threat protection security vulnerable populations terrorism intimidating protest these words can affect our lives in a major way think about the difference between describing a group of people as a crowd versus describing them as a mob one of those words paints them as potentially violent and these words can be used to enact political control on the previous episode of this show we talked about islamophobia and how the concept of threat can be deployed to paint peop

le as violent even when there's no evidence it's really worth taking this in the idea that calling something violent is itself a kind of metaphorical weapon violent people are not usually thought of as having the right to self-defense if somebody attacks you and you fight back and they kill you they can't claim self-defense because they started it so by calling someone violent you imply that they don't have the right to resist politicians and journalists will sell you policies making that move o

n everything from policing to workers rights to interpretation of your own country's history benjamin said that mythic violence can be used to establish a legal system and philosophers since him have added that it can also be used to set the boundaries of what even gets to be thought of as violent and that doesn't mean that we should just throw up our hands and go oh well i guess it's all relative then just that whatever definition of violence we employ we should consider how it's going to be us

ed we cannot simply start with a definition of violence and then proceed to debate under what conditions violence is justified or not for we have first to settle the question of which framework is naming violence through what erasures and for what purpose we cannot simply assume a definition of violence and then begin our moral debates about justification without first critically examining how violence has been circumscribed and which version is presumed in the debate in question a critical proc

edure would ask as well about the very justificatory scheme at work in such a debate its historical origins its presuppositions and foreclosures last week another mysterious fire ravaged a private medical clinic in malibone causing over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds worth of damage and killing a cleaner the week before another blaze destroyed a beautiful house of worship in islington once a picturesque feature of the london skyline now an ugly smoldering crater the arson crisis gripping th

e capital is a national emergency and almost as bad as the fires themselves is the chilling effect they've had on voices especially the voices of women and girls who have legitimate concerns about the fire department the quality of discourse has declined last week my good friend baroness plantation war crimes had stones thrown at her metaphorically in an innocent digital muddle-up plantation liked a tweet that was critical of firefighters and almost immediately the anti-fire woke mob started pay

ing for her blood just for daring to challenge anti-fire orthodoxy to accuse baroness war crimes a woman who has spent her entire political career safeguarding the lives and livelihoods that matter most in this country of encouraging arson is ridiculous just for liking a tweet that said firefighters are all and off a balcony into a [Music] many reasonable people have legitimate concerns about zealous bans on smoking oppressive fire safety codes and orwellian restrictions as to how much kerosene

one can store in one's own house my brother is a door-to-door petrol salesman and he says that complying with these starvingist regulations is driving him almost to penury he nearly had to sell his second home but the flesh-eating piranhas whipping up social media outrage are only too happy to trample on the rights of honest hard-working men like him and even when women and girls speak up they want to silence us i heard how baroness war crimes was ruthlessly silenced when i saw her on bbc news n

ight and heard her on radio 4 and 2 in women's hour and read her in the guardian observer spectator telegraph and her new book the british press will not be intimidated by these anti-fire thugs any more than we are by the transgender taliban and the intersex intifada thank god for groups like firefighters against kerosene enforcement an alliance of firefighters and ex-firefighters standing up for the rights of good citizens against the militant activists in the fire brigade thanks to fake's oppo

sition there's somebody to check the destructive rampage of wokeness after all society must be defended simone vale the french philosopher who wrote that essay about the iliad we started with makes an interesting suggestion she says that violence or force is the thing that takes away human choice she wasn't the first person to say this the 13th century philosopher thomas aquinas said that the violent is the opposite of the voluntary if somebody loses their agency their autonomy their ability to

affect the world then violence is the thing that takes that away to define force it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing exercise to the limit it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense makes a corpse out of him in whatever aspect its effect is the same it turns a man into a stone from the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power in its way more extraordinary the power to make a human being into a thing while he i

s still alive he is alive he has a soul and yet he is a thing strange a thing with a soul strange for the soul it wasn't made to inhabit a thing when it is forced to there is not a single part of it that is not subjected to violence veil's definition might prompt some interesting reflections if she's right then violence is very common raising a child involves denying them choices so that would be a kind of violence compulsory public health measures like mass mandates or vaccine requirements woul

d be kind of violent as would denying somebody healthcare the french revolution obviously but also the regime that preceded it this means that it would be difficult to divide actions into violent and non-violent which is annoying because it would be really useful if we could do that it would be very helpful if there were some particles of violence that we could detect and say ah this thing is definitely twenty percent more violent than this thing but sadly it doesn't seem to work that way violen

ce is a relationship between the action and the context in which it takes place we could consider the suaj pump occupation to be violent mom does if you sabotage something then you deny somebody the choice to use it and that is a kind of indirect violence but of course mom would invite us to consider the context the much greater though slower violence of building and maintaining a coal-fired power plant and he's not the first person to point this out either it's been a persistent feature of stru

ggles for racial justice for decades there is a daily pervasive state violence that is never spoken of much less acknowledged for palestinians living under a brutal military occupation for marginalized disenfranchised young people in british cities or french suburbs for african-americans disproportionately impoverished disadvantaged and preyed upon by u.s police surviving generation upon generation of institutionalized and violent racism for the global south diminished and drained by neoliberal

policies imposed upon it by the imf and the wto if it were ever in doubt the protests in baltimore have shown us once again that only some types of violence are visible or really matter the trouble of course is that you can't focus on both the action and the context at the same time hence the weird almost hypocrisy that we started with to the jacobins the violence of the french revolution was justified in the context of what came before but understandably that came as little comfort to louis xvi

who still ended up contextually [ __ ] dead the million-dollar question is how do we separate the violence that we care about from the violence that we are willing to accept or believe to be inevitable and that's kind of what politics is for when the german police took back the gosula mine most of the people involved escaped a few hundred were arrested and then had to be released because they refused to speak to the cops and just clogged up the bureaucracy there were some charges made but as fa

r as i can find nobody was ever convicted of anything the mine was owned at the time by a company called vartanfall who were themselves owned by the swedish government who were social democrats and greens so clever choice of target kind of hard for them to ignore that context sadly rather than shut it down they sold it to a collection of fossil capitalists from the czech republic and it is still in operation at time of recording step forward we hear that you are a good man you cannot be bought b

ut the lightning which strikes the house also cannot be bought you hold to what you said but what did you say you are honest you say your opinion which opinion you are brave against whom you are wise for whom you do not consider your personal advantages well whose advantages do you consider then you are a good friend are you also a good friend of the good people hear us then we know you are our enemy this is why we shall now put you in front of a wall but in consideration of your merits and good

qualities we shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you with a good bullet from a good gun and bury you with a good shovel in the good earth by the way if you've ever wondered how philosophy tube is made then i have some good news for you we have created a behind-the-scenes documentary about my process and how the show originally got started with the support of curiosity stream about whom you probably heard they are a subscription streaming service they've got thousands of titles about

art and science and history the documentary has been made by the philosophy tube crew not by me so i am quite excited to see it and it will be out by the end of this year i am told on nebula nebula is a streamy award-nominated platform that i and a few other creators all own a little piece of they don't have any adverts or demonetization so it's a good place to put extra stuff like this that might not necessarily fly on youtube and the way it works is if you sign up to curiositystream you get n

ebula included for free they get your subscriptions you get the documentary i get a little bit of money for saying this that goes to the people who made the documentary just to sweeten the deal though if you go to curiositystream.com philosophytube and you can get 26 off curiosity streamer as well that means you get them and nebula for 15 a year you don't have to sign up to their premium package you can sign up at the standard curiosity stream level and you still get nebula included i double che

cked and there is some really cool stuff on there for example i watched a documentary about the french revolution that had some really cute animations in it and some reenactments that made me smile and i learned a lot so click the link in the doobly-doo or go to curiositystream.com philosophy did you figure it out yet what to do with the figurative outlet i'm running my mouth that happened slept well in a couple of days trying to figure it out but i'm stuck in the shapes that i'm handing probabl

y to the people they demanded what kind of power men i can't am i just a liberal if i ain't got the point yet get big hard if you can't take the stand but this [ __ ] right here for those still tall power to the soap yet still will defend cause it was the first time that they made the attempt but left calm and calm made me cynical save live images the parliamentary liberal not to say that i unite with that position or the vanguardism it's support efficient i'm still learning on the journey and i

'm burning up cause the planet's getting [ __ ] while i'm doing it for another book another page another word of wisdom wanna go take your time baby it's a crazy amount we gotta learn just to get [ __ ] i can't take this [ __ ] anymore what about practice we gotta talk tactics talk last reality spilling on your mattress can't go to sleep think about marxist [ __ ] you may get the point but it's still poor marx machine gotta hit the street gotta hit the fast gotta get the nasty the mask gotta ski

p my clowns gotta gotta be more proletarian that you can forgive me lord sinned and thought in pure pet and pushed my thoughts grab me a revisionist so i may resurrect as a true revolutionary true and perfect list of comrade practices unapplied theory nothing going forward but sometimes we get stuck inside the fortress reading same [ __ ] same [ __ ] it gets boring gotta get funky gotta gotta get creative gotta read another paper bow better let it sleep gotta stick in my hole gotta do research i

mean search then see if it works yeah emphasis on definitive styles and not just re-read now wow what a life i've been given don't want to sacrifice but uplift it then have the guns come assistant build up the neighborhood make it strong break oppressive bonds make you want it but what do i know cause there ain't no bible describing how the battle for survival all i got is curiosity and contradictions that are mountains but also move mountains quite violently revolutionary doubt i'm searching w

hat i'm certain of i'm carrying out yeah [Music] [Music] surprise flex