On Platonic Guardians

Still my favourite scene in the whole show.

    What does it mean to serve as a protector of the state? In Game of Thrones, they may have referred to the "realm," but the essential meaning remains: the protectors of community are forever invested in the welfare of its constituents—but not for power, self-interest, or pride. If not established by this post's title, I am discussing "protectors of the realm": extra-state actors who rarely hold political office, but prioritize the polis: the police usually unrecognized by the state.

    As some of the folks familiar with this blog may know, I almost dropped out of high school in grade 11. I was fortunate that I discovered a bunch of philosophy books at Chapters that became the basis of much of my future interests, research, and writing. Particularly, I became obsessed with translations of Plato's Republic, reading and rereading sections until I was satisfied and confident in my understanding. I had heard of Platonic guardians prior to reading the Republic itself, but I did not appreciate their exhaustive importance to my context until reading (and rereading) Book VI. This section provided me with the knowledge that shaped much of my future aspirations, particularly to participate in governance when- and wherever possible.

    It's 2024, so the alleged guardians of Classical Athens don't hold as much relevance as they would to a relatively isolated city-state with a stable population. However, it's a critical idea for understanding the tension between any general populace and its persistent aristocracy. Plato's philosopher kings exist with and despite the aristocracy, even when the least educated of his contemporaries could be relegated to "Aristocrat, " a term traditionally referring to a typically wealthy member of a minority-elite in a given community, or its "best citizens" in 1500s French communities. In my experience, it's rarely used in 21st century contexts, but its traditional characteristics persist in neologisms of "elite," "privileged," or the "establishment."

    I was hesitant to write this post because I feel as though discussing this passage from the Republic has been overdone to clichéd parody.  However, it was critical to my own development and motivations.  Much of my decision-making after that tumultuous year could be attributed to my aspiration to service,  toward Platonic guardianship.  

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  Since that time, I have considered myself a civil servant first and an educator or student second.  Following the Socratic tradition, education was always a means to a stronger civil society, which follows from the description and purposes of Plato's "guardian class," AKA "philosopher kings."

    If you Google this passage, you will find innumerable blog posts referencing rough transliterations of the same essential meaning:

"the reason why truth forced us to admit, not without fear and hesitation, that neither cities nor States nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small class of philosophers whom we termed useless but not corrupt are providentially compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the State, and until a like necessity be laid on the State to obey them; or until kings, or if not kings, the sons of kings or princes, are divinely inspired ' d with a true love of true philosophy. That either or both of these alternatives are impossible, I see no reason to affirm: if they were so, we might indeed be justly ridiculed as dreamers and visionaries." (Republic, Book VI)

    This custodial role has continued everywhere from Warhammer 40k to Wikipedia Administrators. These often extra-state actors don't always hold political office or enforcement arms of nation-states, but they frequently gravitate to these roles in order to fulfill the broader purpose of "[taking] care of the State."

    Ironically, these would-be protectors often find themselves directly confronting the faces of the aristocracy, those who treat the state as a means and not an end in itself.  This classical conflict will persist long after we're gone; the aristocracy that exists for itself isn't going anywhere.   

    Yet, we must persist.  Anyone committed to the broader welfare of the state (however the "state" manifests in each respective epoch) must confront the excesses of aristocratic power.  Most of the folks predisposed to such advocacy tend to find themselves among the aristocracy, and therefore, they are usually best positioned to police it in each instance.

    Bertrand Russell no doubt encountered this same tension, especially given his obvious and self-consciously privileged origin.  But, we cannot let ourselves become so consumed with doubt that we cease to check the power of a self-serving elite; in keeping with Russell's critique, we need to challenge their certainty.

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    When Varys approached Eddard, he likely did so from the same justification he held to continue to serve as a eunuch for the state; he was merely continuing to act as a custodian for the realm the best way that he knew how under the circumstances. Although Varys's characterization included some deliberate faults of character, he is probably the closest GoT has to a member of Plato's guardian class. He illustrates many of the conflicts and paradoxes referenced earlier, of an advisor who also polices other aristocrats and of an aristocrat consumed with doubt despite their privilege and relative power.

    Hence, Varys's death signaled the final decline of his current system of governance. Once aristocrats who exist purely for the sake of the aristocracy seize power, these protectors of the realm are usually the last barrier to totalitarian control, and therefore the former's primary targets. You know many of their names throughout the ages, but these casualties of established power were all in part chasing the same aspiration. That of personal sacrifice and service.

Drafted, edited, and published live on stream in 2 hours on April 28th, 2024.

I am dropping out.

Few people know that he was actually defending Bertrand Russell.

I am writing this post mostly for myself as a reference to be used later when I write a much more exhaustive memoir documenting these experiences.

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A vocal minority of people in the academy wax lyrical about the substance and nature of "speaking truth to power" when it's actually relatively banal in practice if university faculty and administrators happen to dismiss or to enable malpractice, corruption, and/or bad faith action.

Just speak the truth. Challenging existing false and dubious authority is concomitant with the communication of unadulterated truth.  But hey, if you really want to speak truth to power, 

rip that doctorate up at the podium, ideally while also reaffirming to the people of the cloth that 

"this is how we speak truth to power."

Cathartic incendiary invective aside, I am dropping out of my PhD program in year 7, after finishing and submitting a full first draft of my dissertation a little over a year ago.  My only regret is that I did not drop out the moment that my thesis committee refused to recognize my data collection in 2021, allegedly because it was unethical for me to collect data without their unanimous approval of a revised proposal, and despite my receiving full ethical approval for the study's Ethics Protocol from my respective Ethics Review Board.  Despite my most recent attempted compromise negotiated with my departmental administration this past summer of 

collecting a second set of data, 
after ratifying a second set of amendments to my Ethics Protocol, 
upon conducting a secondary analysis, 
and despite offering to consolidate two dissertations worth of data and analyses into one oversized manuscript, 

my thesis committee seems to be stonewalling my progress.  Despite paying tuition out of pocket without working full time while living in downtown Toronto, I submitted a revised proposal (about the 6th or 7th version) with highlighted sections for review early November 2023, and no one on my thesis committee has yet gotten back to me as of this writing with feedback or suggestions for revision.  For some of the folks on my thesis committee, this is not a first-time offense.  One might ask, 

"how did you get here?"

I am not interested in flaming my thesis committee and departmental administration, even if I were convinced that such whistleblowing may assist other current and future colleagues experiencing abuse at UofT; there are other fora for that.  Moreover, I am a pacifist who researches and teaches pacifistic pedagogy.  Yet, I think it's still worthwhile to revisit the basic facts of my situation.

I first applied for my program in 2015 from China while teaching math and science just outside Shanghai.  Unfortunately, I was not accepted to OISE's Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning program's fully-funded PhD cohort on the grounds that the department could not find someone to supervise my research.  Upon receiving the decline, I was convinced that the only way to do my research justice was to leave China and to spend at least a year developing contacts and building my application in-person in Toronto.  So, during a year of massive turnover of staff at my school, I elected to pass over an opportunity to serve as vice-principal in order to pursue the PhD program in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning department at UofT.

What followed was one of the craziest years of my life; it was essentially fully-funded cohort or bust.  My close friend and confidant in China insisted that I could not accomplish what I set out to accomplish in a single year. He insisted that I could not learn French while securing a teaching job in Toronto while also gaining admission into the fully funded cohort at UofT.  Not only did I nearly achieve B2 level French with Alliance Française in about 8 months (as a backup to teach FSL if I didn't get into the PhD program), but I also landed a job at Olympiads School to build and teach their Advanced Placement US History Course after publishing my Masters thesis research in a journal article to convince my current supervisor to give me a recommendation for the program at OISE.  I know my work ethic.

Yet, I should have paid more attention to the red flags.  After admission into the program, I developed a permanent scar in my eye (from a "peripheral corneal ulcer" in the words of my optometrist) from the additional stress of a two week stint supporting my supervisor in writing a grant proposal for over 300 thousand dollars (which they won).  I needed to support a close friend and colleague who had their work plagiarized by a member of my committee after I had recommended them to this individual.  I imagine my growing reputation as a whistleblower (or, you know, someone who cares about the pursuit of truth in a university) merely exacerbated my thesis committee's willingness to attempt to stonewall my completion and my departmental administration's unwillingness to intervene.

The most common advice I receive is to either escalate to the School of Graduate Studies or to lawyer-up.  Feeding other UofT departments additional ammunition to fire at OISE betrays my own commitments as an educator and as an education researcher.

And, I refuse to earn my degree at gun-point (through coercion via "hired gun").  It betrays not only what I believe, but what I research and teach to my students. If the only thing standing between me and a doctorate is my willingness to retain legal counsel, I'm better off just going straight to law school.

Fundamentally, a doctorate is premised upon the recognition of the value of an original contribution to an existing body of knowledge by the doctoral candidate's moral, ethical, or at least intellectual superiors.  On these grounds alone, the degree has lost most of its meaning to me.  I will likely never redeem my image of my department or of UofT, partly because of the over-idealizing I engaged in prior to and near the beginning of my program.  I pursued this path based on a mythology.

These intuitions allege to support and foster intellectual specialization.  But, if your research is truly speci-al (and thereby essentially original in keeping with the etymological roots of that word), then arguably no one in any of these institutions should be able to support your work directly, and, therefore, there would be a real need for other specialists to trust you to conduct your research rigorously and ethically because you're making a tangible but original contribution beyond existing knowledge, including the existing knowledge of your doctoral committee.

Empathizing with my departmental administrators and thesis committee, it's entirely possible that the University of Toronto's Faculty of Education was never actually equipped to support my work in the first place, despite the relevancy of my teaching and the research study's content to both the work of my colleagues and the interests of student participants.  Hence, I fully plan to finish the research study and to publish my research.  My last goal at UofT is to seek approval of the second set of amendments to my ethics protocol to conduct my second set of data collection.

I will finish this research project, conducting the additional data collection and analysis for a second write-up that honestly could undergird a second PhD dissertation.  I care about this research; I didn't give up vice-principal and leave China for a degree; I returned to Canada to finish the project that I began with my Master's thesis.  I will see this through to the end, with or without UofT, and with or without their increasingly irrelevant institutional recognition.

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When a colleague asked me why I submitted a manuscript for journal publication under pseudonym, I commented on the importance of practicing "a measure of humility in an ocean of unexamined arrogance."  These experiences have not shaken my resolve.  If anything, I'm more certain of my position now than I've ever been before.  From my work as a volunteer domestic violence counselor, to my role in the classroom as a professional high school teacher, to my role as a leader in the UTGSU Resistance, to the work that I continue to conduct as a researcher, we normalize the abuse that we're unwilling to contend.  

Moreover, I keep letting other people set my win conditions.  For me to finish my research project despite the neglect, misdirection, and sacrifices necessary to persist in my program is a greater accomplishment from my perspective than if I jumped into an existing research project and finished my doctorate in under four years. It'd be a far greater loss if I abandoned my research completely and betrayed the promises that I made to students, parents, colleagues, administrators, and to myself. My department may have failed me, but I won't fail them. I know what I promised to do.

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People familiar with this blog likely know about my effusive appreciation for Bertrand Russell.  He's been a tag on here since I launched this blog over a decade ago.  In the early 20th century, he was arguably the closest thing folks had to Socrates in the English-speaking parts of the world.  Yet, as I've insisted elsewhere, he would not have survived in some of the departments currently operating in North American universities.

As I was editing this post, I kept revisiting Einstein's quotation because I kept that same poster in my office, directly above my desk, at OISE; (I bought the poster among a couple others with the $60 my brother handed me when I began undergrad at Western University).  Turns out, my supervisor also kept a copy of this exact same poster, framed, in their office.

I'm too empiricist and agnostic to argue or to believe that everything happens for a reason, but I do believe in generalizable correlations as a researcher and someone committed to the development of knowledge.  If I were smarter, I would have recognized sooner the implications of most of the intellectuals I appreciate subsisting in exile from the academy.

As my close friends and colleagues could confirm, I did not plan to use the honorific even if I "earned it".  My students call me "Mr." from conventional courtesy; "Adam" is still just fine.

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Post script:  I've only just begun writing "thank you" letters to the faculty, staff, and administrators who have supported me throughout this journey.  A lot of great people do a lot of great work at OISE.  I will never forget their support.

On corruption

Probably a misattribution, but in lieu of reading this nonsense, just listen to Tim Minchin.

Preface: I have rewritten most of this post several times over the past couple of months since no matter how I approach revisions, this particular memorandum still seems too much like a rant.  I do not know if it is the topic or my lived experiences but apologies in advance if it still sounds like a tirade.

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One of my past professors whom I still deeply respect once affirmed to an entire undergraduate history classroom that "corruption greases the wheels of governance."  I have hated those words only increasingly since he uttered them.  Since, in my brief stint in student and administrative governance since high school, his claim has only ever been validated by my exposure.  

As someone currently fighting on the front lines of an anti-corruption movement at UofT, I feel relatively confident promising the reader that to contend one agent's corruption is to contend all agents' corruptions.  Corrupt people tend to congregate; the permissibilities of their corruptions are co-dependent.  "An attack against one is an attack against all," except these tribes play a different game with different rules.

In my five years at UofT, I think I may have demystified the potential ceilings of corruption among both student and university administrative governments, and they go far higher than I could have imagined prior to returning to Ontario from China.  During my undergrad, vocally among my friends and classmates, I had already declared university politics "as among the worst politics, because of all stakeholders, these folks should, and usually do, know better."  Yet, my then naïveté now feels total.

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These institutions prioritize classist, nepotistic, and ultimately dynastic considerations above all.  Moreover, the people managing these institutions generally care far more about control than about students' understandings.  Yet, many of the people responsible for preserving these not-for-profit corporations' marketed images would undoubtedly deny or at least attempt to qualify these allegations, but behind closed doors, they're usually playing kingmaker.  Obviously, not everyone elects to play that game or, at least, elects to play that game monolithically.  However, frankly, most faculty and staff will not bite the hand that feeds them, so why should we expect anything more of our elected student leaders?

There's an admittedly Orwellian thread running among the intentions of university stakeholders and administrators.  Generally, the principal benefactors of these institutions want people educated just enough—conscious just enough of what's actually going on day to day behind closed doors.  Not too much.  Just enough—to keep the institution operational.  Faculty included.  Anything beyond that threshold, and your increasing consciousness can become a growing threat, especially if you have the courage to speak and/or to act on it (by virtue of the crisis of conscience to try to do either in the first place).  

One cannot appreciate the exhaustive extent of corruption in our post-secondary institutions until one starts speaking truth to these folks in power.  With empiricism under continued assault, the stakes of any remaining good faith commitment to alethic coherence have never been higher, and I write that with a deep appreciation of the historicized moment.  Somehow, in the era in which people have had among the greatest access to knowledge, the knowledge project itself has endured its greatest proportionate vulnerabilities since the Dark Ages. Bertrand Russell would not have survived in 2022.

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I don't know if I will ever redeem my image of the University of Toronto.  I'm not going to gaslight myself.  I know what some of Canada's "best and brightest" have done and, especially, what they haven't done with the knowledge that they had when they had it.  

It's easy to try to argue that my experience is the exception: that my exposure has been exceptionally unique or unlikely, but I have heard one too many stories from friends and colleagues to ignore the logical implications of their real experiences and feelings.

As such, it's difficult to face my students when they ask me about UofT.  I don't think I'm doing them any favours by misrepresenting my experiences, and especially the experiences of my friends and colleagues who have been harmed and could be harmed again with the same impunity, but misrepresent I do.  As implied, we at UofT are generally engaged in a great project of misrepresentation.

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I will finish my PhD, but not with the pride that I would have had five years ago.  Universities are not immutable or indispensable; in Canada, our larger institutions' undergraduate programs continue to be integrated as public-private extensions of public high schools.

Prophetically, that same professor also once noted that "if you want to learn, just get a library card."  A small part of me regrets that I did not follow that advice.

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To conclude, I find myself returning to Camus's alleged words almost weekly.  Despite my own bias toward the fundamentality of epistemology, I believe that rebellion is more ontic than epistemic: One exists in a state of rebellion if they are truly "rebelling".  Mere thoughts of dissent or of rebellion do not constitute or predicate ontic rebellion unless one were living under (e.g.) a totalitarian dictatorship, categorically.

If nothing else, my program has taught me that it's far easier to join (or more often to submit to) those inhabiting corruption than to fight for any other alternative.  But, the same were true throughout most of recorded human history; I can think of no exception where electing for corruption within a corrupt system presented the more difficult or higher justice, regardless of what people perceived as that which they had to lose at the time through resistance.

I told my mother something off-the-cuff over Thanksgiving that still resonates with me as I finish writing this post: "Power does not give one the right to abuse it."  Upon critical reflection of my own words as part of my endless attempts to falsify of my own positions and morality, I realized that this is still artifice, still baseless: nothing gives anyone rights.  We give each other rights, since time immemorial, regardless whether we philosophize or categorize them as inalienable and/or a priori.  Since—We can also take them away, as we have done so and will continue to do so, unless We stop them from rescinding or disrespecting what We have established as Our rights.

Only would-be tyrants fear a free and honest will.

On empathic projection

From the webcam of the laptop with which I edited most of this post when I should have been writing my comprehensive exam.  FYI, Einstein was defending Bertrand Russell.

What is social justice?  No. Seriously. What IS it?  Thousands of years of philosophizing and insightful reflection have yet to glean a satisfactory response to a simple yet eminently consequential question.

From the pre-Socratics to Socrates himself, the Western tradition passed down an, at best, provisional explication derivable from the first books of Plato's Republic.  Philosophers have long grappled with the gravity of the question and with the associated gravity of a proficient answer.

Lately, scholars of social justice have gravitated toward the discourses of empathic understanding when confronted with the question of the criteria and/or substance of social justice.  The problem in practice, as I've witnessed it, is that the respondents confronted with social injustices apply empathy undemocratically.  Under the guise of equity, these "social justice warriors" exercise a limited form of empathy that privileges empathizing with particular groups as opposed to a consciously and rigorously maintained, indiscriminate empathic disposition.  Almost daily, I encounter new politically selective applications of empathy that violate the presupposed humanistic ethics and morality of empathetic practice.

Just as Henry Giroux argued that a "democracy can never be democratic enough," empathy can never be empathized enough.  The schools of liberal democratic thought taken to their logical extremes necessitate a democratic empathy and an empathetic democracy in which people practice empathy as democratically and exhaustively as possible.

The idealized desire for the practice of democracy and empathy in their extremities echoes the philosopher's restless pursuit of timelessness and universality.  During a heated philosophical discussion that feels like yesterday but actually transpired about 8 years ago, a great friend and I were arguing about the possibility of objective morality: or in other words, a morality that could transcend time and space and that would be applicable for any human context.  The other discussant was a staunch Christian, while I was a less radically agnostic version of myself.  We couldn't agree on anything other than that if such morality were ascertainable, it could be determined only through an application of reason and empiricism and could only be validated through some leap of faith.

Upon that insight, I wrote one of the first Facebook notes that became one of the first posts in this blog; it attempted to begin elucidating a rationalistic morality.  My consistent contemplation of this construct anticipated my attempt to illustrate the highest moral imperative.  Only recently did I realize that these explorations betrayed a deeper goal of uncovering a (read: the) universal morality via what I now refer to as empathic projection.

In order to practice empathy as democratically and exhaustively as possible, arguably, one must embrace empathic projection.  The OED defines "projection" as "an estimate or forecast of a future situation based on a study of present trends" and as "a mental image viewed as reality."  Essentially, "empathic projection" depicts a practice of empathy through which one estimates or forecasts the situations of future human beings in order to generate a mental image of what might comprise these beings' lived realities.  This practice might enable one to "empathize with potentiality."

In other words, empathic projection can enable an inquiry approach with which one extends inferences beyond past and present circumstances.  An indiscriminately empathic democracy necessitates that the thoughts, wills, and actions of its citizens not only consider empathy with those whom exist and will exist within their lifelitimes but with those whom potentially will exist (to be as democratic, equitable, and non-egoistic as possible). It's a narrowly presentist assumption that one need only empathize with those whom exist in one's generation or with those of the immediately succeeding generation.

The most universal ethic would require that moral judgement be situated not only by empathizing with those whom exist and will exist soon, but with those whom will exist who will never interact with you directly: a morality of the substantive Other.  Caring about people exhaustively inevitably anticipates caring about the future because there are infinitely more potential people of the future than there could ever be living today.  Ask yourself what these timelessly succeeding Others would ask of their preceding Others; this abstraction's moral intimations could validate a trans-generational human morality.

At the very least, logically, these succeeding Others would desire the same degree of opportunity (potentiality) as those whom preceded them since anything less than at least that potentiality would constitute a perfect injustice.  Thinking historically, this justified continuancy of opportunity followed a timeless trend of taken-for-granted equivalency of potentiality which, until the past ~50 years, had remained more-or-less uncontested.

Thus, empathic projection might reveal semblances of an ultimate universal "moral high ground" through the application of empirical reasoning and logic.  If this form exists at all—a morality and/or value system that exists in spite of and simultaneously among and within us, timelessly—then it might be revealable through empathic projection.

In sum, if there is a social justice to be realized, then empathic projection could be pivotal.  These intellectual gymnastics might be essential to cobbling together the political will to do what is necessary to preserve the sentience and sapience of this planet.  Without it, we will undoubtedly continue to elect those antithetical to the future.

Bertrand Russell

(originally published March 20, 2012)
I've often contemplated changing my Religious Views from "All comparative religion courses should be renamed Agnosticism" to "read Bertrand Russell."  In hindsight, the statements are essentially the same, and equally illustrative of my personal (spiritual?) beliefs.

I'm guilty of a kind of hero worship of Russell, for many of the same reasons as some of my intellectual god fathers, [anonymous] included.

Russell's legacy with regards to religious, if I were a reductionist, was simply to inject some mathematician's/historian's rationality into the discussion of religion and belief.  Arguably, that's all I do in my Social Justice and Peace Studies seminars these days.

Russell, if one briefly consults his Wikipedia page, "was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism[6][7] and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.[8] Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the United States of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.[9] One of his last acts was to issue a statement which condemned Israeli aggression in the Middle East.[10]"  If I didn't know any better, he sounds just like your average Catholic Social Justice and Peace Studies student, minus his stance on free-trade - which was a response to his times.

Russell demonstrated something I find profound, that one does not need to know or not know the existence of a God, Gods, or a creator in order to understand or recognize the inherent dignity of all life. There's this weird causation that some fundamentalist Christians harbour that we'll suddenly start eating babies if we don't have faith in God's existence.

Let me say this, without any caveats or "but"s.  Morality is not subject to God;  God is subject to morality.  This is how we have different kinds of Gods interpreted from the same book(s).

Nietzsche championed this idea, but it's worth repeating: you don't need belief in order to have morals, and further, those without belief have a greater onus in justifying their morality.  Believe me, I struggle every moment of every day to justify my morality, and you can be damn sure I have no idea whether or not God(s) exist(s).  It's one thing to follow a set of principles, it's another to put them together from scratch.

Here's one advantage agnostics will always have over the faithful/submissive.  At the end of the day, our values will be more universal, because we questioned them every step of the way.