The Big Announcement Post
I'm starting a philosophy Substack, and frankly I'm excited about it to a degree that's slightly embarassing.
I’m starting a Substack.
The first essay is going up on Sunday, January 1st—I’m a sucker for the calendar—and after that they should keep coming every Sunday until further notice.
So, so why am I doing this? What’s the Substack going to be like? How is it going to fit with the rest of what I do?
I’m gonna tell you! It’s going to take a minute, though, so make yourself comfortable. There’s beer in the fridge.
All good?
Excellent.
If you’re reading this, you might know that I do a lot of debates with right-wingers, and I have a podcast which is my pride and joy, but the main thing I am is a writer. When I get up every day, I let my dog out to pee, I make coffee, and I think about whatever article or articles I need to work on that day. I’m a columnist for Jacobin magazine and a regular opinion writer for The Daily Beast. I also sometimes publish articles at Current Affairs and The Nation.
I’m still going to be doing all of that. I didn’t start this Substack because I want to move the kind of political writing I do for the rest of those places to a different website. Nor am I planning to stop doing regular political writing any time soon. I might throw up in my mouth a little when I hear myself described as a “pundit,” but I can live with “commentator”—and I plan to keep commentating. But.
Long ago, when the world was young and I was in my twenties, I got a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Since then, my interests have changed in all sorts of ways. A couple of years ago, I decided not to renew my full-time contract as a Lecturer at Georgia State University. I still teach one class at a time most semesters as an adjunct, but I didn’t renew the GSU contact because wanted to focus the vast majority of my time and energy on all that other work I just mentioned.
I’ve never looked back from that decision. But I am still very interested in philosophy, and for a long time—pretty much since I started writing in a serious way in 2019—I’ve wanted to make popular-level philosophy writing a bigger part of what I do.
Every now and then, I’ve been able to sneak some of that in at my regular venues. So for example when the great moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson died, I talked Jacobin into letting me write an obituary where I talked about some of her contributions. And I wrote about one of my grad school mentors, the brilliant and strange philosopher of time Quentin Smith, for Arc Digital Media.
But political magazines mostly want political articles…which is totally fair! And political articles are certainly a big part of what I want to write. We live in a grotesquely unequal society. Workers at Amazon warehouses pee in bottles to avoid falling behind on their quotas. Their boss literally owns his own spaceship. American politics often feels like an endless and pointless argument between a faction of snake-oil-peddling Trumpian “populists” who claim to speak for Middle America but don’t even support universal healthcare and a faction of woke neoliberal dipshits who think justice means achieving demographically correct proportions of gay, trans and PoC representation on the Board of Directors of Lockheed Martin. We desperately need to build up a socialist alternative to politics-as-usual and, while I firmly believe that union organizers and door-to-door canvassers play a more important role than podcasters and freelance writers, I do want to contribute what I can.
But. Also. I have an essay that’s been burning a hole in my head about David Hume’s arguments about suicide and the immortality of the soul. (That’s going to be first up on the Substack on Sunday, January 1st.) There’s stuff I want to say about G.A. Cohen’s critique of John Rawls’s theory of justice and how that fits into Marx’s points in his Critique of the Gotha Program about what a socialist society would look like. (That one’s coming up on Sunday, January 8th.) And I want to write about time travel paradoxes and debates about the A-Theory vs. the B-Theory of time—stay tuned for that essay if you don’t know what those are!—and the Problem of Evil and why fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God feel compelling but don’t really work. I want to write about the Liar Paradox, which is what I spent years writing my doctoral dissertation on—eventually that got adapted into this book—and I want to write about meta-ethics and free will and the Trolley Problem. I love all that shit and always have. And I want to share more of that side of my interests with my audience.
When I started writing about politics, a big part of the reason why was because I did have a background in philosophy. I saw people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson spreading complete nonsense to giant audiences. It bothered me that most of the people who’d gone through the same academic training in taking apart philosophical arguments and putting them together again that I had couldn’t be bothered to apply those skills to debunking these mega-popular charlatans because they were too busy writing journal articles about the narrowest points imaginable for the benefit of other academics. A lot of the early writing I did, and a lot of what Michael Brooks and I did on my weekly “Debunk” segment on his show before he passed away in the summer of 2020, was about filling that gap. And don’t get me wrong—that’s definitely an ongoing project.
But there’s another gap to be filled too. Part of the reason Sam Harris’s poorly argued books Free Will and The Moral Landscape sold so damn many copies (even though Harris openly and proudly says he didn’t bother to read the academic literature on free will and meta-ethics when he was writing them), and part of the reason people fill lecture halls to hear Jordan Peterson spout barely coherent twaddle about “the dragon of chaos” peppered with ostentatiously Great Books-y references to Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Heidegger, is that there’s a deep well of public interest in philosophy. Someone is going to fill it.
The Substack is called “Philosophy for the People” because I like the double-meaning. “For the people” in the sense that the parts about political philosophy are bound up in left politics, but also “for the people” in the sense of analytically rigorous philosophical reflection being done not for the exclusive consumption of other academics but for anyone who’s interested. I’m not writing journal articles and putting them on Substack. These are going to be chatty and digressive and opinionated and weird because I want people to read them for pleasure and think about them and get fired up about talking back to them.
And yes, to answer an inevitable question, they’re not “for the people” in the sense that everything on the Substack is “free to the people.” Cue the “and yet you live in society, curious” meme. But seriously: Any version of “for the people” politics worth its salt includes the idea that writers, no less than warehouse workers or baristas, should get paid for their work. Ideally, I’d like this to be a big enough chunk of my income that I can justify devoting a whole lot of my time to the project in the long term. Maybe someday we’ll live in the kind of society where anyone with certification from some kind of Philosophers Guild can get a state subsidy for writing essays like these. To be honest, advocating for something like that would be pretty far down my list of political priorities, considering that we don’t even have Medicare for All yet, but hey, long term, who knows. Until that happens, though, this is reader-supported content.
The way it’s most likely going to work until further notice is that when a new essay goes up each Sunday it’s going to be free for a couple weeks and then it’ll join all the past essays behind a paywall you can open for well under the monthly cost of a single trip to Starbucks for a mocha and a blueberry muffin. If you do choose to support the project by signing up as a paid subscriber, you’ll get eternal access to everything and probably also an uncomfortably long hug from me if you see me in person at a debate or speaking gig and let me know you’re a paid subscriber because honestly that shit means a lot to me.
We’ll come up with a suite of other benefits too, but like I always emphasize when I’m talking about people who support my podcast, the supporter benefits aren’t a service that’s paid for with that monthly support. I mean, as our President would put it, “c’mon, man.” It’s 2022. When the Substack launches, it’ll be 2023. We’re all of us swimming in an endless ocean of free content. Longer access to the essays, and whatever other benefits we come up with, are gestures of appreciation for the support, but “support” really is the key word. It’s something you’ll decide to give if you’re excited about this project—which I hope a lot of you will be. I’m almost embarrassingly excited about launching it.
Let’s go.
I'm not sure if I will be interested in the philosophical discussion of A and B theories of time, but I look forward to reading it.
My interest is more in the physics realm, and in particular Big Bang Theory, but there is also an element of philosophy which may be of interest to you.
For the past century we have theorized that the increase in red shift in stars which increases with distance indicates an expanding universe which began with a big bang.
One skeptical hypothesis proposes an alternative possibility which contradicts Big Bang Theory.
This is counterintuitive, but to understand the hypothesis one must visualize that time has an innate property of speeding up over time (slowly or rapidly, it matters not). Imagine one clock covering the entire universe, but one which is designed to constantly increase the rate at which the hands turn. All things would operate under this clock, so the earth would still take 24 hours to rotate, and so on. Then imagine a one meter wavelength of light emitted billions of years ago taking one second to pass an observer under a slower running "clock". Billions of years later, we observe the same wave under the modern faster clock. It might take two clicks of the faster clock, rather than one for the wave to pass the observer. If so, then our observation would be that the wave is two meters in length, not one. Distance over time. The same wave would consume one click when emitted, but two clicks when observed by us. That is the essence of a longer wave, taking more time to pass. So the only evidence we might have that time slowly (or rapidly) speeds up would be the observation that light would appear shifted more and more red as the distance of the emitter (or age of the emitted light) increases.
The interesting thing is that all of the recent challenges we face with the big bang theory can be completely eliminated with this simple change in the idea that time is not static, but that it speeds up over time. Since light has no mass, the idea does not break any thermodynamic principle of physics.
If we do not assume that red shift indicates expansion, then what we are left with is a seemingly random motion of objects extending into infinity, and eternity. Never created, but simply always existing, eternally and into infinity, in constant motion seemingly random to our limited observational perspective, but always moving in accordance with Newton's laws of motion, and with cause and effect.
The "cosmic" radio background we observe may simply light so old, emitted under such a slow clock that the waves appear to us as long wave radiation (radio and beyond). At some point the waves appear so long under our fast clock, that we cannot even measure them. This blackness is the edge of observation, but not really the edge of anything. Under this hypothesis there is no edge, and therefore no center of gravitation into which everything would eventually collapse.
Many are not aware that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Belgian Priest, Georges Lemaitre. From a philosophical standpoint, I propose that the Big Bang Theory is an extension of Creationism from earlier versions to one which could exist alongside of newer science observations.
https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/georges-lemaitre-big-bang
We tend to humanize everything, and perhaps the big bang is a way to jealously presume that since we are born and must die, then so must the universe. This emotion may have led to broad acceptance of the theory. While the universe does contain living things, the majority of matter is not living. It does not need to be born or die.
So this hypothesis is an attempt to break free from the possibly flawed notion that the universe has a beginning and an end (temporally and spatially). Much of our recent observation of motion seems to indicate that the Big Bang Theory is highly suspect. Particularly the notion that some "dark" energy is forcing matter to accelerate outward at an increasing pace. The use of the word "dark" is itself suspect and has undertones of a religious nature.
As a side note, the word "dark" was also employed in Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign intentionally by advisors to place a stigma upon the opposing party. I heard it several times and it was effective. Darkness still strikes fear in the hearts of men.
Btw: would you consider embedding PDFs of articles in the newsletters sent out each week?
I don't mean each newsletter containing all article PDFs, but the new article we get in a given week. I'm told this PDF embedding is now possible on substack.
It would be quite useful for me as I much prefer to read on E-ink displays or in note taking apps that allow for pen annotations, notes. Having the PDF ready just makes this way easier.