The Forbes article which attempts to flatter and dismiss Thunberg, and which I have discussed here and here, relies for its effect, on the asumption that politics has a bad reputation.
In my more paranoid moments, I suspect that some of this reputation is deliberately manufactured and aims to weaken people’s desire to participate in formal politics by persuading them that politics is only about power, enforcement, deception and dishonesty. Who would want to be political in that case?
Such a cultivated attitude reinforces the power of those who do participate, and particularly those who participate shamelessly.
However, such a vision of politics seems limited and inacurate.
For me, politics is what humans engage in when they attempt to decide upon, or achieve, an aim which involves or effects other people.
Politics necessarily happens all the time because we live with other people, and people acting together can be much more effective than individuals acting alone (most of the time). Indeed to live harmoniously with others, we have to learn how to negotiate and compromise and get them onside as best we can.
This is a view with considerable antiquity. As is well known Aristotle wrote that
“animals that live politically are those that have any kind of activity in common, which is not true of all gregarious animals,”
and
“humans are by nature political animals [or political life forms, Zoon politikon]. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a Polity, is either above humanity, or below it.”
Aristotle appears to argue, that people cannot perform their natural functions apart from the polity, since they are not self-sufficient. Thus, the Polity (my way of translating polis, usually translated as ‘state’ or ‘city state’ or even ‘social organisation’) comes into existence to enable human life. He takes a more or less anthropological position that:
The polity is prior in nature to the household and to each of us individually.
This is because we build our function, abilities and capacities through our relationships to others. Households and individuals do not exist by themselves.
For the whole must necessarily be prior to the part… [as] all things are defined by their function and capacity, so that when they are no longer able to perform their function [within the whole] they must not be said to be the same things
In other words, humans develop their capacities and virtues in relationship to other humans within already existing modes of organisation. We come into being amidst creative others (this is I think important to Aristotle’s idea of humanity, and is in any case always important to recognise). The polity is, therefore, the way humans can come to craft a good and human life the best way they can. The Polity is necessary to make a better polity.
We can also hope that those capacities and virtues crafted within the crafting of the Polity, can perhaps extend outwards to the land, and other life forms. Again, because environments change and relationships between different groups or different polities change, the work of making the good polity is never ending. It never reaches permanent stability or perfection. The polity is likely to face new challenges and new problems, which it has to face creatively.
Taking this idea of politics seriously, politics can be seen to involve idea generation, persuasion, co-operation, competition, decision making, allocating responsibility, allocating authority, overcoming entrenched and no longer useful authority, gaining ability, gaining virtue, rewarding virtue, rewarding beneficial aspiration, and so on.
Politics is essential for joint-human activity, but it need not mean “power over,” or constant dishonesty – an anarchist, communitarian, politics is possible, even if it is precarious. Indeed we might well define a politics which only requires power over and dishonesty as defining a bad polity, which is headed for disaster and requires reformation.
Despite the Forbes article, Thunberg, for example, is almost certainly not playing power and dominance games but is involved in trying reform the current polity, craft the best possible polity, and to continue survival. However, because of this, she is involved in politics, and being made part of power and dominance struggles, by those who are engaged in such struggles and attempting to preserve a disastrous polity. That is probably why she is being so roundly abused. This is supposed to make her less effective, but because of her response to the abuse, it only makes her more effective, and acts as an exemplar for how to behave (virtue) for those who support her.
Some of those engaged in this kind of established abuse politics, are pretending that they are not political, because, in their politics, doing nothing to challenge the processes of destruction is supposed to seem normal.
Please note that I’m not defining politics so that it has to be successful, or result in any firm control over the world (I’m not sure about Aristotles’ opinion on this). The best we can hope for is influence, or effect on the world – working with the world, perhaps – and then check events as they occur to see if we are getting the results we anticipated. This is the nature of the world.
However, uncertainty does not mean you can escape living with politics, or entirely escape having a diffuse effect on the world. Politics is part of human, and humane, life.
Tags: complexity, Disinformation, politics
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
October 11, 2019 at 1:08 pm |
Politics – ‘a bad reputation’?
“In my more paranoid moments, I suspect that some of this reputation is deliberately manufactured and aims to weaken people’s desire to participate in formal politics by persuading them that politics is only about power, enforcement, deception and dishonesty. Who would want to be political in that case?”
I wonder if those reasons really put people off politics. It may be that the most successful political players are those that see it exactly in those ruthless terms. Machiavelli shocks readers not because he offends against conventional morality, but because they recognise his truth.
As for me, I don’t think politics should be avoided – or rather, to be clear, not all politics, only certain sorts of politics – because it is immoral and ugly, but because I don’t think it can achieve the things people hope to get from it.
politics = ‘what humans engage in when they attempt to decide upon, or achieve, an aim which involves or affects other people.’
Surely that is too broad a definition? Trying to satisfy wants and needs by involving or affecting people is what people do all the time. If that’s political the choice is between being political or dead, and actually being dead won’t even do it, because the dead go on involving and affecting people, sometimes for a very long time (see Aristotle, below). If that’s politics there is no need to worry that people are not sufficiently involved in it, or that the justice system or science or whatever is being ‘politicised’. Everything is politics and we are all in it, up to and over our heads.
Actually that is not a bad statement of what I think, except that I wonder why bother with the word politics, why not just say alive? But I don’t think it can be what you mean by politics.
You summon Aristotle for backup. We could disappear down that rabbit hole for some time. But before passing up the opportunity, let’s note that Aristotle’s conception of polity was not at all democratic, and that he was pessimistic about the prospects of ‘creating a right public system and that we should be able to carry it out’, as he says in the Ethics. The primary reason for participating in politics for him seems to have been not to make a ‘good state’ or a ‘better world’, but to cultivate individual and family virtue, which a man will ‘be best able to do by making a Legislator of himself.’
So the man known to several cultures as The Philosopher looks to me like an unreliable ally for promoting a liberatory or environmental politics.
I am sceptical of those kinds of politics for two reasons. One concerns means and ends and time. Politics justifies itself by achieving goals: the trains run on time, the incarceration rate is below a prescribed minimum, the national budget is in surplus, no more refugee boats, a universal wage is mandated, slavery is illegal. Politics can be very effective at achieving such ‘administrative’ goals, partly because they are precise, but just as importantly because what happens later is not part of the plan. When the goal is less clear, and above all when it has no time limit, as usual when politics is based on an ‘ideology’ (make the nation great, abolish poverty, stop people exploiting others, or stop people doing things that cause dangerous environmental change), then politics flounders, and sometimes gets disastrously lost.
The other reason for my scepticism concerns the source of the values which shape political goals. Why do we think trains running on time is a good idea (if we do)? Some might appeal to an abstract or sacred moral source – God, or the categorical imperative. More today, I think, would look to ‘the natural world’, or our experience of it, as providing us with means of judgment. There is no consensus about any of it. Environmental politics is a good example: folks united by a degree of consensus over what they don’t want, but profoundly divided over what they do want. It necessarily follows that very few if any can ever get what they want.
In daily life we have no choice but to live with moral uncertainty and cognitive dissonance: that’s life. With politics it is different. Sometimes it comes and smashes the door in, but usually we can choose to burden ourselves with still more uncertainty and dissonance, or we can be conscientious objectors. That is not easy, because we are social animals (like bees, wasps and cranes, according to Aristotle). Therefore, it is the common fate of conscientious objectors to be scorned.
– Paul
October 13, 2019 at 1:39 am |
Thank you. That was a really nice set of comments and inspirations. I’ve turned my response into the next blog post….