Living with Catastrophe made a series of interesting objections and comments to the last post, so let me see if i can respond
First let me state as clearly as I can, what I understand to be Living with Catastrophe‘s main objections. This makes it clear if I’m reading wrong.
- Real Politics is ruthless, and people know this. That is why they do not participate in it.
- Politics is to be avoided because it cannnot achieve the things people hope to get from it.
- Marshall’s definition is too broad. If we accept it, the dead do politics, and people cannot be out of politics.
- Aristotle is an unreliable ally for promoting a liberatory or environmental politics.
- Politics is about achieving goals, particulary adminstrative goals.
- Politics usually flouders in its attempts to achieve other kinds of goals.
- Skepticism about the source of values for politics. People can often gain consensus over what they don’t want, but split over what they do want.
- Politics suppresses living with moral uncertainty, and we should conscientiously object to it.
Second let me restate my position.
In everyday life humans are constantly trying to work with others, organise work and celebration with others, organise conflict with others, trying to get the better of others, trying to persuade others, trying to threaten others, trying to flatter others, trying to help others, trying to discover the truth of a situation, trying to hide the truth, trying to frame the truth in a way which suits us, or trying to make the good life with others.
These processes go on in the family, in the village, in the city, in the company, in the University, in the State, and in World wide organisations. Not everyone is allowed or encouraged to participate at every level (that exclusion, or inclusion, is part of the politics involved).
While the politics of the State may look different, have different modes of enforcement, and have different effects from the politics of the home or the workplace, they all use similar kinds of processes. Just as the poetry of Shakespeare and my own prose are both language, and can be analysed as langauge, thought, communication, story-telling etc, however different they are.
The classic Western family was often seen as being ruled by a ‘prince’ with absolute legal authority over its members. In reality he may have been advised by his wife or eldest son, or his wife, or mother, may have really ruled, but it was often seen as a State in miniture, and this point was frequently made by monarchists.
1) Rather than ruthlessness being the mark of State politics alone, it may be that the most successful players in any kind of politics are the most ruthless. However, this is not always the case, and even if it was, does not mean that politics has to invoke ruthlessness.
I do, paranoically, suggest that the separation of politics from daily life is a political technique, perhaps ruthlessly, encouraged by neoliberalism, which aims to make ‘the market’ (or really corporate power) the dominant and non challengable part of human life and politics – and supposedly better than other parts of human life, because it is described as ‘non-political’. Hayek even proposes that the democratic state be prohibted from dealing with commerce in any way restrictively.
In the libertarian forms of neoliberalism, every human action and production becomes reduced to trade, and mutual decision making becomes an impingment on liberty, especially when it interferes with trade. For them the ideal forms of evil organisation are the State or the Trade Union (and people must be encouraged to have no hope in the State or unions), and the truly good form is the company – where you get told what to do unless you own and control it. The obvious idea here is that ordinary people are all individuals, and should never act together. Libertarians rarely seem to have the same strength of objection to the wealthy or business people acting together – perhaps because they realise this would affect the political effectiveness of these people, and the force of capitalism.
Neoliberals don’t want to remind us, or they want to keep us ignorant, of the scale and success of peaceful popular movements against corporate power. For example, the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s. I read yesterday, that 20 million Americans joined protests for the first Earth Day. Who knows that nowadays? Who nowadays is allowed to think anything other than that environmentalism is a minor, non-mainstream, interest? How did people in the US raise up against flaming poisonous rivers, and deadly work conditions, and temporarily succeed? Partly because they knew that politics was part of daily life. “The personal is political.” Any ethical decision making that involves others, involves politics.
The Right realised this was a problem in the early 1970s, what they called the “Crisis of Democracy.” Hell Workers! Women!, non-Anglos!, Prisoners! where would it end? The dominant elites might have to share power, if this went on. Power would be diffuse. Depoliticising daily life was one of the solutions to their problem. Ironically, Nixon helped this anti-political rhetoric, through Watergate, and through violating people’s political norms of behaviour. You can’t trust government. Even if it might be nice to have someone of Nixon’s principles in office nowadays….
Over and over again I’ve heard people say things like all politicians are corrupt, they only in it for themselves, you wouldn’t want to be in politics etc… I’ve heard people say politicians all lie or are all the same as an excuse for staying with those who seem to be lying more. It is now pretty much orthodoxy to leave the State to the wealthy, and assume nothing can be done to make things better. So yes I think the absence of politics from daily life is an important trope, and a trope which affects our ability to control our lives, or make the good life.
2) The fact that politics does not always work, in the family, in the village, in the state etc, seems to me, to be largely irrelevant to the argument about it originating in daily life or being more widespread than is usually thought. I’m not sure that many human activities achieve what people hope to get from them. I don’t really transform the world by thinking about it. Most art is crap and will be forgotten or thrown out. Doctors do not heal everyone, and in some cases likley damage people even more. Many families will be unhappy despite the best efforts of those involved. Failure and unintended consequences are normal, and we should recognise this, if we want to engage with life.
I would suggest, that the more self-destructive the culture, the more deletarious unintended consequences are likely to be the case. Climate change is a great example of what seems to be an unintended consequences of particular modes of social organisation and their politics.
3) I don’t think that I am making too broad a definition of politics at all, that’s partly why I went back to Aristotle, because it seems to me, that he didn’t think it too broad either. The same kind of skills are deployed in the family as are needed to be employed in the village, in the township and so on, to make decisions, to organise people, to work and celebrate or whatever. If the idea is to make self-government unnatural, then you have to make this kind of thing either seem minor, or disconnected from the State.
Dead people are important for politics. They may not participate, but they are used politically, and set traditions. The supposedly positive legacy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher is constantly reaserted in order to justify what the right is doing now, and to make it part of general common sense. These legacies may be used in quite contradictory ways. For example, Boris Johnson may use Thatcher’s opposition to climate change to attempt to ‘prove’ that Extinction Rebellion is irrelevant to modern politics.Other people may point to Thatcher’s later recantations of climate change activism, on the grounds that solutions being proposed are non-capitalist, and thus that nothing political should be done. Likewise the activities of a dead parent, grandparent or whatever, may be used to set the tone for the life of members of a family, and encourage them to maintain or increase their status with respect to others.
So while everything is politics, we are being kept out of the central forms of politics, by the denial that everything is political. Nowadays, we don’t influence what counts as justice, or what is ethics… While we are alive, most of us are engaged in politics – to requote Aristotle, we are zoon politicon.
5) All human action and interaction can be reduced to the achieving of goals if we want to. Consequently, if that is our definition of politics then, indeed, everything is politics.
6) Again, that people do not succeed in politics all the time, is not an argument against humans engaging in politics most of the time. Success is never a measure of something occuring, and of course we live with moral uncertainty, and all other kinds of uncertainty, that still does not mean we don’t engage in politics with each other whether we object to those politics or not. Indeed, I would suggest that certainty of action and solution, is probably the hallmark of a politics which will fail to produce beneficial results for most people.
7) The origins of the values which shape political goals, can be many… but nevertheless parts of those values will be shaped by the political process, by interaction and our capacity to persuade people of the virtue of those values and the actions associated with them. We may also use the statement of values to separate us off from other groups, and to creat conflict, in which we are the virtuous, and they are evil. Separation may well be as important to humans as co-opertation, and may indeed work together with co-operation, in that we often seem to co-operate better when we co-operate against some other group.
8) i don’t think there is any particular reason why politics should suppress uncertainty, and moral uncertainty. I think it would be a better politics. But I also think that is true of daily life. People in families often seem sacrifice other members of the family on the altars of moral certainty – but that can probably happen more easily, with a certain type of righteous politics within the family.
4) I’ll talk about Aristotle later… but let me start by saying I don’t have to accept all of Aristotle to accept that some of what he wrote seems insightful.
Tags: politics, social action, social theory
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
October 16, 2019 at 10:34 pm |
Thanks Jon. As always, your response prompted me to review and analyze my opinions. And again I find that our theoretical positions are not as far apart as they seem to be, and that our differences are perhaps more of mood or temperament than of interpretation or analysis.
I have more to say about this topic, but for now I will stick to reviewing your eight point summary of my comments.
1. “Real Politics is ruthless, and people know this. That is why they do not participate in it.”
Politics does not have to be literally ruthless, but neither is it usually fair and guileless. I think most people try to keep away from it not because they’ve been persuaded that it’s immoral, but because they have noticed that it’s usually difficult and dreary, and sometimes dangerous, and that many other activities are a lot more fun.
I agree with you that in the absence of specialized governing institutions – that is, for 98% of human history – politics was interpersonal: people and small groups persuading one another, nearly always face to face, to give them what they wanted by multiple, crude or subtle means, from seduction and adoration to humiliation and murder. The resulting social formations took many varied forms in different cultures and times and places.
Is it possible to judge those sorts of politics to be moral or immoral? It seems impossible, or even meaningless, for what would the ground of the judgment be?
The first governing states emerged in the Holocene, products of the ecological disruption produced by sedentary agriculture and higher population densities, facilitated by the invention of scripts. Early states everywhere were violent and cruel, fighting genocidal wars with one another and violently imposing uniform laws on the tribes, families and households under their control. They still do this, but over many centuries most people have come to terms with legal systems, just as in earlier times peasant families adapted to the exploitative protection of local chiefs, lords and kings, opting for that in preference to slaughter and enslavement by foreign enemies.
I am inclined to agree with the anarchists that there is something about governing states that is an affront to human morality. However, I cannot see that there is any possibility of reversing time and going back to the Pleistocene.
You go on to argue for the efficacy of popular movements in recent times. This is really a separate debate. Like you I am all in favor of peace, justice, equality, community, liberty etc. There are many of us. But these are not issues of democracy versus ruling elites. It is clear from the history of popular suffrage that many people are not in favor of peace, justice, equality, community and liberty, and that still more believe that even if good in theory, in practice they might threaten their own well-being.
In fact, ruling elites in recent centuries have often been more ‘progressive’ than the masses they ruled. Neo-liberalism may have been an idea hatched by ivory tower intellectuals and taken up by capitalists and their political representatives, but neither the old fascism nor the new populist politics – xenophobic, anti-egalitarian, and authoritarian – are elite phenomena. They are paradigm cases of what Aristotle meant by democracy. Elites are reduced to trying, with patchy success, to appease, manage and manipulate them.
2. “Politics is to be avoided because it cannot achieve the things people hope to get from it.”
I wasn’t clear about this. Obviously politics does get (some) people what they want. That’s why it exists. I meant that people can’t get what they want from some sorts of politics. As the broadness of its aims and the temporal span of its goals increases, politics, like all exercises of conscious agency, becomes increasingly feeble, its effects diluted and distorted by temporal contingency.
Mind you, it’s also true people never get exactly what they want from politics. Complete satisfaction only happens, if ever, when desires can be satisfied immediately with little or no interference. Political aims cannot be satisfied immediately nor without resistance – that’s what makes them political – so politics can only achieve more or less satisfactory compromises after more or less painful struggles. And of course it also sometimes happen that people get what they want and find that it was not what they really wanted, as many folk tales warn us. But these are not very convincing reasons for avoiding politics.
3. “Marshall’s definition is too broad. If we accept it, the dead do politics, and people cannot be out of politics.”
Again I was not very coherent. I didn’t mean that your definition – “what humans engage in when they attempt to decide upon, or achieve, an aim which involves or effects other people” – was too broad. I said that it was “not a bad statement of what I think, except that I wonder why bother with the word politics.”
“But,” I added, “I don’t think it can be what you mean by politics.” Why? Because that is not how you usually use the word. You use it almost always to refer either to the doings of agents of the state and its ‘ideological apparatuses’, in Althusser’s phrase – professional politicians, policy wonks, agents of enforcement, manufacturers of consent etc – or to the doings of those who oppose them. True, these are all examples of attempts “to decide upon, or achieve, an aim which involves or affects other people.” But it is the very particular sorts of people and the very particular sorts of aims that distinguish them from the other decisions that humans make, and make them “political” in the generally accepted use of the word.
4. “Aristotle is an unreliable ally for promoting a liberatory or environmental politics.”
Let me just add here that Aristotle could be right about politics being “natural” to humans (i.e. a human function or telos), but unless we also agree with the fundamental tenet of his metaphysics, that everything is drawn towards fulfilling its pre-ordained function, then the conclusion that politics is inherently virtuous does not follow. For Aristotle, humans who engage in politics are better than those who do not because they more fully realize their humanity. But without the premise that creation is drawn towards perfecting itself through teleological fulfilment, there is no force in this argument.
5. “All human action and interaction can be reduced to the achieving of goals if we want to. Consequently, if that is our definition of politics then, indeed, everything is politics. “
I do not believe that all human action and interaction can be reduced to achieving goals. Only a tiny subset of human actions are concerned with achieving goals. In fact almost all the things humans do are unconscious. Our hearts beat, and we breathe and process sugars and oxygen into energy- yielding molecules not because we aim to stay alive but because these things have been programmed by the DNA in our cells, chemical processes that have been evolving for billions of years. And physiology aside, our interactions with people are dominated by the operation of unconscious habits. Only a small fraction of human actions are consciously undertaken to achieve goals, and only a small fraction of those actions are political in the narrow sense of being concerned with government. Politics, even in your very general meaning, is not the cake of life: it is part of the icing.
6. “Politics usually flounders in its attempts to achieve other kinds of goals.”
I didn’t mean that when politics aims to achieve “other kinds of goals”. it sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. I meant that certain goals are incapable of being achieved by politics, or by any other expression of human will. In particular, human will cannot achieve goals that have an indefinite duration. It seems to me that all political projects that aim to establish something on a long-term basis must eventually fail.
A great political movement is very unlikely to achieve its light on the hill utopia for a day, let alone, like Hitler’s fantasy empire, for 1000 years. But even if one did, sooner or later its achievement must decay and die, and there is no way of knowing, now or later, whether the tens of thousands of years that will follow its utopian millennium will be better or worse as a consequence of its having existed.
In the last half century or so when it has become a distinct, global political movement, environmentalism has had some remarkable successes, both in generating environmental and ecological awareness, and in instigating environmental protection laws and regulations. It’s even possible to imagine that a well-executed politics – informed by much greater understanding of both geophysics and humanity than exists at present – might be able to prevent environmental change from inflicting terrible harm on future generations without inflicting terrible harm on present generations. But relative to earth history, this program could never be anything other than a brief interruption. And who knows what would happen in the aftermath of such an interruption? Politics can modify but cannot eliminate biological and geophysical realities. Sooner or later the human species will become extinct. We prefer it to be later because we are human, just as we would prefer to die later rather than this minute because we are human. That’s all.
7. “Skepticism about the source of values for politics. People can often gain consensus over what they don’t want, but split over what they do want.”
Environmental politics is rife with antinomies. Its care is primarily directed at future people, hypothetical entities who don’t exist yet and may never exist. It stakes its hopes on being able to modify the trajectory of the earth for human benefit, yet knows very well that humans’ ability to modify the earth for its benefit is what caused the present crisis. It protests the harm that humans will do to other humans by their present modes of production and consumption, while bracketing the greater and more immediate harms that humans are doing to one another right now through wars, inequality and interpersonal violence.
These and many more factors make the environment a notoriously “wicked problem”, even for people who spend their lives thinking about it. As for most of us, all they can do is, as Greta Thunberg says, tell politicians to “listen to the scientists.” But scientists are qualified to state the problems, they are not qualified to supply the solutions. They are no better at politics than anyone else (and “political scientists” might arguably be worse). And what to say to someone who observes that it was investors listening to scientists that got us into this mess in the first place?
8. “Politics suppresses living with moral uncertainty, and we should conscientiously object to it.”
Actually I did not say that politics suppresses moral uncertainty but that it _adds_ to the moral uncertainty already abundant in everyday life. It was on that ground that I excused those who wish to steer clear of it. I do not think people should be blamed for not wanting to be good Aristotelian citizens.