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.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 