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I continue to hark back to posts marking the long way that I have travelled since 2012 in understanding that freedom only works when the zoon politikon - the political animal - meets conditions where she can fully emancipate herself. Freedom is not like a rail-road network ensuring that people are consistently guided toward the public good, as if on rails corresponding to libertarian principles, the rule of law, and the self-contained logic of markets. In fact, freedom is far more fluid, resembling a delta of fast changing stream-beds, where the flux is finding its course by adapting to a persistently mobile phalanx of banks and counter-currents. Rather than being based on stable regimentation, freedom depends on a game of mutual adaptation which includes all members of society. Everyone is entitled to affect with their interests and ambitions everyone else. The fluidity of the order is embodied in the equally dispersed right to be politically active. Freedom is highly political.
★★★
Thus, I argue in
Why It Is Not True That Politics Makes Us Worse - Thirteen Conjectures on Politics (1/3):
Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus, research fellows at the CATO Institute, have written an article entitled Politics Makes Us Worse.
Below I shall comment on each of the thirteen paragraphs of which their
article consists. Powell and Burrus are making many valid points, but
they spoil their take by over-generalisation, which is the cardinal
defect underlying the libertarian presumption against politics. In that
way, the arguments displayed in Politics Makes Us Worse are almost a mini primer containing many of the central misconceptions of politics entertained in libertarian circles.
First, it is in order to comment on the title the authors have chosen: Politics Makes Us Worse.
It can be inevitable, and in some cases even useful, to introduce
phrases that come over more strongly than the wider message they are
intended to support - like in a socially well-understood exaggeration
(like "Americans are great people.")
Such is the case with the title of my
present post - I do not believe that politics makes us better; rather I
think politics can make us better, but it also can make us worse.
Moreover, politics may have functions and trigger effects that do not
relate to the issue of people becoming better or worse. Hence, in the
text I qualify the title's bait.
The authors do not make any such qualification whatsoever. I am therefore entitled to take the statement - politics makes us worse
- as an absolute. And precisely therein lies the difficulty with their
position, which is representative of the attitude maintained by a large
number of libertarians. In the below text, the authors' phrasings are
indented and completely in italics,
followed underneath by my comment (without emphasis):
1.
Increasing the sphere of politics leads to bad policy and increased vice.
By and large, the freer a country, the
more likely it is to allow political engagement by any citizen
interested in such activity, increasing the sphere of politics
compared to a closed access society where the privilege of participating
in politics is reserved to a small ruling elite. It appears that the
absence (as in Mabutos's Kongo) or the retraction (as in Nazi Germany)
of such freedom leads to increased vice, rather than the other way around.
An interesting special case might be
provided by a class of countries that do not have a democratic political
order, yet enjoy the status of favourites in the eyes of many
libertarians, such as Hong Kong or Singapore. To begin with, the absence
of a Western-type democratic political order does not mean that
politics, with all its pluses and cons, is not happening in such
countries. The relevant processes may be less familiar to the Westerner,
naturally more opaque, or it may be the case that in order for the
political goings-on to become more transparent to an observer, she must
seek intimate and enduring participation in the social life of the
respective countries.
Furthermore, I strongly suspect that Hong Kong and Singapore have benefited from other people having done politics in their stead
- namely the British people, who exported practices and institutions of
a modern civil society to these two places. Excellent conditions for
commercial advancement (enabled by the imported model of a modern
Western civil society) combined with an impoverished population eager to
take advantage of the opportunities to grow materially more
comfortable, the people of Hong Kong and Singapore may have had low
demand for democratic politics for a number of decades. They certainly
had strong governments whose political orientation and political
decisions were decisive for the economic success of both places.
Indubitably, politics has made Hong Kong and Singapore better (places to
live in).
2.
Even if we try
to ignore it, politics influences much of our world. For those who do
pay attention, politics invariably leads in newspapers and on TV news
and gets discussed, or shouted about, everywhere people gather. Politics
can weigh heavily in forging friendships, choosing enemies, and
coloring who we respect.
What the authors want their readers to
focus on is a part of politics fraught with problems and unpleasant
challenges: the divisiveness in politics, the ways in which politics
creates division, and enhances or exploits it.
What the authors do not see is that politics is the only way in which we can hope to deal with issues that drive us apart.
What the authors do not see is that we
cannot ignore politics - understood as dealing with the inevitable
fundamental disagreements that the social order of a viable community
must come to grips with.
Politics communicates, resolves or
attenuates strife resulting from the manifold sources of significant
disagreement among human beings. Bashing politics in total is like
rejecting tragedy and drama in human affairs as a needless luxury
willfully created by the bored and playful.
Of course, try as we may, we cannot ignore politics - it is part of the human condition. Of course, politics influences much of our world
- which is full of dissent and potential for oppression and violence
that needs to be kept under control. The compromises of politics will
tend to be imperfect, because the more fundamental disagreements among
human beings will not go away, when our political arrangements help us
to avoid the crassest, bloodiest, and especially destructive forms of
battle.
3.
It’s not
difficult to understand why politics plays such a central role in our
lives: political decision-making increasingly determines so much of what
we do and how we’re permitted to do it. We vote on what our children
will learn in school and how they will be taught. We vote on what people
are allowed to drink, smoke, and eat. We vote on which people are
allowed to marry those they love. In such crucial life decisions, as
well as countless others, we have given politics a substantial impact on
the direction of our lives. No wonder it’s so important to so many
people.
Does political decision-making really increasingly determine so much of what we do and how we're permitted to do it? Can we do less and are we more regimented and patronised than in 1965, in 1912, or in 1860? By what metric?
Is it not the case that we are living in
zones of reduced freedom and other zones of increased freedom, many of
which may not be easily netted, if this is possible at all? I suppose,
as drivers we may be considerably more regulated today than in 1912 -
but is this not largely an appropriate response to mass transportation,
and a large contribution to personal freedom? Have the regulations to
which mass transportation has led been brutally imposed upon us by
political decisionmaking, or is it not rather the case that countless
institutions of a free society, from the legal world, to the media, to
the many events and practices that make up our political order have
allowed millions of us to exercise influence on the process by which
such regulations get formed?
The source.
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