Category Archives: Politics
Respect > passion
I don’t know what makes me put stuff like this on Facebook.
Passion is overrated. It is cheap and common. Any jackass can get worked up about what is obviously true and good and want to fight for what they know is right.
Respect is more difficult and admirable. To negotiate for what you believe in while recognizing that your opponent is doing the same, committing whole-heartedly to your position while reserving your deepest loyalty for the mysteries of diplomacy — that constant possibility of breakthrough insight that pierces horizons, transfigures questions, sublates either-ors, and creates new intellectual space ex nihilo — this demands a kind of faith entirely unknown to “religious” fanatics who always manage to be on the wrong side of the stories they misappropriate.
If you see religion as opposed to liberal democracy and science, you might want to consider rethinking your most basic schemas. Religion, liberalism and science do not tolerate each other: they require and entail one another. In fact, they are inseparable — more like facets or dimensions than discrete entities.
(And of course, I had to mention Leviathan and the Air-Pump and The Metaphysical Club.)
A newish political framework
(Updated November 25, 2015, and edited slightly on January 19, 2020.)
No word is more loaded and distorted than the word “liberal”.
No word is more crucial, especially right now. Deprived of language, the very concept of liberalism is slipping away. Liberalism is losing its place in polical discourse, precisely when it is most needed. Each ideology sees liberals as unwitting dupes of its enemy, and happily shoots through liberals to fire on its foes, and tallies fallen liberals into its kill count.
But liberalism differs more from illiberal ideology than strains of illiberalism differ from from one another. Far from being the midpoint, average or muddling of purer ideologies, liberalism represents the cleanest and most radical departure from all ideological extremes, and our best hope for transcending them.
For this reason the word “liberal” needs clarification and revitalization.
For the last several decades the word “liberal” has been casually associated with “left”. And among the right, liberal has also been connected with Political Correctness.
The PC-liberal association, especially, makes it impossible to discuss what liberalism really is, because what makes PC objectionable to those who reject it is not liberalism, but illiberalism: an aggressive prioritization of the interests of particular collectives over individual freedom of speech, with the goal of manually re-balancing the scales of justice to compensate for generations-old collective imbalance.
Of course, this sort of collective oppression is exactly what liberals accuse conservatives of attempting. Some conservatives cheerfully admit to this, because they believe their institutions are backed by some absolute super-human authority. But the libertarian faction of conservatism balks at this. Libertarians want to maximize all liberty — social and economic — and will not tolerate any authoritarian interference in the private sphere, even if the authority claims to be underwritten by God Himself. This commitment to liberty is what makes libertarians true liberals (and why they have been correctly called “classical liberals”).
In theory, left-leaning liberals are sympathetic to the libertarian goal of maximizing social and economic liberty — but they are deeply skeptical of the libertarian favored means of achieving it, deregulation. They suspect that those who favor deregulation (and reduction or elimination of the welfare state) are invested primarily in the interests of those Americans who benefit directly from deregulation and shrinking of the state, and that all talk of the Invisible Hand of the market and Trickle Down is justificatory myth.
I am not interested at this point in the merits of the left and right forms of liberalism. Instead I want to point out the important fact that liberals agree on the end — liberty — and disagree primarily on means of achieving it. My belief is that alliances founded on ends, where the means are contested, make far more sense than alliances founded on means used to pursue divergent ends.
When liberalism is secure, the disagreement between left or right liberal strategies can seem enormous — even the key difference between friend and an adversary. At times when liberalism itself is threatened (and it seems we are approaching that point), liberals of all kinds must close ranks and redraw battle-lines. To join ranks with lesser-of-evil illiberal forces allows liberalism to be divided and conquered.
For this purpose, I am proposing a framework to help liberals of all kinds understand our shared political ideals and to frame discussion of our disagreements.
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The strategy hinges on separating the idea of left versus right from liberal versus illiberal.
The left-right continuum is one of equality. The further left you go, the more importance you assign to actual, achieved equality. The further right you go, the more you believe that some people (for whatever reason) ought to have more power or wealth than others, and that this achievement of inequality is good. In the middle region (where I think most liberals stand) is belief in equality of potential, with the left-middle emphasizing mobility of status and the right-middle emphasizing stability of status.
The liberal-illiberal continuum is one of individual versus collective purpose. At the far end of liberalism is complete disregard for collective purposes. For a pure liberal, collectivities exist solely for the sake of individual purposes. At the far end of illiberalism is the belief that the collectivity is the only thing that gives an individual life purpose. Toward the middle is the belief that individual and collective purposes are at least potentially mutually reinforcing. Those who lean liberal will emphasize the value of individual experience of participation in collective purpose, while those who lean illiberal will emphasize the enduring greatness of institutions while acknowledging the importance of winning the loyalty and faith of those who contribute to its preservation and flourishing.
Having worked far too long in consulting, I’ve made a nice 2×2, so we can link up our understanding to the awesome power of the human mind’s hypertrophied visual intelligence.
Here’s the catch — there is a theory embedded in this diagram, and it is what distinguishes this model from similar frameworks.
In the middle of the diagram is a gray triangle, a region I call the “political gamut“. What falls inside the political gamut is a coherent and practical position. What falls outside of it is impracticable, or requires inconsistency in practice.
According to this model it is impossible to be extreme left or extreme right and also liberal. I think a great many hard-left liberals and hard-right libertarians look at each other and see the impracticability of the other’s position without seeing the impracticability of their own. But this model claims that liberalism is required to be centrist with regard to the left-right spectrum. Or, to put it differently, extreme liberalism requires extreme left-right centrism. I call this position “ambiliberalism“.
Have at it. I’m trying to be a good designer and user testing this conceptual model. Please respond here or on Facebook.
Universal Design Praxis
I find the term Design Thinking inadequate.
First, the term Design Thinking belongs to IDEO. As far as I know, they made the term up, they use it for marketing and it remains closely associated with them. It is uncomfortably too many things at once: a semi-grassroots movement, a (vague) methodology, a bag of tricks, a style, an approach to problem-solving and a trademark.
But second, thinking is only one part of what goes on with Design Thinking. And in fact in Design Thinking thinking is demoted from its usual exalted position. In most situations in most organizations, making and doing activities are preceded by lengthy talking, making of cases, adducing of evidence, modeling, deciding, planning, and other activities of the head. But with Design Thinking, making and doing become more equal partners with thinking in determining what will be thought and done and made. Hands and feet enter the picture and work alongside the head (and heart) to shape what transpires.
For this reason, I am inclined to characterize this way of working more as a practice than a way of thinking.
Even practice fails to go far enough, though, because a practice can still position a practitioner outside of what is being worked on. With design problems one struggles inside them, rather than working on them or puzzling over them. Anyone who has gone through the wringer of a deep design problem can tell you: design immerses, involves, challenges and changes people at an unnervingly fundamental level. This is why talk around design, design thinking and related movements like UX and service design can get a little breathless and zealous and quasi-religious: because it does stimulate — even forces — unexpected and profound self-transformations. Because of this — because the practice of doing/making/thinking iteratively feeds back into and self-modifies the doing/making/thinking and perceiving process, and the practitioners involved in it, it should be called a design praxis.
And since the active domain of design praxis is all systems involving both subjective free-willed, choice-making entities (a.k.a. people) and objective entities — and such systems are ubiquitous — it might even be called Universal Design Praxis. According to this perspective, most problems are actually design problems. When we limit design to traditionally define design areas (graphic, product, digital, architectural, interior, fashion, and so on) we misdiagnose problems as engineering, marketing, management, economic, etc. problems — and usually end up factoring out the crucial element of free-will, and wind up treating people as beings to manipulate, control or coerce.
There is a moral/political dimension to design praxis: it works to engage human beings as free and appeals to free choice, and this also contributes to the whole movement’s quasi-religiosity
So here are the core principles of Universal Design Praxis:
- Any development of systems comprising both objective and subjective (free-willed) components is best approached as a design problem. (This encompasses the vast bulk of human activity.)
- Design problems are resolved through iterative cycles of first-hand immersion, collaborative reflection, collaborative making, testing, revision, etc. Whatever the specific techniques used, they are used with this thrust in this basic framework: go to reality to learn, to make, to relearn, to remake…
- Design praxis changes the practitioner as the problem moves toward resolution — the practioner self-transforms into someone capable of seeing a solution that initially was invisible.
- Design praxis involves reflective collaboration — multiple people working directly with realities (as opposed to speculating or recalling or applying expertise). Abstractions are derived afresh from direct exposure to reality (the reality of people, things, actions, institutions, places — whatever contributes to making a situation what it is).
- Design praxis assumes, affirms, appeals to, and amplifies free-will.
Human [second] nature
If someday we finally persuade ourselves that free will, souls and individual purposes were inventions, that they are sustained only by our linguistic and pedagogical habits, that they can easily be dis-instituted and explained into non-existence — I hope the insight doesn’t come before an even deeper insight: That the most important elements of humanity are our second-natural ones: what we have made of ourselves in the act of making things for ourselves.
Cultural activity is working to form the second-natural essence of future generations. I want us to have free-will, souls and individual purposes because I like having them, not because I think they have an existence apart from “mere” human ways of being.
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Do not argue with me about what is natural with the expectation that naturalness compels acceptance.
Show me that a thing is good and for whom it is good and which good things must be sacrificed to have it.
Faith in philosophy
My faith in philosophy still stands in that I believe philosophy does something important — and in fact, essential, in the life of human beings.
However, this faith has been beaten back severely over the last decade: I believe philosophy is suppressed by every society, even the freest, out of necessity — and further, that most of the time when it is suppressed that it ought to be suppressed.
Ambiliberalism
Here is a second version of my revised “Ambidextrous Liberal Manifesto” diagram, which I will eventually make into a new presentation to replace the old one posted on Slideshare.
The core ideas:
- The term “liberal” needs to be restored to its original meaning: “favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.”
- The proper opposite of liberal is “illiberal” not conservative. In the American liberal-democratic tradition, a conservative is necessarily, to some degree, also a liberal, which is why right-liberals are also called “neoliberals” or “classical liberals” or “libertarians”. The tradition conserved in America is liberalism. This is not as true in some European countries where liberalism has emerged from monarchy, aristocracy, or other illiberal orders.
- The habit of conflating left with liberty or right with liberty is counterproductive. Left and right must be considered separately from questions of liberalism.
- Left and right are attitudes toward equality and inequality — NOT liberty or unfreedom. Regulation and deregulation can serve liberal purposes or illiberal ones.
- Left-leaning Democrats (analogous to European Social Democrats) and Right-leaning Republicans are both moderately liberal, sacrificing liberty for other values (equality and just rewards, respectively). Even within the American liberal-democratic tradition this is actually legitimate and deserves respect. Any position falling inside the triad of Liberalism, Social Democracy and Conservative Republicanism should be considered legitimate within the American political order.
- Attributing secret or unconscious motives to our political adversaries is not only inaccurate and unjust — it makes enemies of fellow-citizens. Republicans are not all crypto-plutocrats and Democrats are not all crypto-Marxists, and to make these kinds of accusations is childish and violent.
- Liberal-democracies depend on development of skillfully civilized fighting: what Chantal Mouffe calls “agonism“. Heated disagreements within a civilized range are not only acceptable to liberalism, they are the consequence of pluralism and the very substance of liberalism.
- True liberalism cannot exist in a state of economic anarchy (the “libertarian absurdities”), nor in a state of exact equality (the “left-liberal absurdities”), but only where equal access to opportunity exists, which requires moderate pro-competitive regulation — a balance of equality and inequality. (Even proto-libertarian Friedrich Hayek advocated regulation, provided it was not anti-competitive regulation.)
- Liberalism cannot be taken for granted as a natural state which emerges when illiberal obstructions are removed. It must be created and maintained. To do so, liberals must free themselves from doctrines of left vs right and instead form alliances which treat the policies of the left and right as mere means to the end of liberty, to be used together, ambidextrously, to maximize liberty.
Ambiliberalism
Since I read Mouffe a couple of years ago, I’ve become aware of the intensity and depth of my commitment to liberalism, defined as: “favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms… favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform.”
I came to feel that liberalism ought to be viewed as a moral commitment, not an adherence to particular policies. A true liberal will treat all policies as means to an end to liberalism, and will discard any policy if shown to violate the goal of liberalism.
Currently this is not the case. Left-liberals align themselves with advocates of leftist policies without worrying nearly enough if their allies are committed to a liberal outcome. And the right is the same, if not worse. Libertarians allying with neoconservatives is nothing less than perverse.
It occurred to me that the language and framing of politics might be the cause of this, and that a reframing and clarification of language might enable new alliances along moral lines. So I made the Ambidextrous Liberal Manifesto.
But since the first iteration, a lot has happened. The USA has experienced an intensification of racial tensions. Reactions have been polarized and polarizing. Political correctness has returned to the left with a literal vengeance, after a decade long residence with the right, where it took the form of grotesque Freedom Fried nationalism. In Europe, hard-right politics is gaining ground with building momentum. In my personal life, I’ve been reading about liberalism, from the perspectives of thinkers who wrote in the wake of WWII, and who were responding to polarities more extreme than those we bemoan in the USA. Two of the most notable were Friedrich Hayek and Isaiah Berlin.
Consequently, I’ve found myself wanting to redraw my political landscape with increased dynamic range in a more universal gamut. So, here’s the latest. I am going to work it into a second version of the presentation, later, but I think it is in a state where its new meaning can be derived from the first version.
The Republic of Reality
represent |repri-zent|
verb [with obj.]
- be entitled or appointed to act or speak for (someone), especially in an official capacity.
- constitute; amount to.
- depict (a particular subject) in a picture or other work of art
- formal state or point out (something) clearly
“Now that we are no longer fooled by these maneuvers, we see spokesmen, whoever they may be, speaking on behalf of other actors, whatever they may be. We see them throwing their ranks of allies, some reluctant, some bellicose, into battle one after the other.” – Bruno Latour
If knowledge is representative, this sense of representation (4) should not be too closely equated with (3) depicting or (2) constituting. It is better to emphasize its affinity with (1) acting or speaking on behalf of a reality.
Knowledge represents reality by being its spokesman in deliberation, conveying the considerations relevant to that reality, and negotiating for where that reality will figure into whatever is being discussed. If a representative speaks well for a reality, the reality will cooperate and reinforce his claim of representing his constituency. If he misrepresents a reality, the reality will undermine and discredit his representation by refusing to cooperate as the representative promised it would.
Again: our knowledge does not depict reality or make little idea-models that correspond to a reality — with our knowledge we politically represent a reality and conveys what it does and will do with respect to a problem. We are standing in for a reality and representing it in its absence.
Of course, it pays to confer with any reality we are seeking to represent, and be good students of that reality so we can represent it ever more faithfully. When we are representing people we may have conversations with them. Or we may immerse in their lives, interact and participate so we can get first-hand first-person knowledge of what is going on. If we are representing non-human things we might have to watch, form hypotheses, interact, experiment, revise — again, so we can be taught by the reality how to represent it.
And, as Latour never tires of pointing out, every social situation is a heterogeneous collection of human and non-human actors.
Since design is nearly always intervening in some social situation in order to change it, what design researchers really do in the field is confer with the full social reality in order to understand it and fully represent it. And once hypothetical solutions are found, design researchers return to the social situation to confer with it about how it might react to them. Good designers are like good politicians — always shaking hands, knocking on doors, staying in touch, winning support.
Individuality
My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.
With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.
With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.
Douche Theory 2×2 Model (R)
I plan to use this diagram to help me explain different approaches to design strategy.
Human-centered design helps Douche organizations become Keepers.
Persona Americana archive
I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a blog of passages taken from pre-War literature that display an American sense of identity that I feel has faded over the course of my lifetime.
I am thinking especially about two authors I read heavily as a child, like Mark Twain and L. Frank Baum. I don’t have particular passages in mind, yet, but I do have a strong sense of Americanness that I believe I acquired from them:
- pride in one’s own humble roots
- a taste for directness bordering on roughness, delight in dispensing with dainty niceties
- extreme practicality — take action without hesitation or theorizing
- a stubborn sense of equality (often demonstrated in a disdain for class airs and thoroughgoing non-participation in aristocratic self-importance games)
- “live and let live” elevated to the highest moral principle — commitment to defending the rights of others to think and do whatever they please with an expectation that this commitment be reciprocated
- impish irreverence toward merely formal propriety
- a cheerful can-do work ethic of plucky, industrious optimism
- Settling an issue with one’s fists — followed by a handshake of respect, then friendship
- thinking big — tastelessly big — Vegas Big
- frankness, with non-concern for offending others with one’s opinions
- self-sufficiency, ability to survive by one’s own wits
- willingness to help a person in trouble, regardless of who the person is
- disregard for irritable, moralistic, formalistic, sophisticated sensibilities
I am imagining a photoblog consisting of images of pages of books, each tagged by theme, and prominently featuring a tag cloud which hopefully over time might reflect the qualities of the ideal American character.
Images of America
An embryonic hypothesis: Most Americans subscribe to one of three images of America, each with its own political hero, philosophical hero and philosophical movement.
Founding Fathers (Enlightenment America): Political hero: Thomas Jefferson. Philosophical hero: John Locke. Movement: The Enlightenment.
Pre-Founding Fathers (Evangelical America): Political hero: Jonathan Edwards. Philosophical hero: Martin Luther. Movement: The Great Awakening.
Re-founding Fathers (Progressive America): Political hero: Abraham Lincoln. Philosophical hero: John Dewey. Movement: Pragmatism.
Engineering and design
Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.
Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.
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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.
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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.
Cat-agoraphobic political statement
I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and I condemn all involuntary identifications.
Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.
If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.
I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.
The medium of action
Had Hannah Arendt lived to read Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump: she would never have written this:
With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.
Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.
Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.
This last sentence is perfectly, elegantly wrong, and overcoming this belief is at the very heart of Design Thinking.
Latour on the Baby Boomers
I found this passage from Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence persuasive and moving.
I myself belong to the generation designated as baby boomers, at least until age has earned us the dreadful replacement moniker “golden agers.” Without this indispensable reference point, it won’t be possible to tell whether it is reactionary or not to propose, as I did in the introduction, that we should “learn to respect institutions.” Unless we know the genealogical cluster in which you are located, it will be impossible to know, given that habit has so many enemies, whether you want to protect a value by instituting it or, on the contrary, whether you want to betray it, stifle it, break it down, ossify it. Now we baby boomers have drained that bitter cup to the dregs. Confronting the ruins of the institutions that we are beginning to bequeath to our descendants, am I the only one to feel the same embarrassment as asbestos manufacturers targeted by the criminal charges brought by workers suffering from lung cancer? In the beginning, the struggle against institutions seemed to be risk-free; it was modernizing and liberating—and even fun; like asbestos, it had only good qualities. But, like asbestos, alas, it also had disastrous consequences that no one had anticipated and that we have been far too slow to recognize.
In particular, it took me a long time to understand what effect such an attitude was going to have on the subsequent generations from whom we were threatening to conceal the secret of institutions owing to our own congestion (and also owing to our numbers and our appetites for living lavishly and for a long time). We expected these generations to continue (as we had?), through the vigor of their critical spirit, to hold onto the originality of their initiatives, their spontaneity, their enthusiasm, everything that institutions were no longer able (and no longer knew how) to keep going. This was to sin against blessed habit; it was to claim to be continuing institutions without offering any way to ensure continuity. We thought we were protecting values and contrasts by extracting them from institutions—from which we had profited before we destroyed them—like fishermen who claim to be saving fish from asphyxiation by bringing them out into the air. One little hypocrisy too many; we have to hope it won’t be stamped on our foreheads on Judgment Day . . .
And here is the “malign inversion”: by losing the thread of the means that could have ensured subsistence—habit being no longer able to ensure the relay—we have involuntarily pointed in the direction of a return to substance without specifying to the next generation that this return would be truly fatal, precisely for want of defining its means of subsistence. In Pierre Legendre’s words (provided that we extend them to all the modes and not just to psyches), we have broken the “genealogical principle,” that is, the search for antecedents and consequents. Being-as-other can gain its subsistence through the exploration of alterity, through multiplicity, through relations; it cannot ensure continuity by entrusting it to a substance. But without the scaffolding of habits, it cannot subsist at all! Here is where the trap closes, where the miracle product called asbestos begins to make the employees who breathe its microfibers cough their lungs out.
I may be overdramatizing the situation, but I cannot help thinking that if those who are starting to succeed us inadvertently sought to keep speaking of what is true or false, they would have no choice but to plunge headlong into a search for foundations, since institutions can no longer guarantee continuity. In other words, to those who, tired of spontaneity, are nevertheless still searching for truth, we have left no recourse but fundamentalism. Now all the contrasts I have talked about up to this point are lost forever if we set out in search of their “incontrovertible foundation”: God, of course, as we shall see, but also law, science, the psychogenics, the frenzied world itself, in short, the multiverse. If the reader has grasped the weight, or rather the lightness, of habit, he has also understood that there is nothing true except what is instituted, thus what is relative: relative to the weight, the thickness, the complexity, the layering, the multiplicity, the heterogeneity of institutions; but relative especially to the always delicate detection of the leap, the threshold, the step, the pass necessary for its extension. Exactly what Double Click teaches us to miss. By confusing the rejuvenation of institutions with their dismantling, hasn’t the baby-boomer generation made it possible to slip, almost unwittingly, from the critical spirit to fundamentalism? As if a first category mistake about blessed habit had triggered a second, infinitely more calamitous, concerning the radical distinction between what is true and what is instituted. The late modernism that thought it was digging the grave of its predecessors would thus have been digging its own grave!
I am well aware that we would be committing a new injustice, however, if we were to go on flagellating ourselves too long. If it is hard for our children to inherit our muddled passions, how could we have inherited the whole history of Modernism without difficulty? If it has seemed impossible for us to utter the words “truth” and “instituted” in the same breath, it is surely because of the lamentable state in which we had found the aforementioned institutions. If we have criticized them, it is surely because they had not been functioning for a long time—or at least because there was no longer a recipe adapted to their various regimes. If there were just one way to take habits, there would have been just one way to stand guard over institutions while keeping them from degenerating and tipping unnoticed from omission into forgetting. But as each mode has its own particular way of letting itself be omitted by habit, these are the differences that have made it so difficult for a civilization to provide the care that would have been required to maintain all the contrasts extracted by the ontological history of the Moderns.
If our predecessors had spent even a fraction of the energy devoted to the critique of institutions on differentiating all these cares, all these attentions, all these precautions, our generation would never have found itself before empty shells. But the very idea of care and precaution had become foreign to them, since they had hurled themselves blindly into this modernizing furor for which the time for care and attachments, as they saw it, had definitively passed. As if that archaic time were henceforth behind them and they had before them only the radiant future, defined precisely by a single emancipation, by the absence of precautions to be taken, this reign of irrational Reason whose cruel strangeness we have come to understand. I grant that it is hard for the young people born after us to inherit from the so-called May ’68 generation; but can someone tell me what we were supposed to do with the legacies left behind by the generations of “August ’14,” “October ’17,” and “June ’40”? Not an easy task, to inherit from the twentieth century! When will we be done with it? But we must try to be patient: once we have deployed all the modes, we shall know what we are to inherit and what we can, with a little luck, pass on to our descendants. In any case, in the face of what is coming, are not all generations, like all civilizations, equal in their ignorance?
Universal respect
To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.
To believe one is too great to bother with lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)
Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.
This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.
Pro-political quotes
Bruno Latour:
Only in politics are people willing to talk of “trials of strength.” Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.
Chantal Mouffe:
Introducing the category of the ‘adversary’ requires complexifying the notion of antagonism and distinguishing two different forms in which it can emerge, antagonism properly speaking and agonism. Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries. We can therefore reformulate our problem by saying that envisaged from the perspective of ‘agonistic pluralism’ the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism. This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of ‘deliberative democracy’ is that for ‘agonistic pluralism’, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.
One of the keys to the thesis of agonistic pluralism is that, far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence. Modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. Breaking with the symbolic representation of society as an organic body — which was characteristic of the holist mode of social organization — a democratic society acknowledges the pluralism of values, the ‘disenchantment of the world’ diagnosed by Max Weber and the unavoidable conflicts that it entails.
I agree with those who affirm that a pluralist democracy demands a certain amount of consensus and that it requires allegiance to the values which constitute its ‘ethico-political principles’. But since those ethico-political principles can only exist through many different and conflicting interpretations, such a consensus is bound to be a ‘conflictual consensus’. This is indeed the privileged terrain of agonistic confrontation among adversaries. Ideally such a confrontation should be staged around the diverse conceptions of citizenship which correspond to the different interpretations of the ethica-political principles: liberal-conservative, social-democratic, neo-liberal, radical-democratic, and so on. Each of them proposes its own interpretation of the ‘common good’, and tries to implement a different form of hegemony. To foster allegiance to its institutions, a democratic system requires the availability of those contending forms of citizenship identification. They provide the terrain in which passions can be mobilized around democratic objectives and antagonism transformed into agonism.
A well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions. If this is missing there is the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation among other forms of collective identification, as is the case with identity politics. Too much emphasis on consensus and the refusal of confrontation lead to apathy and disaffection with political participation. Worse still, the result can be the crystallization of collective passions around issues which cannot be managed by the democratic process and an explosion of antagonisms that can tear up the very basis of civility.
It is for that reason that the ideal of a pluralist democracy cannot be to reach a rational consensus in the public sphere. Such a consensus cannot exist. We have to accept that every consensus exists as a temporary result of a provisional hegemony, as a stabilization of power, and that it always entails some form of exclusion. The ideas that power could be dissolved through a rational debate and that legitimacy could be based on pure rationality are illusions which can endanger democratic institutions.