Wednesday, November 30, 2005

War by Another Name

I. And perhaps, isn't all politics the worship of power for its own sake? Was Nietzsche right that all politics are founded in violence? Or simply in making others obey one's will?

II. Is "the left" principled and ethical, or are we basically interested in making the rest of society think and behave in a way that makes us comfortable? Do we care about "rights" and "tolerance", or do we basically detest that conservatives have different opinions about behavior? Do we really care about poverty, or just detest those who we feel don't care about poverty? Do we care about racism, or just want to beat up "white men" for not being the historical victims of racism? At what point do we become the pathological left- valorizing criminals for their "critique" of America? At what point is this just resentment?

III. Is "the right" principled and moral, or are they basically interested in making the rest of society think and behave in a way that makes them comfortable? Does the religious right care about "values" and "decency", or do they simply detest the fact that other people are allowed to live their lives as anything other than Christian? Do they believe in "self-determination" and "hard work", or simply want to break the social contract? Is capitalism a "value" or the negation of all values? At what point do they become the pathological right- valorizing tyranny for the order it maintains? Worshipping power instead of authority? At what point is this just resentment?

IV. What is the crime in being "apolitical" if politics is essentially self-interest? If it's war by other means? Shouldn't we opt out? Should I stop calling myself a "liberal"? Is this "nihilism", or is it simply belief in something less pathological?

3 comments:

elendil said...

What a thought-provoking post. I don't believe that politics is "meant to be" war by other means. I remember an undegrad course where I was taught that politics is about power, but I don't want to think of it that way.

I would like to see it as a way to organise on higher levels, to achieve a the synergistic effect of different individuals with different strengths and weaknesses working in concert. If that's the case, the dichotomisation of American politics is an absurdity. That is more suited to warfare, or sport, where there's usually two "teams" and we identify or pledge allegiance to one, sometimes in a fanatical way, and always on irrational grounds.

If one truly believed in the idealisation of politics as I've described it, then the other ideology is not an opponent but a friend. The other serve the important role of picking up where your own falls short. Of course, that presupposes that your own does fall short, which is not usual thinking for those engaged in war or team sports.

Do we really care about poverty, or just detest those who we feel don't care about poverty?

I would argue that they are different mechanisms to the same end. If you think about it, altruism and spite are the same thing but in opposite directions. Altruism is to help someone at a cost to yourself, and spite is to hurt someone at a cost to yourself. Both of them are counterintuitive to natural selection, but make sense from the society level. Both seem to happen because evolution[1] has granted us an internal mechanism to make their expression consistent with self-interest: altruism's mechanism is empathy, and spite's is vicarious anger.


[1]: Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. (2003) The nature of human altruism,
Nature, 425:785-791.

Rufus said...

It's interesting because democratic politics have been seen as different things at different times and in different places. In England it was seen as organized groups jockeying to get their interests met at about the same time as the French saw it as something akin to moral pedagogy!

I suspect that the system is what Winston Churchill called it- the worst possible political system with the exception of all the others. Perhaps it is highly flawed, but can be more humane because it is flawed.

Spite and altruism can lead to the same ends, but perhaps altruism is simply healthier for the cultivation of the self. It is less deleterious to one's selfhood. Also, I suspect that spite makes it easier for us to abdicate our own responsibilities, which are, of course, never really met. Perhaps it can, in that sense, be counterproductive.

I remember a parable from the Bible (sorry :)) in which the workers in a field are complaining to the farm owner that another worker doesn't work as hard as they do, and he tells them something like: "His task is different than yours- you can't judge how he works." There was something to that.

I wish I was better at that.

elendil said...

... spite makes it easier for us to abdicate our own responsibilities, which are, of course, never really met.

You might like this. It's from the blog of one of the Christian Peacemaker Team members being held hostage in Iraq. It is likely that he will be dead in 5 days time.