Debate: What Politics Is Really About
Power or "the Good"? Reason or violence?
In today’s Debate, Wisdom of Crowds asks: What is politics?
and began to argue this question in a recent podcast episode. They continue their argument here. Sam believes politics is inseparable from philosophical questions about the good life and the nature of justice. Politics is the arena where those questions are contested. Damir disagrees. For him, those questions can only be asked and answered by an individual. Politics is the realm of conflict between different visions of goodness and justice. Sam believes politics has a place for reason and deliberation; Damir believes in the primacy of power struggle and sublimated (or not-so-sublimated) violence. Sam will start things off. Enjoy!— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor
Samuel Kimbriel: One of our first-ever conversations was at a party somewhere in Northwest DC, where you were joking that the one thing needed to heal our moment was for someone to go back in time and kill baby John Rawls. It was an off-color joke, but it had a philosophical point. Mid-century liberalism, the joke suggests, has overestimated the idea that its founding premises — human rights or distributive justice — are neutral and self-evident. So many of the paroxysms we now see seem to be a society that is violently trying to shake off that inheritance. People want moral commitments, not just strange arguments about how their specific preferences are impartial.
I want to press you with this same challenge. In our last podcast, I accused you of being a covert Rawlsian. What I meant is that in our exchanges you tend to try to push people on their foundational commitments, without really owning up to just how provisional your own are in turn.
As I read it, life is very uncertain. Maybe we have some sense for what the nature of the world as a whole is via science, but even there it’s spotty. Similarly, we have very unclear sense for what human beings are, or what life is about.
I take it that the real job of the philosopher is to force oneself first of all — and then by proxy, others — to face that existential ambiguity head on. We can’t dispositively understand the nature of life in advance. Instead, we have to assess the conditions as best we can, and then get on with living. Life in that sense isn’t built on certainty, but requires a kind of courage to run experiments, attempting to work out the nature of the world and the good life in real time.
I’m confident we agree on a lot of this. But my accusation of covert Rawlsianism is that you often seem to think that you have a trump card — a realization that violence is itself a neutral reality, and that all other explanations (with the possible exception you make for religion at times) are simply bad faith failures to face the corrosive power of strength over weakness.
I’m unconvinced. As I see it, violence like any other category is part of the mix. It’s one reality alongside many others and the whole business is trying to work out which reality is more real than the others.
So there’s the challenge, somewhat too terse — but I’m sure we’ll have ample space for some blows and counter-blows.
Damir Marusic: I think where we part ways is where you say that the real job of the philosopher is to force oneself first of all to face that existential ambiguity head on. Implied in that is that the role of the philosopher is to wrestle with these questions on a personal level — and yet also to model this wrestling for others in a public way — in order to work towards a positive vision. Presumably you allow that the existential ambiguity is ultimately not resolvable, yet nevertheless you seem to hold that there is a Good that can be approached step by step, maybe asymptotically. You see the job of the philosopher to both highlight how difficult this path is, and to try to walk along it — or at least to clear a path so that others that follow you might get further.
I think you’re simply not skeptical enough. You don’t take seriously enough the possibility that there is no Good. Your wrestling with contingency is still under the assumption that progress can be made. I’m simply not convinced that this is true. If you’re going to face existential ambiguity, you have to face it fully.
Does this mean I’m making a truth claim about the ultimate meaninglessness of everything? No, not at all. I’m just suggesting that any positive claims to meaning are ultimately going to be private and unprovable. Professors love to introduce Nietzsche to students by making them read the madman parable — the famous “God is dead … and we have killed him” bit. Nietzsche, through the madman, prophesies that some kind of higher re-enchantment of society might be possible in the future. Maybe! But for the moment, “God is dead” is an echo of Adam and Eve eating the apple. And it’s pretty clear from all the faith traditions that there’s no going back.
My railing against liberalism and its claims about rights and justice has to do with those claims not being defensible on the terms liberals choose — and indeed, even somewhat hard to define without the broader Christian tradition from which they spring. But having abandoned the totalizing truth claims of a single faith tradition, there is no rebuilding that totalizing vision of the Good.
So let’s say you believe fully in Christianity, Sam. And you have an inkling of a Good that comes from its teachings, and therefore argue that we must have more charity for our fellow man, and that the strictures of borders and states run against these things. That’s fine, that’s an argument I can follow — and it’s an argument that’s more powerful to me than Rawlsianism, as it ultimately would come from authority rather than reason.
But expelled from the Garden, with God no longer immanent, your claims are merely your own, and affect only those that share your commitments.
That’s where I’m coming from. I see the world, and politics, as the battlefield of cloistered commitments, with no way of breaking through to universals. You’re focused on the philosopher’s quest for truth and the Good — something that you say is difficult and mysterious but ultimately possible. I’m saying that that’s a fine thing, but it’s not what I’m talking about. To understand the political world, you have to understand the motivations of factions. And to do that well, you ought to try to understand their commitments, and where they come from. But the moral content of those commitments is irrelevant, because all these competing moral claims are irresolvable in a godless world — or, better put, in a world where there is no single god.
But politics will go on. And my argument is that at the limit, irresolvable disputes are resolved by the sword. That’s the veto from violence I keep coming back to. This is the political world. A world where metaphysical questions about ultimate meaning may exist in the heads of the actors. But the system’s functioning is not really about those claims — it’s merely fueled by the violence that arises from the incommensurability of those claims.
Samuel: My first goal in this debate is simple — to argue that there are no trump cards, full stop. Not for religious people who believe in authority or revelation; not for liberals who believe in reason; not for economists who believe in self-interest; and not for theorists of violence who seem to know too much about the cold truth of reality. We all stand equally vulnerable before whatever the actual state of the world turns out to be.
You make a crucial elision in your response, one I’ve seen you make before. You slide in one well-punctuated sentence from the realm of ontology to the realm of subjectivity. “With God no longer immanent, your claims are merely your own, and affect only those that share your commitments.” The first part of this, the immanence of the divine, is a claim about the world — What is the world and what is God? Was God ever real or immanent? Those are matters concerning being — that is, the state of things. But in an instant you jump to the realm of perception “merely your own,” of “only those who share your commitments.” But these are simply not the same registers. It is definitely true that, whatever is the case, we only perceive it through being human. But the view that the world is nothing more than what we perceive, and shifts along with it, is as contestable as any other theory, materialist or otherwise.
But it’s a revealing mistake. If Justice or the Good or God ever existed, the strangest thing would be if they could disappear beneath humanity’s knife — as though the sun’s nuclear reaction flickered in and out of existence based on the whims of public opinion. It’s a kind of anthropocentrism that makes claims far above our station. If there are universals at all, it is definitional that they have force and agency all their own, human perception or decision be damned.
Let me state baldly that the idea of violence as the primary reality is perfectly plausible. In fact, to tighten the view, I think your strongest argument remains survival of the fittest. It is not that violence is the only reality; nor that humans only act violently, but that when push comes to shove, it is only violence and the products of violence that survive long-term.
But here I return back to my argument that there are no trump cards. What both of us are faced with is the raw hard barrage of life, which must be faced and lived without absolute certainty that we’ve understood the reality. Perhaps when one person launches a missile to Kyiv or slits 10 more throats on a Middle Eastern battlefield they are simply engaged in neutral acts of dominance or will. Or perhaps they are committing metaphysical crimes against Justice itself.
I wonder if this point is still accessible to modern people, particularly in tragedies. Even as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth give themselves over to violence and violent scheming, the audience can feel that they are somehow askew. It is not that they are mistaken in their operational plans — they are in fact clever enough to execute the violence they intend. Rather they are cutting against the direction of the the universe itself in a way that will be disastrous.
To put the point more cleanly — if the gods do in fact sit in Olympus, they are going to overwhelm you whether you believe in them or not.
Damir: I think it’s you who is eliding — specifically the part where I said that "any positive claims to meaning are ultimately going to be private and unprovable." How can it be otherwise? It’s not that Justice or the Good never existed, it’s that they’re always going to be contested.
And it’s not that I’m claiming God was ever immanent — indeed I have serious doubts on that question. I’m just saying that it’s only in a world with an immanent God that you could make any kinds of moral claims definitively. With the Fall, in a plural Babelized world, agreement on these matters is impossible.
To leave no doubt where I’m coming from: my own personal set of convictions are almost certainly much bleaker and empty than yours. But I am not claiming that my personal beliefs are a trump card over you. I can’t convince you of the ultimate meaninglessness of it all. But what I can do is point out the contingency of ALL positions. These are the wages of pluralism. If I can’t convince you of meaninglessness and you can’t convince me of ultimate meaning, we can in an ideal world agree to disagree and go our own way.
Unfortunately, politics is rarely solely motivated by such rarefied things. Usually, in the context of states and societies, there is some level of compellence of the individual involved. And my claim is that to understand politics, it’s best to pay attention to the balance of forces arrayed on any question, because that’s how any question will ultimately be resolved. Claims of moral righteousness or pursuit of the Good are, in this framework, only important as inputs in the marshaling of forces for the conflict.
Are the higher order questions important? Of course! But they’re a matter for the individual — either for personal sanity, or as a motivator for how to live one’s life. And yes, we love to read literature about the inner struggles of the Macbeths and the Lear family. It’s ennobling, thrilling, edifying. But none of this is in the realm of politics. These are matters of interiority.
“Ah, but Damir,” you say, “you’re wrong! The ultimate questions are the only ones that matter, and are not matters just for the individual’s conscience! And you’re not only wrong, but your politics are shallow, your quiescence is immoral, and is leading to great suffering in the world! Your dogma is a source of evil!”
Maybe, I say. But I don’t buy any of your premises. So here’s a knife and my bare neck. Go on and change the world!
Samuel: I’ll let your blade sit on the table between us for the moment.
In your last volley you set up a cordon sanitaire around what you take to be the sphere of politics. Conviction, you insist, is a “matter for the individual,” “personal,” “private and unprovable.” Politics, in contrast, sits on the other side of the barrier. The Good may come into it, but only inasmuch as it’s efficacious for “marshaling forces for the conflict.” It’s a tidy distinction, but two ticks too comforting. For the analyst, it offers detachment — the ability to watch the affairs of the political animal from the lab, never having to be committed to the concerns that drive the frenzy. For the politician, it distorts the stakes, leaving no answer to the question of why conviction should be so powerful a motivator for political action.
The analyst can come up with a model. Fair. A picture of political action, some prediction of where it might go. Still fair. But analysis itself is still both a political and metaphysical action. What else could it be? The analyst is also immersed in the world and in society with all the accountability that entails. I think your man Nietzsche gets the stakes. The madman you describe in your first letter goes on to say “the holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves?” Even the attempt to sequester or cleanse a realm for pure analysis risks being a metaphysical crime, depending on the nature of the world. This is the crime the Rawlsians risk; but I think you risk it as well.
But let me go at this one last way. I remember reading an account of one of the foot soldiers in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. As he tells it, his path toward violence was “built up over the years, and years of seeing privation, years of seeing exploitation, years of hunger and sadness and love.” This is the heart to politics as I see it — the molding, shifting, forming — of what people, both individually and collectively, become. It’s a matter incredible contingency, but also sensitivity — what are we and how do we live? And there are a range of options, from the violence of the IRA bomb, to the polite withdrawal of the middle class, to active non-violence or martyrdom. My point simply is that any one of these decisions will always be a substantive one and that no option gets us away from the metaphysical weight of having to choose one of them — that is, of having to live. To put this another way, I tend to think that the stakes of becoming a bad person are higher than the stakes of becoming a dead person, and it’s worth fighting against the former more than the latter.
So to sharpen the question back to you — as I see it, politics is intertwined with the world — how else could it be? Whatever ends up finally, fundamentally being the case also involves and implicates the political. That means that while there are criteria of success or sustainability in politics, they can never be divided from primary questions of meaning — of what humans are and what our accountability is to Reality as it stands. It seems to me that you then have an extraordinarily high bar if you want to cordon politics off from those questions of what is finally Good (the answer to which, I emphasize, could turn out to be “there is no Good!”).
Damir: I think we’re approaching some kind of clarity, Sam. This is all about this cordon sanitaire, as you put it. How do we draw it? Do we draw it at all? What is politics? I think I’ve concluded that if my cordon is too high, yours is far too low. Whereas I try to define a realm of politics, you in turn collapse everything into metaphysics.
The collapsing is most clearly visible in your second paragraph: “[A]nalysis itself is still both a political and metaphysical action. What else could it be? The analyst is also immersed in the world and in society with all the accountability that entails.” Every move has a moral accountability. Every move has a moral implication. You then go on: “Even the attempt to sequester or cleanse a realm for pure analysis risks being a metaphysical crime, depending on the nature of the world.”
The part that really jumps out to me is you claiming doing analysis potentially could be a “metaphysical crime.” It certainly could be said that if my priors end up causing me to blaspheme or otherwise act in an evil way, in a world that turns out to be divinely ordered, I may be divinely punished. But whether that is true is not a political question but a metaphysical question. Surely that difference matters?
On Twitter I said that your approach boils things down to personal accountability and salvation — and that doing so is very modern and individualistic. Maybe that was unfair — you’ve pointed out that the ancients were concerned with similar things pertaining to the individual. And when talking metaphysics, I can’t really disagree with how you set out the stakes. Even without certainty about the ultimate stakes, they are potentially very high for all of us.
But in pushing everything to these ultimate questions, I think you lose something important. By prioritizing and focusing on theoretical ultimate ends (personally arrived at through revelation or conviction or reasoning), you lose insight into a far grubbier dynamic that is very clearly apparent in the world — a dynamic that is worth understanding on its own terms. That’s what I’ve been calling politics. Maybe we need a better term for it? But my conception attempts to be descriptive.
As I’ve laid out above, the core problem of the system on its own terms is that there is no way to make any moral claims stick. That was why I ended the last note as I did, with my bare neck offered to your knife. It was to say that if I, as a political actor, refuse to submit to you, or even consider the possibility of your value system, and that you nevertheless judge my behavior to be evil or dangerous, you can only kill me to stop me — or submit to my evil and possibly perish. That you may choose to submit because of your convictions is all fine and good. And ultimately you may even be rewarded for it! But that’s outside of the scope of what I’m describing here.
“Ah, but,” you say, “what if my martyrdom wins the day in the long run?” Well, if your death at my hands inspires a revolt that I am unable to suppress and by which I am violently overthrown, ushering in an era where your example is venerated and the world is ordered by the teachings of Saint Kimbriel of Cambridge, you will have defeated me in our political struggle. Metaphysics, however, is still outside of the scope of things. The question of the ultimate good is external to your victory. Indeed, the question of the ultimate good will remain mysterious even after your victory, until such a time if and when some ultimate purpose of the world is revealed to all.
I think part of the confusion, and the frustration that Shadi and you often have, is the muddle between my description of the realm of politics and the political arguments I often make. I often describe this contested reality of struggle, with its veto from violence and the impossibility of moral hegemony — and then as a political actor make an argument to you that I am not convinced by your metaphysical claims. You see this as unfair, that I am stacking the deck in my favor. But I don't think that's true at all, as I hope my walking through the martyrdom example shows.
So what is so useful about my description of politics if its conception of power encompasses the unpredictable and unmeasurable — admits to “acts of God” as it were? I think it usefully lowers the political actor’s gaze to the world as it is. This is not to say that it glorifies ruthless leaders like Vladimir Putin over more idealistic types. But it should encourage people to not approach a conflict with someone like Putin believing with certainty that the arc of history bends towards justice, and that therefore our side will prevail. Or to use a less violent example, it forces people who firmly believe in universal human dignity and who want to change how countries do border policies to contend with the strength of their argument, rather than the moral substance of their argument, when contemplating how to defeat a populist demagogue’s appeal. (Yes, the moral substance may end up being the strength, but the moral substance must still be instrumentalized to effect change.)
To put it in highfalutin’ terms, it nudges politicians away from the recklessness of an ethic of conviction towards a more balanced ethic of responsibility.
As I said a letter ago, maybe we’ll have to agree to disagree, because on some level this is a question of framing the problem. I’d just leave you by suggesting that my frame doesn’t deprive me of thinking metaphysically, but yours does push you away from thinking politically.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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This is a lovely discussion — properly adversarial without becoming overly rancorous, and very fun to read.
Damir makes a distinction between metaphysics and politics. I am wondering about how best to place this (hypothetical) distinction. We might be able to break things down, roughly, into three sets of questions:
(1) What do values consist of? What is the correct way to understand what it is to value something? What makes values meaningful, or not, on a personal or social or ultimate level?
(2) What are the correct values to have? Or, if you don’t believe this question to be meaningful, then, more narrowly, what are your values? Or, what values do you hope people will have?
(3) What power do values have, as a practical matter, in the observable world? What values do people actually hold, if any? How can human actions or observable events change the way people perceive or act on values?
Damir, I think, wants in part to stop (3) from being infected by (2) and (1). He is certainly not wrong that people’s views on (2) and (1) can sometimes distort their understanding of (3), like for example when someone expects that their values will be politically compelling because they are “correct,” and refuses to see that this may not be the case.
Sam, by contrast, thinks that we cannot fully wall these questions off from each other — and possibly that some amount of equivocation or obfuscation is the inevitable result of trying to. For example, Damir’s claim that “any positive claims to meaning are ultimately going to be private and unprovable” has serious consequences for (1). It is not just a claim about (3), no matter how much Damir might want to build that wall.
Perhaps the easiest way to make Sam’s point would be to make a plausible claim that contradicts Damir’s, but that is clearly in the realm of (1). For example, Charles Taylor makes a lovely claim in “A Secular Age” that false ideologies of value are generally compelling because they contain some truth. I call this “lovely” because, despite not sharing Taylor’s Catholicism, I share his intuition.
Taylor’s claim is clearly based on the idea that there are “true” values; it has a strong component of (1). But it is also deeply relevant to (3). It asks us to pose further questions that can be illuminating in themselves. For example, we might consider that the Nazis had a positive vision of a pure and honourable Germany, full of respectable, excellent people. This vision was central to their appeal. Taylor’s theory suggests that Nazism may have been compelling because there was genuinely something good that they were pointing at, albeit in a distorted and ultimately disastrous way.
Would it be better to exclude theories like “false but compelling ideologies generally contain some truthful value claims” from our analysis? What about the competing claim that humans are congenitally inclined to evil, even the ones we like, and that true goodness is but a rare flicker in every society known to mankind? It seems to me that political analysis would be deeply impoverished by the lack of either of these theories. But if that’s true, then we cannot simply exclude (1) and (2) from all discussion of (3).
Thanks for hashing this out. I understand Damir’s position a more clearly now, though I resonate more with Sam’s approach.