I’ve recently reread Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind and might be publishing some articles over the next few weeks on thoughts that book raised. For now, I’ve got to address the question in the title, “What is politics?” from the viewpoint of my effort to enrich and expand our understanding of the Body of Christ as it forms in this mortal realm.
In The Liberal Mind, Professor Minogue says:
Now what makes liberal individualism so plausible is that the individual is the only self-conscious entity whose limits appear to correspond to a physiological creature; and also that the thoughts and feelings which constitute institutions such as states or churches must be physically located in the minds of human beings.
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Yet if we wish to learn about the military behavior of soldiers, we must study military activities, not psychology. And similarly, if we wish to understand politicians, we must attempt to understand the activity of politics, not discover whether politicians are nice or nasty men. [page 50]
In this article, the first part of the quote is most relevant. I put in the second part, which points more to the next question of the reality of communities, because I wanted some balance and some hints of where I’m headed. In fact, any who’ve been reading my writings over the previous few years would realize that the question of the reality of entities defined by relationships has been partly addressed in my past efforts — relationships are primary over concrete entities. In a sense, human communities exist first and shape the individuals. Which comes first, chicken or egg? How about the flock? And the environments in which the flock lives?
In any case, I want to quote Professor Minogue again before moving on:
A social institution is a self-conscious grouping of interests. But we are not always self-conscious, and the study of institutions is far from exhausting political and social life. For in philosophizing we are confronted with another kind of evidence which in liberal individualism must be explained away, but which for other philosophers is itself a starting point. As examples of this evidence we may take a philosopher absorbed in a problem, an artist in a picture, or a soldier engaged in an attack. None of these people is self-conscious, and the behavior of each can only be explained if one understands the relevant activity. … But what is false in liberalism is the doctrine that these moments, times of concern with self-preservation and comparative status, rather than the times of self-forgetful absorption in activity, are the yardstick of reality. [page 51]
It might be that part of our difficulties in understanding the relationships of individuals to communities/institutions/etc. is that most people feel most alive when most self-conscious, not when losing themselves in a difficult and interesting task. They feel most alive when they are experiencing the pleasures of good food or music at a rock concert rather than when growing food in an intensive garden or playing a recorder. It would be in those two latter activities that we would most resemble those we pretend to admire, da Vinci and the DiMaggio brothers and other high achievers. Is this a result of an inadequacy in their upbringing or in their capabilities? I say inadequacy because the ability to put all of yourself into a worthwhile task outside of yourself, building a clock from scratch or solving an important problem in astrophysics or worshiping God, is a necessary part of becoming God-like, even a necessary part of sharing life with God. To drive the point home, without being judgmental towards individuals, I sometimes get the impression in my own praying and in observing others praying that even the best of us will sometimes soak in our own holy and self-righteous juices and call it prayer. Prayer is getting lost in our conversation in which we learn to talk along with God. Along with. Not to and not even with in the face-to-face sense.
The previous paragraph points towards one or more major problems we have to solve to become — so to speak — better than ourselves. What does that have to do with formation of communities or our entry into an existing community, at which time — if we truly become part of it — we become one of those forming that community.
Let me diverge to note a recent article about the loss of memories when one partner in a relationship, such as a husband or wife, falls into dementia. The article, and the underlying research and analysis, actually deals with the wider issue of the loss of memories in more general sorts of human groups. The article, Psychologists Ask How Well — Or Badly — We Remember Together tells us:
Several years ago, Suparna Rajaram noticed a strange sort of contagion in a couple she was close to. One partner acquired dementia — and the other lost the nourishing pleasures of joint reminiscence. “When the other person cannot validate shared memories,” said Rajaram, “they are both robbed of the past.”
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Some findings in the field of collaborative memory research have been counter intuitive. For one, collaboration can hurt memory. Some studies have compared the recall of items on lists by “collaborative groups,” or those who study together, and “nominal groups,” in which individuals work alone and the results are collated. The collaborative groups remembered more items than any single person would have done alone. But they also remembered fewer than the nominal groups did by totaling the efforts of its solitary workers. In other words, the collaborators’ whole was less than the sum of its parts.
This so-called “collaborative inhibition” affects recall for all sorts of things, from word pairs to emotionally laden events; it affects strangers or spouses, children or adults. It is, in scientific lingo, “robust.”
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“If a small group can reshape memories, we see how individuals come to hold certain viewpoints or perspectives,” she says. “That can serve as a model for how collective identities and histories are shaped.”
This “collaborative inhibition” might be a large part of what’s happening when human beings form into mindless or amoral herds. Alexis Tocqueville noted back in the 1830s that Americans have an odd inclination to ignore the most blunt and most obvious of facts when it conflicts with the mainstream view of things. Yet, we can be feisty as individuals. Maybe we need to be by ourselves to be able to fairly evaluate the moral implications of our actions as communities?
It’s the memories shared, and then lost, that interests me, for now. The ‘lost’ part interests me only as a pointer to the existence of shared memories, even group memories or community memories shared by large numbers of human beings — some of we’ve likely not even met.
Let me turn to another quote from Minogue’s The Liberal Mind before I try to determine some direction for my future efforts in dealing with this important aspect of the formation of the Body of Christ:
A tradition in this [second and better] sense is a knowledge of how to go about tasks, one which can only be transmitted by imitation, and which cannot be written down and summarized. In this sense of tradition, it is development rather than repetition which is the central idea. And what leads such traditions into decadence is precisely the conscious operations of reason. For reason fragments a tradition into a set of policies, ends and means, and works in terms of principles, which are to traditions just what dogmas are to ideologies — distorting fixed points outside the range of criticism. [page 55]
Development, rather than planning, is crucial and so are operations which might not even be conscious, but I’m going to tie matters together by saying that politics is the art of human community-building. A true politician, even if he’s a local dentist organizing a club for admirers of the Corvette, involves both the skills needed for a community to survive and prosper and also the stories which give meaning to the past and the dreams which give a true purpose to the future of that community.
It seems likely to me that we come together to form human communities partly because of the gaps in our memories. If we formed one-man, or one nuclear-family, societies merely interacting with other such societies as being external to our ‘real’ societies, we would never have the sorts of rich community lives that led to even the Bohemian neighborhoods of London and New York in healthier days, let alone the entirety of Western Civilization. In Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, an important thinker in the development of modern thought about the individual, did all he could to present in positive terms an impoverished community of one man living in isolation with another one-man community which was a man of different culture and language. A community as an assemblage of black-boxes. It’s hard to even describe the brilliant strangeness, and perverseness, of such thought to one who believes in the Body of Christ and in that ultimate of communities — the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I’ll note without further discussion that it’s very odd to me that Christian thinkers, theologians and political philosophers and others, seem to expend little effort thinking about the nature of that ultimate community and what it would mean for human communities.
In any case, a community of truly free-standing individuals hasn’t existed in the real world and exists in fiction only in the writing of writers of impoverished imagination, in books of impoverished narrative. I say this as an admirer of Defoe at his best, as a journalistic novelist who did wonders with the story of the Plague in London. I should also qualify myself. Some science-fiction writers with good imaginations, if not always the highest literary talents, have written of perverse societies of isolated individuals. The most relevant of such books is certainly the book in which Ray Bradbury got it right, as opposed to Orwell and Huxley. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury told us of a totalitarian society built from the ground up by isolated television-watchers. Sound familiar? Bradbury, in fact, thought television was the final piece in the puzzle, allowing Americans to retreat from reality, entering a state where they wouldn’t be bothered by God’s Creation. Tocqueville feared something like this would happen in the United States in his Democracy in American published in the 1830s. Hannah Arendt expressed a similar view regarding the entirety of the middle-class and countries dominated by that class.
So, let’s think about three men from a reasonably rich culture:
Tom remembers some things, perhaps consciously or perhaps just in his customs or habits or the skilled movements of his hat-making hands. Dick remembers some other things but is dependent upon Tom, not just because of Tom’s hat-making skills but also because it’s Tom who remembers a large number of songs from their Irish ancestors. It’s Harry on the other hand who has taken up the odd habit of reading histories about these United States to which their Irish ancestors came and it’s Harry who can tell them about some of the great accomplishments and some of the great failings of the land those hungry Irishmen came to, perhaps even telling of the way those Irishmen were despised and treated as animals useful only for their strong backs.
The art of politics, building a church community or a local political community or a men’s club, is meshing together those memories, leveraging off the gaps in any one man’s memories, in order to nurture and coordinate the requisite skills and also to construct something like a narrative which gives meaning to that community. When I speak of leveraging off the gaps in memories, I’m largely pointing towards a humbling process similar to what St. Paul spoke about in his Letter to the Romans:
For by the grace given to me I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.
As some sociologists and historians, such as Robert Nisbet, have claimed:
We are bound together in communities by ties of dependencies.
We need each other’s skills and we need each other’s memories. As I’ve noted before, echoing others such as Nisbet, we’ve chosen to walk away from our smaller-scale communities and to become dependent upon the centralized powers of this modern age. We’ve left behind our community roles to become workers in giant corporations, citizen/soldiers in giant states, and consumers in giant marketplaces. The problem is the nature of these top-down, exploitive communities of always self-conscious and always self-concerned individuals rather than their size since the Body of Christ, even with salvation restricted to a relative few, will be more gigantic than any conceivable human state.
Continuing to remember but to bracket away the question as to whether a community is a real entity or a mere collection of individuals, we can ask a similarly important and difficult question:
Do we also need a genius to organize us into a richer and more complex community?
I’ll say no and will even claim a domineering or would-be domineering ‘genius’ of this sort will destroy or deform a community. We need to be patient and we need to do our work in our locality, which might actually be a region where various localities meet and form a more complex community. One way to see what I’m saying is to think of a federation which grows organically.
The governing councils for the various towns and cities in an urban area would come together to form a county. The governing councils of counties would come together to form a state. And so on. These processes once occurred naturally in our long-gone (relatively) free markets. One fairly straightforward example comes from the insurance industry where companies combined from the primary companies up through layers of the companies taking higher levels of risk to ‘smooth’ out those risks over time and over larger geographical areas. A very limited model of community building, but one which worked well even though it always had some levels of top-down design.
And we have to be careful about our thoughts. We think about a certain realm of human life in terms of engineering or bureaucratic system building when we should be participants in a narrative process which can’t be guided if it’s to remain healthy and strong. That is, we’d have to be careful not to ‘guide’ the process too much and certainly not to try to impose our favorite solutions upon an evolving system.
Healthy human communities evolve over longer scales of time and develop over shorter scales of time. As the historian Carroll Quigley claimed:
The truth unfolds in time through communal processes.
In my way of thought, this is an recursively entangled line of thought. You see, “Things are true,” and “Truths are thing-like.” This means that communities are true and not just ad-hoc arrangements. Moreover, communities are thing-like. The communities and the communal processes themselves unfold in time.
But entities like the United States and the so-called global economy are hierarchical structures imposed on masses of human beings and various human communities which would otherwise develop truer and more fruitful communities.
Perhaps we can say that the community evolves in time as true relationships emerge?
We haven’t gotten it right yet and we aren’t capable of fixing everything because we don’t even know what we’re fixing let alone what it’s really supposed to be like. More than that, we’re organisms, ourselves growing and developing towards futures we can help shape but can’t plan in the way that modern bureaucrats once imagined they could plan for a safer and more prosperous and more aesthetically pleasing Harlem.
Rather than trying to design our various communities, we need somehow to regard them as being more like evolving and developing organisms than designed and manufactured machines. When we so regard them, we can research them and analyze them, not for the purpose of controlling what shouldn’t be controlled but rather for the purpose of understanding them that we might move along with their development in our own lives and with their evolution to the extent we can consciously live as members of one generation in that democracy of the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.
In conclusion, I think it relatively easy to define politics as the art, drawing upon some science, of bringing together different skills and other forms of memory for the purpose of forming a community, perhaps to serve God and perhaps to get in a good game of bridge once a week. It’s harder to define even a vague range of legitimate actions on the part of the those who take on leadership roles with a ‘political’ aspect, but I strongly believe they should limit themselves to being actors who are part of more or less spontaneous processes, perhaps guiding them when a community begins to stray from all possible moral paths, but, even then, not trying to guide them down a specific path.