January 2, 2011
Party Animals
“ALL untaught Animals are only sollicitous of pleasing themselves, and naturally follow the bent of their own Inclinations” - Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue
Just under a year ago I joined the Labour Party. I will not be renewing my membership.
This is not, however, because of some ideological disenchantment. Neither
is it due to dissatisfaction with Ed Miliband’s faltering start, or the Party’s lamentable response to the Coalition. The truth is, I’ve done nothing for Labour since the 2010 General Election. I’ve not even bothered updating my CLP membership since moving to Cambridge. And the basic reason for this is that I intensely dislike political campaigning, and party-political activities.
I find knocking on doors at best boring, and at worst utterly unpleasant. This isn’t so much because I’m averse to meeting the general public, as that I’m averse to looking them in the eye and lying. Like when they say “Labour has a rubbish policy on Trident/ID cards/immigration/the 10p tax”. Or “Gordon Brown is a crap Prime Minister, I’m not putting him back in power”. And I’m supposed to sit there and pretend that they’ve got it all wrong. Because The Party is fantastic and if it wins everything will be sunshine and kittens.
Likewise, away from the doorsteps I find the experience of party-politics pretty nauseating. The herd mentality in particular is stifling. It’s like being stuck with a bunch of football fans who only want to talk about their team and how great it is – apart from the heretics and traitors trying to ruin it from the inside, of course. That, and the constant, compulsory mantra about how awful and evil the other teams/parties are.
These tedious diatribes rarely track facts, reality or careful analytic judgement. But they pass the hours in many a constituency office. I say this, of course, as somebody who was (of all things) a Lib Dem MP’s researcher for most of 2009.* The above is certainly not unique to Labour. It’s the essence of party politics. Petty, bickering, self-indulgent, tribalistic and relentlessly tub-thumping in the face of reality. Your side against theirs. The Greater Good, pursued via the medium of Shit Policies.
The fact is, to stay active in grass roots party politics you have to enjoy this. Or at the very least, be able to engage in it whilst not contantly battling the urge to shove pins in your eyes.
Of course some people are able to so partake and nonetheless maintain good judgement, political sense and basic moral principles not determined by party policy. Don Paskini is the outstanding example here, though Chris Brooke gets a mention too. But these types are, in my experience, very rare.
The typical party animal primarily enjoys the petty, tribalistic, self-deceiving (our out-right lying) drudgery of party activity itself, and for its own sake. That, after all, explains why many are still engaged, year after long year.
But furthermore, those that go on to be seriously successful – to head local councils, become MPs, or even government ministers – have to invest enormous amounts of time and energy in this world of perma-propaganda, dogma, and tedious tribalism. So they, too, must find the entire process in some way satisfying. Or else they’d go off and do something else. Like make money, or save the whales.
Which leads me to some conclusions. Real world party politics is far removed from any vision of individual political agents striving-forth to right wrongs by clear-sighted application of moral principle. It’s far more to do with the actions of individuals deeply-involved in a daily process of tribalistic, competitive political hustling .
Sure, these individuals will possess moral values and principles, of varying degrees of coherence and sophistication. But what drives many is the appeal of politics as a participatory activity. They do politics because politics itself is how they like to spend their time: propagandising, disseminating and tub-thumping for their chosen tribe.
Which this leads again to the conclusion that there’s something very misguided about conceiving of politics as being fundamentally an exercise in applied ethics. And that any political theory maintaining otherwise will be quite seriously deficient.
–
*It was partly seeing how shit the Lib Dems are that made me think Labour was some sort of superior alternative. Which I still think it is, overall. But not enough to keep me paying yearly subs.
grrl said,
January 2, 2011 at 9:08 am
Happy New Year!
What an admirable resolution!
Err.. hold on! Do you think they, the ‘tribe’, could manage – without people like you – to bring us some ‘sunshine and kittens’?
Phil said,
January 2, 2011 at 11:21 am
I’m interested, in a settling-a-bet kind of way, in the part about first-hand knowledge of the shitness of the Lib Dems.
TJ said,
January 2, 2011 at 12:21 pm
A similar conclusion to Daniel Davies’ classic tract: “I sht on the progressives of this planet”:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2006/12/i-shit-on-progressives-of-this-planet.html
Key lesson: in a stable, wealthy, liberal democracy opposition to the bad is a far more important civic duty that promotion of the good.
Rob said,
January 2, 2011 at 1:19 pm
TJ,
my recollection of that d-squared post is that it makes an entirely sensible argument in applied ethics that ‘do no harm’ is a better political maxim than ‘pursue in every precise detail your favoured utopian vision’ because of the complexity of political institutions and the fallibility of human judgment. Paul, on the other hand, seems to think that if the participants of some practice generally have morally unsatisfactory motivations for engaging in it, we should stop making moral judgments about that practice. Whatever you might think about the appropriateness of that argumentative move, it’s not the same as ‘don’t push that lever, you have no idea what it’ll do’.
Peter said,
January 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Paul,
Sure. But isn’t being active in grass roots party politics not the same thing as merely being a member of a party? You can not be active etc, but still want to support the party financially through membership payments and so on.
Paul Sagar said,
January 2, 2011 at 2:04 pm
“Paul, on the other hand, seems to think that if the participants of some practice generally have morally unsatisfactory motivations for engaging in it, we should stop making moral judgments about that practice.”
Paul patently thinks no such thing, and had never argued for such a bizarre position, either.
Peter,
I suppose that’s a fair point. It’s just personally I don’t really see there being much value in being a member of a party simply to give it money. I’m happy to accept that for others this might be a happy course of action, and one with perfect consistency, but it’s just not enough to keep me on board.
Rob said,
January 2, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Paul,
in that case, what is the relationship between participants’ enjoyment of the lying, betrayal, arrogance and the like which I don’t dispute are integral to democratic politics and the consequent failure of the kind of political philosophy you disparage as applied ethics? I imagine most engineers build things because they like building things, so presumably it’s not “fundamentally an exercise in applied ethics” in the sense that politics is not either. Still, we’d want to allow ourselves to be able to make highly abstract judgments – which treat engineers’ preferences about what to build as constraints as much as inputs – about the appropriateness of engineering projects. Indeed, large engineering projects seem to be one of the things we would want to be doing applied ethics about, because of their widely dispersed and profound effects – like politics.
Paul Sagar said,
January 2, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Rob,
I never said there was no place for “highly abstracted moral judgements”. But the value and/of interest of those judgements, and the worth of the amount of time put into exploring them, is up for debate. As is the possibility that there might be better ways of spending our time, especially if our purpose is to understand and analyse politics with relation to how it actually occurs, let alone make recommendations for its future conduct.
Note that the word I used in the OP was “deficient”. I didn’t say “incoherent” or “fundamentally untenable”. I said “deficient”. Because my position is that to tell us all something *interesting* about politics (as oppose to, say, ideal moral theory), and to also get to a position of being able to offer recommendations that have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of ever having any practical purchase, then getting away from the “ethics first” view is likely to be fruitful. Sure, we can spend a lot of time thinking abstractly and in highly refined and isolated ways about the moral dimensions of politics abstracted from decision-making processes, the psychology of political actors as experienced in real life, and so forth. It is, after all, quite a diverting intellectual pursuit (i’ve spent a few years now indulging). But again, I’m not sure this is the best way to find out about *politics as it actually happens*, any more than I think that doing thought experiments about which way to flip the lever when the runaway train is hurtling towards two rival sets of victims is the best way to understand ethical life *as it actually happens*.
None of that goes any way to entailing some position that we can’t make “moral judgements” about people’s actions because of some thought that they have grubby motivations. On the contrary, we’re never going to be able to stop making those sorts of judgements – and nor should we want to. The question is: what sort of judgements should we be making, how closely should they track lived experience, and what can we expect those judgements to yield? Those are practical questions, ultimately. And hence, if we’re going to use theory, it would seem at least sensible to make more of an effort to base it in the experiences of practice.
Lianne said,
January 2, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Very interesting – I recently had a similar discussion with a friend who is a party member, while I am not. The joining of a party usually amounts the signing of an activists’ contract (i.e. you will go out, spread the word, raise awareness, and warrant funding for free).
I do think that unless you intend on fully committing yourself to a trajectory similar to the one you describe above, and to retain a sense of wider perspective beyond party politics, you should hold back from signing on.
Ultimately though, it should be an individual choice about what feels right. Good on you for making it!
Tom said,
January 2, 2011 at 6:05 pm
“This isn’t so much because I’m averse to meeting the general public, as that I’m averse to looking them in the eye and lying.”
So don’t. I’m a Labour activist, and I enjoy knocking on doors. I just don’t lie. If someone criticises a policy and I agree with their criticisms, I’ll tell them so – but I’ll also explain why, despite disagreeing with that policy, I’ll still be backing Labour, and urge them to do the same. It’s really not difficult; if someone was angry about the removal of the 10p rate, for example, it was easy enough to agree with them about that but still point out that Labour increased the 10p rate in the first place, that the lowest rate of tax today is 3p in the pound lower than it was in 1997, and that Labour’s tax and benefit changes, according to IFS analysis, were strongly progressive. It might not convince them, but you can certainly put a case for Labour without having to lie even slightly.
Paul Sagar said,
January 2, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Tom, that’s a fair point; I’ve phrased things far too crudely.
A better way of putting it is: I can’t stand being an official representative of (say) a manifest social injustice to the worse-off whilst also having to try and persuade somebody else that even if I agree that this was indeed a manifest injustice to the worst off that should be ignored because next time The Party promises to be different (even though the Leader refuses to admit what he did was wrong).
I appreciate that some people are able to stomach having to take that sort of personally-compromised position, and in many cases I actually respect it insofar as it shows commitment to a perceived greater good. It’s just for me, personally, I can’t stomach it, mostly because I dont see the ostensive greater good as sufficiently great.
Party politics just isnt for me – I hold my hand up and admit this freely. I don’t therefore mean to impugn everybody involved in party politics – there are many decent and committed individuals so involved (even though there are, sadly, a lot of sad an tiresome idiots too).
Hannah said,
January 2, 2011 at 7:12 pm
Yeah, your impression of party politics sounds very similar to mine and it’s the reason why I’ve never become a member of a political party. Working with one never sat well with me. It’s unfortunate that it’s so difficult to get involved in national politics without being a member of one. I’d be all for more independent MPs in Parliament.
Rob said,
January 3, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Paul,
There are obviously a number of things going on here in that, but focus on the complaint about getting “to a position of being able to offer recommendations that have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of ever having any practical purchase”.
First, this depends on thinking that it’s a deficiency in political philosophy if it isn’t at least (well?) designed to directly bring about desirable political change. As I’ve said before, this seems pretty unappealingly moralistic to me. It’s a demand that political theorists do stuff not because they want to, but as part of the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Time (or whatever) or be seriously lacking. It also seems to exclude all kinds of utopian thinking that’s central to the history of political thought – Plato; Rousseau; much of the socialist tradition.
Second, it depends on thinking that actually, highly abstracted pieces of philosophical reasoning don’t (ever?) contribute to political debates. They’re not often going to, but there are various rhetorical and clarificatory purposes that they can serve if used carefully. Think of Jerry Cohen and tickets, for example. Alternatively, ask how helpful you think the work of John Dunn or Raymond Geuss has been in real politics over the last thirty years. Third, it depends on thinking that we’re (always? typically?) in a position to say what counts as desirable political change without doing highly abstract pieces of philosophical reasoning first. I’ve yet to see anything that convincingly argues this is generally the case, not least precisely because of the complexity and unreasonableness of actually-existing political institutions.
None of this is to say that there’s nothing wrong with contemporary analytical political philosophy. I can provide you with a long list of complaints about it if you’d like. It’s quite boring, so I’d advise against it, but you can have it if you want. Another way of putting this would be to urge you – and here you is a collective noun – to be political about this. Is late Rawlsian insistence on analysis of the normative burdens of practices from a position of awareness of the central features of those practices really what you want stopped, or is it Mike Otsuka’s insistence on the political relevance of the permissibility of weaving jumpers out of your own hair? Engage in some coalition-building.
Ronald Collinson said,
January 3, 2011 at 6:43 pm
On a niggling terminological point, it occurs to me that you’ve signed up with those people who reject the idea that political philosophy is a sub-branch of moral philosophy. I tend to agree substantively with those people, but I feel that this is because they’ve identified a deficiency in *moral philosophy*, rather than political philosophy in particular. Yesterday, you wrote:
“The question is: what sort of judgements should we be making, how closely should they track lived experience, and what can we expect those judgements to yield? Those are practical questions, ultimately. And hence, if we’re going to use theory, it would seem at least sensible to make more of an effort to base it in the experiences of practice.”
Don’t you think that this applies just as strongly to moral philosophy as it does to political philosophy? Political philosophy ought to be about politics, no doubt; but I should need some very strong convincing from some anti-Humean quarter that moral philosophy ought not to be about people. It may be that there is something wrong with seeing political philosophy as ‘applied ethics’, but is that not because ethics is already practical?
Paul Sagar said,
January 3, 2011 at 10:16 pm
“First, this depends on thinking that it’s a deficiency in political philosophy if it isn’t at least (well?) designed to directly bring about desirable political change. As I’ve said before, this seems pretty unappealingly moralistic to me. It’s a demand that political theorists do stuff not because they want to, but as part of the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Time (or whatever) or be seriously lacking. It also seems to exclude all kinds of utopian thinking that’s central to the history of political thought – Plato; Rousseau; much of the socialist tradition. ”
No, you’re assuming that because I think there are good grounds for not doing something, I must universalise and hold the same to be true for everybody else, and then enforce a blanket condition on everybody’s activities. But that’s a problem with you thinking everything has to be universalised, not with my views of politics.
Look, I can accept that *you* want to do the really abstract stuff. Fine. But personally, I find that politics is made distinctive largely because of the *urgency* which lies behind much of its happenings, and the fact that, ultimately, lives, liberties and possessions are on the line, with some people getting much better deals than others meaning some people’s lives go considerably badly. For me, that urgency stuff really matters, and it’s where I think the action is intellectually. That’s why I find political theories not focusing on these more here-and-now aspects deficient in many ways (though it’s worth stressing that I do get a lot out of reading Rawls, Cohen, Dworkin et all, and certainly don’t think these people are stupid or useless or anything silly like that).
I can entirely see why you don’t agree that this is where the interesting action is. And I don’t think you’re committing some sort of conceptual mistake, or thinking in some incoherent way (I’m not claiming to be part of the post-Kantian tradition – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weber, Lukacs etc who basically take it that politics has to be conducted wholly outside ethics, even if I do find such thinkers pretty interesting). I just think there are better ways that *I* would like to spend my time. And I think there are compelling reasons for that, which lots of others might share. But I accept that in the last instance some people won’t agree – and indeed they will go off and no doubt do intellectually interesting and stimulating things in the abstract. (Though when the abstract becomes largely all that anybody is doing, I’m going to think that’s rather unhealthy – as, incidentally, it would be rather unhealthy if *nobody* did the ideal stuff at all, either).
(Though FWIW, I don’t think Rousseau’s work is as abstacted as you seem to think, because, say, The Social Contract is coming out of a very concrete concern about the nature of fallen man and the possibility of sociability without coercive structures in a world transitioning to commercial modernity, which in the 18th c constituted live and not all that abstracted concerns, bizarre as they may now seem to us. As for Plato/Socrates, well they tried to show us how the super-abstracted approach might have *practical* pay-outs (the good of the individual’s soul in following justice being, in the end, the highest good, and the point of being just) so they’re not particularly good examples, even if with the benefit of hindsight we may think they *failed* to deliver any satisfactory practical account (‘cos 2,500 years down the line it looks rather bonkers)).
“Second, it depends on thinking that actually, highly abstracted pieces of philosophical reasoning don’t (ever?) contribute to political debates. They’re not often going to, but there are various rhetorical and clarificatory purposes that they can serve if used carefully. Think of Jerry Cohen and tickets, for example. Alternatively, ask how helpful you think the work of John Dunn or Raymond Geuss has been in real politics over the last thirty years. Third, it depends on thinking that we’re (always? typically?) in a position to say what counts as desirable political change without doing highly abstract pieces of philosophical reasoning first. I’ve yet to see anything that convincingly argues this is generally the case, not least precisely because of the complexity and unreasonableness of actually-existing political institutions. ”
Yes, this is a fair point. I probably shouldn’t rest much weight on the claim about having actual practical pay-out – though maybe I can still get away with the “hoping” part. Happy to shift my argument to the poing about finding it more desirable to try and describe and analyse politics as it actually happens, because that’s what interests me more than very abstracted moral theory, which ultimately seems to me to be precisely that: moral theory, rather than an engagement with *politics*.
Though FWIW, lots of thinkers over the centuries who *have* offered more concrete assessments of politics vis-a-vis the contemporary scene can claim rather a lot of real-world pay-out: Machiaevlli, Hobbes (especially), Locke, Hume, Mill, and so forth. But I take the general point (at least in the short term).
As for Coalition-building, I see your point. But you have to admit, the Rawlsian/Cohenite approach has a tendency to act a bit like an academic SWP; once you let it in, it takes over everything…
Chris Brooke said,
January 4, 2011 at 11:47 am
“It also seems to exclude all kinds of utopian thinking that’s central to the history of political thought–Plato; Rousseau; much of the socialist tradition. ”
Paul has already said something about Plato and Rousseau. I’ll add something about the utopian socialists, who were terribly concerned with getting their ideas implemented in practice: Owenism and Fourierism in particular were practical movements engaged in trying to acquire land and resources with which to set up experiments in communal living. (The experiments failed.) These were utopians in the “hopelessly ambitious” sense, not in the “abstract, otherworldly” sense.
Rob said,
January 4, 2011 at 10:36 pm
Paul,
on the first point, I really am happy for there to be methodological pluralism in the discipline, as I hope Chris will testify. If you and others want to do more practically informed and perhaps therefore more practically relevant work, that’s not just fine, but good. It would be a pity if everyone was trying to write books like ‘Rescuing Justice and Equality’ just as it would be if everyone was trying to write something like ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The issue is about what happens when we try and speak to each other. Saying that you think there are “compelling reasons” to write and think in a more directly political way, or that political theory as applied ethics is “deficient” does not seem a statement of happy methodological pluralism. If we’re going to be methodological pluralists, then we need to be able to avoid condemning people who don’t share our methods every time we speak about them – which of course isn’t an entirely fair characterization of what you do, but if it’s just a personal preference, then it should be usually expressed in less straightforwardly denunciatory terms.
As far as my ‘well, what about Plato and Rousseau’ line goes, I suppose it depends on exactly how you want to characterise the dissatisfaction with political theory as applied ethics. Different versions of the dissatisfaction will capture different historical and different contemporary theorists. If it’s about generating what Zofia Stemplowska has called ‘achievable and desirable’ policy recommendations here and now, I’d argue that given Rousseau’s apparent own scepticism about the viability of the system outlined in the Social Contract in any society in mid-18th Century Europe, he fails that test. I don’t know enough about the political circumstances in which The Republic was written to say whether that’s true of (that bit of) Plato, but it doesn’t seem like a plan for doing the things it actually suggests in any society I can imagine – which of course may be a failure of my imagination. On the other hand, people like Thomas Pogge or Leif Wenar are producing what seem like achievable and desirable political recommendations here and now firmly within the applied ethics tradition.
If it’s not about giving us apparently achievable and desirable political recommendations, but rather about an awareness of the inescapable verities of political life – scarcity, human fallibility, moral disagreement, and so on – then I think we can pretty clearly chalk up Marx and much of the rest of the hard left tradition even if they did *want* to give us achievable and desirable recommendations. Almost all of Rawls seems to me considerably more aware of the constraints those unavoidable truths impose than the utopian socialist tradition, for example. This is my answer to Chris, such as it is: that complaints about a lack of ‘realism’ may be of various sorts, and getting clear about which one is being made is a prerequisite of knowing exactly who falls under them. And some pieces of applied ethics may fall under none of them. Brian Barry’s work has a number of faults, but a willful ignorance of basic political realities or an disinterest in real world political problems and potential solutions to them are not obviously ones.
One the Cohenite/Rawlsian thing, two points. First, please not Cohenite/Rawlsian. There are some pretty profound methodological differences between Cohen and Rawls. There is no way Cohen would have said that one of the four aims of political philosophy was reconciliation with the world as it is, as Rawls did in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Whether Rawls succeeds in that aim is a different matter, but that is apparently an aim. Second, we don’t take everything over. Look at the Cambridge Department, admittedly smaller, and the Oxford Department. Where’s your Centre for Political Ideologies, your Mark Philp, your Lois McNay, your David Leopold, your Liz Fraser or your Marc Stears?
Notice to Serve « Bad Conscience said,
February 7, 2011 at 12:03 am
[...] to suite preference] day-in-day out, because they enjoy it. Rather like many people enjoy campaigning for a political party, or going to big political conferences. It’s about tribalism, and the fun of political [...]