When you're on your own, reading and listening to audio books, browsing the internet for YouTube videos, articles and podcasts, a strange filtering seems to occur. There's a process toward assimilation. A search for coherence. Internally and externally, consciously and unconsciously, patterns form, coalesce from the chaotic flux of ideas. Alone with my world of ideas, there's a settling into themes and concepts, with this remarkable shape-creation going on in my peripheral vision. Structures of meaning constructed from fragments.
An example today. Running, listening, for the second time, to Timothy Snyder's excellent The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. He was explaining two ideologies manifested in political systems: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity. Let me offer a brief account of each. The former refers to the notion that a better future is ahead, but that it is inevitable under the laws of the system as it stands - the communist ideal or free market capitalism, opening up trade and inevitably increasing equality. As the laws of the system are understood and progress is certain, there are no alternatives and nothing to be done. Just sit and wait for the perfect world. The politics of eternity is the idea that time is circular - the present and future will keep on repeating the threats of the past. There's nothing that a government can do to improve the lives of the people, all it can do is guard against danger. There's no sense of progress: just defense against the other, the outsiders, the unbelievers. In one case, the ideal is in the future, like heaven, and we don't have to work to get there, don't have to address inequality or injustice within our system, because our system is the right system and progress is inevitable. In the other, there is no ideal, just danger. Wage war, not love.
He sees the world now as lurching from inevitability to eternity.
But we don't have to. There is another way. There is the politics of history. Where we learn from the past: from what works and what doesn't. Where we judge, assess, make changes, try something else.
This struck me as in perfect alignment with Susan Neiman's reading of Kant. She explains that the infant's worldview is dogmatic. The world makes sense. All happens as it should. Is and ought are bound together. The young child is learning that she can know things and make sense of things and believes that she will be able to make sense of everything and know everything, because reality aligns with her conception of it. The adolescent, in contrast, sees that the world is unfair, that bad things happen to good people, that there are no answers to some questions, that she has been lied to. She believes in nothing. She sees the is, but the ought is just a child's dream, an impossibility,
Growing up, says Neiman, is being able to see both the is and the ought, sensing the gap between them, and knowing that while it will never be closed, one can, must, try to narrow it, by fighting for ideals. The adult tries to improve reality in accordance with ideals. There is no inevitability: it takes work. But progress is possible, if we look at the world clearly and hold firm to our ideals.
In both cases, we have to find that gap, that synapse, that sweet spot between credulity and cynicism.
Another Goldilocks state is highlighted by Michele Gelfand. Some cultures are 'tight', others 'loose'. In the former, people obey rules and etiquette, clocks all say the same time, trains are never late, everyone pays their taxes on time; in the latter, there's openness and creativity, tolerance and acceptance. Clearly both have virtues - and vices. In tight cultures, there's more suspicion of immigrants, less tolerance for people who don't conform to social norms; while in loose cultures, there's more crime and a trend toward it breaking down through lack of efficiency. To get an insight into her work, you can find links to her popular articles here.
All this reminded me of Aristotle's idea of the virtues as the mean between two vices: courage lies between cowardice and recklessness; generosity between meanness and prodigality. Reason helps us choose the right response at the right time, but we have to notice that we can adapt, notice that our instinctive response of habitual behaviour might not be best. We must have open eyes and open minds.
Philosophy can help with this. The American philosopher John Perry describes how first year university students come into his class with a host of assumptions. Not even assumptions. Inhabited patterns. He describes them as if all these thoughts and beliefs and opinions have been funneled into their minds by their parents, their peers, their religion and they essentially have no sense of having any alternative.The process of getting to grips with philosophy leads them to ask, 'Why do I want to be a hedge fund manager? Is it because my Dad is one and told me to follow him? Is it because I believe in that as a path to a valuable life? Or would I rather be a writer or a mechanic?' Our fundamental life choices do not have to be given to us by others. We can own them.
Likewise, Iddo Landau says that when faced with Hamlet's question, 'To be or not to be?' the philosopher asks, 'Is there a third way? Maybe to be without the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune beating me down? How do I get there, instead?' This is the quest for the unspoken option, the alternative outside polarised ideologies.
But, to get back to Snyder, and the bigger picture. And as I listened on, he talked of the six virtues of politics: individuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty and justice. And how does he see virtues, I was wondering. He answered (through the text - not as a disembodied voice in my lockdown-addled brain) and his answer was a perfect match for Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of virtues as manifested through practices. A quick recap here: through cooperative practices, we use the virtues and they are sustained by and also sustain the practice itself. That really is his work in a (probably inaccurate) nutshell. So, Snyder says that virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish. You have to have the right system, practice, institution in place and you have to live by the virtues.
The reason he focuses on individuality is interesting. If you have an institution that sees no merit in individuals, then they can be sacrificed for the good of the institution. They, as individuals, are of no value save the value they bring to the system. We see this trend clearly in Soviet style communism, but consider neoliberal capitalism: if you are not contributing wage labour and are not consuming, what value do you have?
Worryingly, according to Gelfand's research, times of great uncertainty - economic collapse, say - and perceived threat - for example, when there's a pandemic - can incline people to favour very authoritarian leaders. They want to 'tighten up'. She wrote about this in The Guardian earlier this year.
I can understand this inclination and yet I hope that what we aim toward is not something worse. It seems to me, right now, little is as important as questioning our structures: our personal structures of meaning and the structures of our institutions and society. Are they fit for purpose? Or are they selling us down the river toward an impossible vision of unreasoned progress (the politics of inevitability) or, more likely, an inhibited state of victimhood where all that counts is fighting off the enemy and making them as miserable as we are (the politics of eternity)? We have to take the third way: the politics of history.
Interestingly, China has over the past decades been following at least some of Snyder's virtues. For starters, the boldest plan to achieve the targets set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement came from China. They have been working to realise the targets. Their Belt and Road Initiative is seen in the West as a drive toward global domination, but let's not be too hasty. China has been pouring money into neighbours and trading partners at least in part because trade and co-operation have through the course of human history brought peace rather than war. (Here is an interesting article that considers the non-Western standpoint.) If your neighbour is poor, trade and political relations will not be healthy. China certainly has its vices, but when one considers the human rights record of the USA and European nations in the past and the USA, at least, in the present day, the West is hardly in a position to claim to be on much of a moral high ground. In addition, when the USA has bio-warfare facilities in Eastern Europe and when factory farming (a US mega-industry) is, coronavirus notwithstanding, believed to be the greatest risk in the genesis of a new pandemic, blame of China during the Covid-crisis is misplaced. The factory farmers, though not their livestock, were simply lucky this time around.
If you want a different view of China from that presented by the Western media, read the perceptive and highly intelligent articles written by Pepe Escobar for the Asian Times.
I am not putting China as a shining example to follow. Far from it. I am suggesting that just as we learn from history we can also cherry-pick better ideas from other nations, rather than simply labeling 'them' as 'the enemy', 'the threat', 'the danger'.
The greater danger is in our own wilful blindness: our inability to see through anything other than our own distorting lenses.
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