I find Politics dangerously embarrassing.
Dangerously, because my embarrassment about it often makes me quietly leave the debate (any debate) to others. Dangerously, because everyone should involve themselves in politics (because politics has always already involved itself in them, not least in the formation of them as them (and, somewhere, as part of many bigger Thems)).
But why embarrassing?
Ever since I started to become aware there was such a thing as politics (about the 4th of May 1979), I have had the feeling that politics is an impossibility.
Politics is both beneath contempt and beyond our ken. Politics has to deal with both the most abstract undercurrents of History (History with a capital Kapital) (History as Tories trying to bunk off from History) at the same time as it deals all forms of blunt prejudice, from taxi-driver- omniscience to conspiracy-theory organic-fruitcakery. Politics has, as its contemporary start- point, X’s version of the bleedin’ obvious going into battle with Y’s version of the bleedin’ obvious (times by seven billion).
Most of all, Politics has somehow to incorporate gossip, fear, social climbing, politico’s egos, psephology, televisuality, organized crime, capitalism, religion, terrorism, rhetoric, greed, applied maths, demographics, pseudo-global consciousness, jokes, sex-scandals, idealism, corruption, bureaucracy, ignorance, and at least a dozen more components I have missed.
How these components come together, making the Human-Machine that makes human, is beyond messy. It is something so confusingly alive, changing changes upon changed changers, that it hurts to go near, look at or think about. Yet, at the same time, it is – I know – extremely banal.
I was once privy to a private political conversation between Andrew Rawnsley (The Observer’s Chief Political Commentator) and Paddy Ashdown (former Leader of the Liberal Democrats, to name but the most major of his middle-sized significances). The fact that Andrew Rawnsley, Paddy Ashdown and I were on a double-decker bus provided by Penguin Books, and were also accompanied by Nick Hornby, the woman who inflicted Angelina Ballerina upon parents-of- girls, and Peter Rabbit, is by-the-by. They are proper political animals. Andrew and Paddy were behind me, on the upper deck, and they were seriously talking serious domestic politics. And I was listening in, and I understood every word. And most of it was discussion of personality, not policy, not theory, not History. And never did they threaten to go beyond the language of the day-to-day Westministering and into a meta-language comprehensible only to behind-doors power-dealers. If I had been sitting beside mathematicians, or grammarians, or anthropologists or even Premier League footballers, they would fairly soon have said something I did not get because I didn’t have the language or the concept. But there was no danger I would get left behind by Andrew and Paddy’s chat about what X thinks of what Y thinks of Z, this week.
In other words, Politics does not take place in other words.
Politics, like prosthelytising churches who have the New Testament retranslated every ten years into an even more approachable English — Politics is always returning to the most demotic demotic it can find.
Hence, politicians use of clichés (and occasional, grant them this, coining of clichés: There Is No Alternative, Victorian Values, New, We’re All In This Together). Politics is always an attempt to get back to what the people say about what they think. Even Enoch Powell, famously the last of the great classically-informed orators, constructed his classically-informed ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech entirely around vox pop quotes from plain-speaking constituents. Powell’s interpretational flourish was only a rhapsody upon public domain themes. He was merely retranslating the hating.
Vox pop is what counts because there is no other indication of how people will vote, or whether they will bring about violent insurrection in order to see their elected members dangling beneath Lambeth Bridge.
A politician is a great dirty ear attached to a muscular and responsive tongue and controlling a big pointing finger. You say this so I say this and so then this goes there, okay?
Both the word-pile Human-Machine of What Politics Incorporates and the Grotesque Ear- Tongue-Finger Creature will give you some sense of what causes my embarrassment. I do not feel comfortable around so much muchness. I am repulsed by the inane echolalia of Political discourse (for the Ear-Tongue-Finger Creature is constantly shouting in the dark cave which is its natural habitat).
Yet I am also obsessed by the question, ‘Given that things could be completely different to how they are (because they demonstrably have been in the past, and they inevitably will be in the future) — given the mutability of humans, how can we collectively make things better than they are?’
By which I mean, How can our interrelations be more just, or less unjust? In what better ways can we organize both to help people who need help and to leave completely the fuck alone people who don’t need help? What can we create, as a lifeworld, that is worth bringing more child- shaped-things into and up in?
The Politics of the Politics of Politics — that’s where it becomes really interesting, and obviously worthwhile.
So, finally, I arrive at Václav Havel; as I’ve said before, my only political hero — though I went on to be a bit sniffy on the subject of his post-Presidential writings.
(Václav Havel (1936-2011), dramatist, dissident, last President of Czechoslovakia, first President of the Czech Republic.)
Václav Havel is a politician I can bear to look at, conceptually. This is not only because I admire him as a dissident; I also admire him as a President.
In the whole of my life, there is no righter-time-righter-place than Praha 1990 to 1993. I lived and worked there as a State employee (in the Economics Faculty of the Charles University). During those years when everyone was quoting Wordsworth’s bliss-dawn, I saw what a people who had just rebooted their Politics looked like. And I saw a Police Force (and a State) which was unsure exactly what kind of law they were enforcing, and so almost entirely refrained from enforcing it. And I felt more free than I have ever felt (and, and this is the crux, more free than I can ever envisage my children feeling). And I saw, under the sign of Havel, a Politics that included absurdity and acknowledged it.
For the word-pile Human-Machine and Eye-Ear-Finger Creature are absurd, and should be acknowledged as absurd, rather than despised as embarrassingly grotesque. Nothing human is grotesque.
It is absurd that we try collectively to govern ourselves; it is absurd that we take the world as an entity and try to improve it. Politics is, at once, the absurd application of hope to society, and the continual management of disappointed social hopes.
There are two entirely different things called "politics". One of them is relatively new.
The old politics involved an authoritarian monarchy supported by a parliamentary discussion about the pros and cons of all suggested policies. The ordinary working people were not allowed into the political process and the best they could hope for was to go cap in hand to beg and plead for better conditions.
When the pleading didn't work they were forced to protest in the streets and go on general strike.
During the Liverpool General Strike in 1911 Home Secretary Winston Churchill sent in troops and positioned the cruiser HMS Antrim in the Mersey.
The "Great Unrest" continued until 1914 in Britain and also in Germany.
Working class people, both men and suffragettes, stopped the economies of both Britain and Germany and other European countries demanding sufficient pay to feed their families.
The governments of the "Great Powers" came up with a solution and ended the Great Unrest by simply sending all of the working class men from both countries to go and kill each other. World War One was a massive culling of bolshie workers.
The new politics allows us, the people, in on the decision making process. Universal suffrage and the reduction of aristocratic power allows us to make the changes which the previous system of ruthless authoritarianism could never have given us. In the 21st Century we are able to influence decision making both at local council level and at Westminster level.
Yes, professional politicians and journalists are continually trading cliché and buzz words. They are forever packaging news and twisting the truth of the events into cynical entertainment. Nevertheless we have a duty to those who gave their lives to get the vote. We must not waste it. It is important that everybody eligible to vote should do so.
A few things.
1) I got more emotional than I expected while reading this and it’s not even “political.”
2) feeling a bit agitated because I recall your way earlier posts & reporting on your part in protests and I feel so much of it has become a performance (even when not armchair via tweet thumbs) that something like your actions get engulfed with all of that.
3) absolutely LOVE Václav Havel.
4) I love Prague. Random trip in a winter led to a summer there and then once again in summer. I love its villages and people and artists and writers… ah. must go back.
5) most excellent essay. Thank you. I will now be sharing a link of it to anyone who wonders why I may *appear* not-political because I am not screaming from the Twatter Xwitter Chatter Toc Box.