First, I have been agonizing about what I a politics of mercy would look like. I have spent months in the belly of the political beast (Washington, DC) working on a political campaign-albeit, a very atypical political campaign-and I have seen again and again the limits of top-down politics.
I remember being in a rhetoric class a few years ago, discussing the differences between Romanticism and Classicism. We were talking about Classicism and its effects on the structures and values of America’s political system. (In case you haven’t read your Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance lately, a Classical worldview is one of order and limits, uniformity and law. A Romantic worldview is one marked by subjectivity, irrationality, sublimity and erratic emotion-all things we can’t codify.)
We were in the middle of discussing how these temperaments have influenced politics when it occurred to me: Classicism is the politics of limitation and restraint; it keeps people free from others’ excesses so that everyone can pursue what is actually important to them-the Romantic acts of creativity, love and meaning. Classical, top-down politics is not an end in itself, then, but a structure that tries to prevent one person from gaining so much power that they keep others from pursuing their real aspirations. Classical politics is the answer to this question: What if we are trying to live in harmony but one person abuses the general trust and expectations of living in a group? Classical politics attempts to restrain individual excess to allow for the individual extravagance of love and art. Romantic politics, on the other hand, is what we live for. It is the point itself. It is the freedom to create-beauty, meaning, trust, etc. It cannot be codified because it is the politics of the extenuating circumstance, where every person is singular and deserves a singular reaction.
I am having a difficult time lately, because I work for a presidential candidate who is, for me, the paragon of what is best in top-down politics: justice, righteous indignation, and the desire for equality. But working for a political campaign has also led me to despair over the limits of Classical politics.
This occurs on multiple levels. For example, I often think about radical reform and how it happens. In Classical politics, even the most progressive politician is restricted to saying what is authorized by the consensus of common sense. Ralph Nader can say something that is radical to some people-can say, for example, that we need to shift power from corporations to the people-but he can only speak up against the frontier of what we have decided is possible. This is a problem because I believe that true reformers are actually language-benders, that they are quite literally pushing the bounds of language by speaking in a language that has never been heard before. They are revolutionaries because they are asking for something new in the language-for some noun to be included as a noun (Blacks, women, slaves) or for some kind of discourse to be approved of (speaking in the language of the personal or the sacred). I believe movements begin when the agony of the unvoiced breaks through in the form of a demand-a demand to be radically included as nouns or as speakers in a language that has never been thought before.
I think we make a mistake when we look back on reformers of the past and say that they were ‘radical’, since, looking back, we don’t actually see their radicalism as what it was but fit it retroactively into what has, thanks precisely to that radicalism, become ‘self-evident’ to us. I just posted an article on this blog about the first white people to see the Grand Canyon and what that seeing did to their minds. It was literally a sublime experience; it shattered the concepts in those explorers’ brains. It was agonizing to behold because it could not be categorized using the available concepts. I believe that the demands of previous radical reformers worked on people in the same way: they were actually unassimilable; they exploded the concepts that were lying around. We are the inheritors of those ideas and so, just as people who have been conditioned by photographs and new concepts to view the Grand Canyon without pain, we too can accept the equality of women, Blacks, and slaves with equanimity-and we place the reformers who instigated these painful ideas within the realm of the normal. What they did was brave, we think, but must have been at least possible. The public resisted it, we say, but was partly ready for it.
I disagree. Learning about people like William Wilberforce, for example, I have had the inescapable realization that he was asking for things that weren’t even comprehensible. He was not merely casting his moral arguments in terms of economic arguments, saying that we should slowly stop the slave trade in a way judicious to all parties. That would have been hard enough. He was demanding that people acknowledge the radical singularity of all slaves as human beings who suffer-and, consequently, their radical and singular obligation to them. As a result, his demand defied the political language: he wanted all slaves to be free and equal. We have inherited these concepts of free and equal, and so we are retroactively able to understand people like Wilberforce. What this retrospect keeps us from understanding, however, is how his demands would have looked in the moment that they occurred-namely, unspeakable.
I try sometimes to think of a comparison. I keep thinking of several examples, all related somehow to my friend, Katy Savage. Katy is ardently against what she calls speciesism-any hierarchy between species whatsoever. For her, there is no moral justification for making a distinction between the rights of humans and the rights of other animals. She fundamentally rejects the notions that animals and plants derive their worth merely as objects for our use. As a passionate biologist, she runs into problems when she refuses to kill animals to study them. Katy’s reaction to the suffering of animals is as real and natural to her as someone else’s suffering for the pain of a family member, precisely because she believes that we would naturally feel that kind of empathy for all species if we had not been seduced by false categories and dangerous separation myths.
But Katy has a problem: most people think she is crazy. Perhaps the people who think she is craziest are the very people pushing for animal rights reform. That might sound odd at first. Isn’t Katy an animal rights activist? Well yes, in one sense of the word. But the traditional animal rights activist, pushing for reform within the current political landscape and language, is actually quite threatened by Katy. The traditional animal rights activist has accepted the fundamental hierarchy and violence in a speciesist system, and has decided merely to lessen its excesses. This might be regarded as radical by a society that refuses to recognize the violence of its assumptions, but in fact it is not. As a friend pointed out the other day, most animal rights advocates are arguing for better treatment for animals before they are killed. Isn’t that strange, said my friend, that even the “extreme” animal rights advocates have no problem with the final consequence-that animals are killed? If we were talking about human beings-if we said they should be treated well but ultimately killed simply because we liked the taste of them-people would revolt with the obvious answers: These are human beings! You can’t just kill them because you want to, and any so-called ethical treatment is completely contradicted by the ultimate act of killing.
With animals, however, we accept the argument. The current political discourse does not include radical species equality in its language of the possible, and so reforms will be just that: efforts to ease pain in a system that depends on pain, rhetorical pronouncements of compassion in a system that depends on fundamental hierarchy.
I bring this up not as a lecture on species equality (although that is a worthy topic), but to address a problem with top-down politics of justice. I have said that real radicals did not just introduce hard ideas, but changed the language of the politically possible altogether. I bring up Katy and animals to illustrate what kinds of claims William Wilberforce might actually have been making when he demanded not just the humane treatment of slaves or a slow end to the slave trade, but the radical equality of slaves as human beings. Looking at Katy’s demands for species equality helps us to understand what Wilberforce was actually asking, and why the responses to him were not ones of mere hostility but outright ridicule. At this point, the top-down political discourse can only accommodate talk of easing pain (and rebels even against that). To even speak of radical species equality is almost incomprehensible. But to try to legislate it? Downright absurd! Sure, I could introduce ethical animal policy in Congress, but it would be bound by the limits of the current political discourse and would largely rest on violence. But the idea of introducing legislation requiring all people to be vegans, for example, would be both figuratively and literally unthinkable.
If I were to decide to introduce the latter idea-which I believe is proportionate to what Wilberforce was attempting against slavery-people would, amongst stronger complaints, probably tell me that my ideas did not belong in politics. If I wanted to be a vegan on my own time, I could go ahead, but it would certainly not be something I deserved to demand of everyone.
In other words, my fight would be relegated largely to the domain of bottom-up subjective politics, particularly the domain of the religious or the spiritual. If I had felt personally moved to become more merciful in my relationship to other species, I would have the right to act accordingly. I would not have the right to ask it of others in the common language of justice because people would essentially believe that I was speaking in the language of extenuating circumstance-of mercy-that was binding only on me. Since my feelings would be regarded as subjective, I would have no common language to legislate in and, consequently, no ‘right’ to do so.
And so we run up against the limits of a Classical politics that exerts undue power over the expressions of Romantic politics that it was supposed to safeguard. In other words, Katy’s (and Wilberforce’s) Romantic expression of mercy was actually frustrated by the politics of rights and freedoms-first, because Classical politics was not ready for it but second, because Classical politics-dependent on codification and uniformity-could not universalize what was essentially a request for radical mercy.
November 21st, 2008 at 3:44 am
When people got up in arms about Prop 2 in CA this past election they always asked our opinion on it since we’re “vegetarians.” The reply seemed pretty obvious to me… what’s the point on spending millions & billions on giving a chicken a little more leg room in its cage? Who is out there saying WHAT THE H?!?? We shouldn’t be killing them & eating them. Answer: no one.
Ella Baker was one of the lesser known civil rights activists. I read about her when Neil lets me have a break to do “fun reading” (not too often these days ;( She objected to centralized authority and said, “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you can change that system. That is easier said than done.”
I think she got to the heart of what you are saying (if I am not mistaken) that black reformers had to create an entirely new language with which to have a dialogue with society. I was listening to NPR the other day & they were playing interviews with people who lived through the depression… one woman’s comment reminded me of that grand-canyon type experience.
She meekly described how it seems strange to talk about it now, but in the 1930s she worked alongside blacks in the cotton fields and simply had no comprehension that they were anything like us or that they were anything but Negroes. She said one day in the store a white man was forcing a tiny black woman to push his cart out to his car & slammed the door on her & it hit her. She ran to open the door for the struggling woman & began to see the humanity of black Americans. I was truly a beautiful story.