In other words, the politics of ‘rights’ breaks down as soon as we realize the rights exist merely as buffers between different freedoms ‘to’ and ‘from’. Classical politics contradicts itself when the rights it gives people to be free from others’ demands for mercy clashes with the freedom it gives people to live morally. The question is, essentially, whether a person should be able to universalize their merciful impulse in a way that would interrupt others’ freedoms from those claims.
But any person who has confronted real suffering feels the obligation not to just personally end it, but to universally end it. The desire to end suffering does not show up in the langue of compromise but in the language of a radical equality that exists before and despite all evidence to the contrary. And that is why Katy and Wilberforce were not human ‘rights’ advocates, but, rather, unassimilable revolutionaries demanding a radical equality that outstripped the language of rights with its attendant freedoms ‘to’ and ‘from.’ In the language of radical equality, there is no freedom ‘from’ the radical obligation to end suffering and hierarchy; the freedom to recognize suffering is simultaneously the obligation to end it.
What I am wondering, essentially, is how we can politically accommodate the subjective. I am wondering, specifically, if we can have a politics of what we live for rather than merely a politics of what we are trying to protect against. Right now we say that we can’t-that the subjective, by definition of being subjective, is dangerous because it cannot find a common language that could be fairly applied to everyone, and consequently should stay quietly in the domain of the personal and not stray into public discourse. But what we forget when we say such things is that the subjective impulse is the universalizing impulse. It is easy to talk of justice without moving anyone. That is because talk of justice uses a language that, by virtue of being common to everyone, is not very compelling. This language is almost always the language of law, statistics and money. But anyone who has heard a person inveigh against war, say, by talking about how much it costs or how many people have been injured know that this is a fundamentally unpersuasive way to speak. It will enrage people who are already enraged and do nothing to people who aren’t. This is precisely because money, statistics, and law are not the language that things actually happen in. They are diversions; they are the ways we attempt to objectify experiences that were deeply subjective. The subjective experience is what compelled us to care in the first place, and what would compel others to care. The whole apparatus of law is the objective extension of our subjective impulse toward mercy. We objectify the subjective because we are afraid to impose our subjective experiences-which could, we worry, be just preferences-on people who might not agree. But when we objectify these experiences to make them fair, we make them common but uncompelling, and we conflate real politics-the politics of beauty, joy, and mercy-with the politics of justice.
I’ll give an example. I loathe urban sprawl, subdivisions and big box stores. I loathe them for many reasons, but the most basic is that I think they are ugly. Since I was very small, the sight of a sprawling, nameless city made my soul cry out. This was not the result of methodical thinking, or even, at first, the result of knowing how much water they required or how many species they destroyed. I simply felt a rupture in my heart, an incontrovertible ‘this is wrong’-or, more specifically, ‘this is ugly’. I have struggled with these feelings for obvious reasons. I was worried that what I found to be ‘ugly’ was just a temperamental preference-a taste-that would be wrong to impose on others. How would I feel, I reasoned, if a person who loved cookie-cutter houses made a law demanding me to build a house according to their preferences? Clearly, I would find that repulsive but, since the whole thing would boil down to preference, I would be unable to argue with the person and the matter would be decided by whoever was most powerful. I didn’t want that. And so I spent years trying to discover an objective grounds for what I already hated. I read book after book about the economic costs of sprawl, the water it required and the quantifiable pollution it produced. I read about how little Target paid its workers and how that affected taxes that people paid to support welfare. I learned and learned until one day, Wal-Mart announced it was going to build in my neighborhood. I couldn’t stand for that! So I organized a group to fight it. And we did. But the basic problem nagged at me: How could I stand up and say what I actually meant-that big box stores were ugly, in their looks and in their treatment of others, and that that is why I didn’t want one in my city. How could I say that what I actually wanted was not to lower taxes or preserve property values but to repaint the city in bright colors, curve the straight lines, and grow gardens on all the rooftops? Because that is what I wanted. I was an artist trapped in a democracy, a wailing pastor trapped in a courtroom. I wanted beauty and mercy in a government that allowed only law and justice.
So we had a big meeting to convince people to vote against the Wal-Mart. I made, of all insulting things, a PowerPoint (my concession to the Way Things Are). This PowerPoint was the average of all my feelings: I included facts about property values and tax codes and zoning laws, but I started with information on sweatshops, sprawl, and pollution. In the middle of talking about the latter, I put up a picture that showed two Chinese people riding bikes out of a black cloud of smog outside a Wal-Mart factory. On the other half of the screen was a picture of Chinese teenagers working in a sweatshop producing thousands of cheap toys. I was talking about sweatshop abuses and environmental violence when a woman raised her hand: “Can’t we get to the point?” she said. Horrified, I told her that yes, we could get to the point if she would kindly tell me what she thought the point was. “You know,” she said, “How our properties will be affected and how much traffic will increase.” And then: “This stuff is nice and all, but it is never going to convince the City Council.”
I have not been able to stop thinking of this experience. I felt devastated. How was it that we could not talk about ugliness and cruelty in politics? How had those been excised out of the political discourse, and why had we agreed to sell our robust ethics for a technocracy? And why was a technocracy-the constricted language of traffic and property values-the only acceptable kind of government? Simply by virtue of being common to everyone?
I was struggling with these thoughts precisely because I realized that democracy, by depending on a common language and placing consensus above even ethics (since its ultimate ethic is consensus)-must ultimately be reduced to a technocracy, where its moral claims are legislated so long in the language of the common that they lose the moral power that democracy was supposed to safeguard. I was wondering if the politics of beauty was impossible just as I knew that for me it was not a choice but a demand made on my soul.
The problem for Katy, Wilberforce and me, then, is that our desire to universalize mercy compels us to universalize that mercy via the apparatus of the State. And that is problematic because the State, dependent on Classical restraint, rules, and uniformity (aka, justice) is capable of universalizing our requests precisely by being that structure that could not possibly accommodate them.
What Katy, Wilberforce and I want is to universalize our preferences into what democracy calls ‘rights’, which should obviously throw some suspicion on the concept of rights itself. We have been trained to thing that rights are either objectively deducible or self-evident when, in fact, they are neither. A right is not objectively self-evident. What we mean when we say ‘right’ is that it was actually only self-evident to one person-a person who felt some rupture in her being that made an incontrovertible demand on her. That demand itself, precisely by being deeply subjective, demanded to be universalized, and that person’s success at universalizing that deeply subjective demand became what we call a right. If that is true, self-evidence is not a ‘logic’ in the traditional sense but a ‘logic’ in the necessary, subjective sense. A ‘right’ simply means universalizing a preference so that people are not free to go back and argue beyond the starting point. Very few people now, for example, would want to have a conversation about whether or not Blacks are equal to Whites, but that is not because their equality is any more certain or logically self-evident than it was before. It was simply that enough people felt a radical subjective rupture that required them to fight for Black equality, and that this fight-a fight that fought against and threatened consensus democracy in its radical demands-convinced enough other people to experience the same radical subjective rupture that the ‘right’ became collectively inevitable. It became a ‘right,’ in other words, which means nothing but this: that we decided to stop acknowledging that it was actually a preference by drawing a line-the line of ‘rights’-that could keep us from re-entering a dangerously subjective conversation. And we should remember this. A right is actually an aberration in democracy that we misguidedly laud as the logical expression of democracy itself.
(But I also believe that Politics-the top-down institution-is necessary. We cannot simply say that politics should be the sum of our subjective demands. Institutional politics acts a ballast that the subjective person must resist in order to universalize demands, and the act of resistance produces and finesses the real revolution. So yes, the State is a protection against the ‘wrong’ subjective demands, but that protection is not -as we want to say-the point itself. The State is a frustrater of rights, not the guarantor of them. That is, ironically, its value. But any time we begin to believe that the State is actually capable of granting rights, we have missed the revolution.)
July 15th, 2010 at 6:48 pm
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