Gallowglass

a foolish consistency

Am travelling in Ireland, which is supposedly the information capital of Europe, but which is in practice a wasteland virtually bereft of broadband access; the incumbent telco is only reluctantly rolling out broadband, and still charges a small fortune. Dial-up and blogging are unhappy companions.

But onto more substantive matters …. Timothy Burke has a long post on consistency, which, as he says, need not be the hobgoblin of little minds. Instead, it’s a virtue that should be prized, especially by public intellectuals, who should apply the same standards to those on their own side that they do to their enemies.

It’s an interesting post, and I’m broadly in agreement with it, even if I think that stirring cries to “to take back public life from the stunted, withered, corrupted spirits who now rule the field” work better as rhetoric than as practical advice. Still, the problem that Burke identifies goes deeper than a lack of consistency. Public debate, especially in the US, is becoming agonistic in all the wrong ways. “Agonistic” translated into everyday English, means based on struggle and competition. Battle between ideas and ideologies is of course a good thing in principle; nobody has a monopoly on the truth. But it can rapidly become unhealthy when the ideologues of one side seek to avoid real debate by anathematizing the arguments of the other side, that is, by declaring them to be innately “evil” or “un-American” or whatever.

This seems to me to have happened in the US debate on war in Iraq. Or, more precisely, the US non-debate; the lack of a proper discussion among US politicians of the pros and cons of going to war verges on criminal irresponsibility. When the level of partisan rhetoric is so inflamed that mild criticism and reasonable doubts are considered to verge upon treason, you know that you’re in trouble. As Johnson famously remarked, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. It allows you to duck the hard questions, by suggesting that it’s unpatriotic to ask any questions in the first place.

Which said, the smug and self-righteous attitude of some anti-war folks was very nearly as irresponsible. It’s not as obviously egregious as the Chicks-bashing Kent State massacre-advocating Freedom Fries-chomping jingoism of the pro-war right, but it’s equally sterile and unproductive. A very large proportion of the anti-war constituency seems to have failed to grasp the basic point that politics isn’t a form of self-expression, or of demonstrating your moral superiority to a public audience. It’s the hard slog of persuading others, who don’t necessarily share your first-base assumptions, that you have something true and important to say. And of listening to what those others have to say, when they’re reasonable, and of being open to in principle to being persuaded by them.

As I’ve said before, Weber’s essays on Science as a Vocation on “Science as a Vocation” and Politics as a Vocation provide a rich discussion of the problems of politics, persuasion and consistency. On the one hand, Weber argues that politics is radically agonistic. It involves the clash of viewpoints that are fundamentally irreconcilable. The political actor is a hero, but a tragic hero. He fights on behalf of a particular set of values because he “can do no other,” but his choice of values is contingent and arbitrary in the most fundamental sense; there are other, antagonistic sets of values that are equally “valid.”

Politics in this account is a battle between warring gods, a struggle that can’t be resolved. You pledge your allegiance to the one, or to the other, cause, because you have to; it is only through commitment and consistency that you can develop that sense of responsibility which is required of you. Yet you must also recognize that politics is a mess of paradox and contradictions. To act successfully in politics, you must be passionate, but also committed to the “slow boring of hard boards” that is the everyday grind of political activity. You may adhere to ultimate ends that are laudable, yet these ends must be achieved through actions that may “endanger the salvation of the soul.”

This suggests an ideal of political debate as a struggle between irreconcilable viewpoints - but one that rests on a personal ethic of responsibility. It’s agonistic, but it’s also radically pluralistic - everyone must recognize that they do not have, indeed cannot have, a monopoly on the truth - ultimate values are not subject to scientific inquiry. Inquiry may reveal the limits and awkwardness of political viewpoints, but it may not dictate the viewpoints that one should take. In Weber’s words,

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts—I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression ‘moral achievement,’ though perhaps this may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying.

Weber doesn’t believe that consistency is possible in any fundamental sense. The aporiai of politics are such that there will always be a clash between means and ends. But a more limited, second order consistency is possible; an ethic of responsibility that is clear-headed enough to recognize these contradictions, and acknowledge them. Which is the kind of consistency that I think Burke is looking for.

And it’s this, I think,that is increasingly being lost in public life. People who see politics as a war between good and evil fail to exercise the sort of responsibility that Weber talks about, whether they’re George W. Bush, Christopher Hitchens or Noam Chomsky. They don’t even try to come to terms with the messiness of politics, the lack of any grounding for fundamental values, and the contradictions that plague their own positions as well as those of their opponents. Pop-Manicheanism has a tendency to strangle political debate, or at best to transform it into a shouting match, a dialogue des sourds. A sort of Gresham’s law starts to apply, in which bad argument drives out the good. Enough said.

Posted by Henry at June 8, 2003 06:02 PM | TrackBack