Looking at the city

1. The distinction between left and right is often useful for political thinking. It’s significant that the terminology comes from a representative assembly (you know the story, I assume): voting is binary, “aye” or “nay,” so in a political system based on voting, at the end of the day you have to pick one of two sides. In a two-party system, citizens do this themselves, during elections. In a multi-party system, politicians do it, by forming coalitions within parliaments. (The former seems better to me, but that’s a question for another day.) Either way, the decision is necessary, and the simple spatial metaphor neatly reflects that need to choose.

2. The difference at the heart of the left-right distinction has to do with equality–or perhaps it’s better to say “egalitarianism,” the idea that from the notion of equality you can spin out a whole way of thinking about public policy. To treat the left-right distinction as if it is fundamentally about anything other than egalitarianism vs. its critics (e.g., new vs. old, state vs. market) is to obfuscate. (Norberto Bobbio made the definitive argument about this about thirty years ago.)

3. But that doesn’t get you very far. There are a number of different conceptions of equality (Michael Walzer’s distinction between “simple equality” and “complex equality” is a good place to start), several competing ideas about why we ought to value equality, and any number of conflicting ideas about how to achieve it–not to mention the myriad reasons for and ways of opposing or criticizing or just worrying about egalitarianism and its consequences. We need a more complex vocabulary, because we quickly run up against the usefulness of the terms “left” and “right”.

4. The limits to those terms' usefulness are more apparent the more widely the terms are used. My impression–anecdotal, uncertain–is that until around fifteen years ago most Americans (most journalists, most politicians, most citizens in general) didn’t use these terms often. The few Americans who did use them much were the handful who were self-consciously ideological–say, Harringtonites on the left, or Buckleyites on the right, people who were deeply immersed in political activity and who took a more or less intellectual approach to their political engagements. I think a shift happened around the time of the rise of the Tea Party “movement” and a new aggressively and self-consciously right-wing media world, after which use of the left-right distinction quickly became ubiquitous. (To whit, here’s an n-gram using the best proxies I could think of for the political uses of the terms.) I may have the dating wrong; perhaps the spread of that terminology was gradual, and I only noticed its widespread use suddenly. In any case, one consequence of the (relatively) recent ubiquity of the terms left and right is that in recent years I have often found myself unable to recognize what others call “the left”. The notion that we could use the term “the left” to include, for example, university managers who pontificate about “inclusion” while keeping adjunct pay as low as possible and shunting students out of classrooms and onto screens…well, words fail me.

5. I would like to propose that the best way to use the left-right distinction is neither by retaining the simplistic binary nor by extending the spatial metaphor through the addition of more spatial terms (“center”, “far”). The left-right metaphor is insufficient, but it strains when stretched. Instead, it is more helpful to introduce qualitative adjectives: authoritarian, sectarian, democratic, statist, decentralist, techno-optimist, green, humanist, market-friendly, religious, secular, populist, decent, etc. This yields terms that highlight substantive differences within “left” and “right”.

6. Adding substantive adjectives to the terms “left” and “right” can also suggest strange or surprising cross-cutting agreements. If the spatial metaphor is most useful for describing voting decisions, then it follows that the left-right distinction loses salience the farther you get from the act of voting. We might then ask which matters more, the alliance I make on election day, or the alliances I make on the other 364 days of the year?

7. One adjective in particular interests me right now. Can there be both a humanistic left and a humanistic right? That is to say, are there distinctly “left” and “right” versions of the project of staying human in antihumanistic times? Or, rather, is it that there are wormholes from certain parts of the left, and likewise from certain parts of the right, getting you to a humanism that is not quite either left or right? I find this to be a conundrum, as puzzling as the conundrum that @ayjay mentions in his post today about humanism. I’m not sure that it matters much: the work (and the need for wisdom and courage) is more or less the same, either way.

8. After all, what’s a spatial metaphor among friends?

I find that in groups I belong to, the element of democratic life that generates most controversy these days is the expectation that people leave home and screens behind to attend meetings. It seems to me that the people who see online simulations of meetings as more in keeping with democratic principles than “in-person meetings” (yes, they really use that redundant expression) think this way because they see equal voice as the quintessence of democracy.

That way of thinking is well-intentioned. Democratic politics depends on our identifying the moment or point at which people act as equals (we could call it the equality-point). If voices, abstracted from persons, were that equality-point, then the most democratic procedure would be the one that best equalized the opportunity for the voice of each to be heard, even if all that was heard was a digital mediation of each person’s voice. But this view is wrong. Voices aren’t equal: democratic practices are possible only if voices aren’t equal, because in a democratic assembly we cast our votes under the influence of the most persuasive voices.

The root of democratic life, the premise or origin of democratic practice, is ekklesia: a call or invitation. Our reception of a common invitation is the essential point at which democracy reflects our equality with one another. (How we come to know that equality is another matter.) Democracy means that the whole people hears a summons to participate in the community; all are called out from private concerns, from the privation of individualism and inaction, into common life. It is in the nature of an invitation that people might not respond in the same way, or might need to learn how to respond before they can respond, or might not be able to respond today but might be able to some other time.

Democracy is allowed to challenge us. Democracy is in fact a challenge to all of us.

(Advice that I will endeavor to follow…)

1. Stay aware of Washington DC political news in a general way, but don’t spend much time on it. Consider setting time limits for your news reading (or watching). An hour a day? Half an hour? A quarter hour most days, and more only once in a while?

2. Read widely enough (in history, literature, ideas, etc.) so as to keep in mind the longer-term and bigger-picture context of the day’s news. The political troubles we face right now have many sources and were brewing for a long time, so moving toward something better will also take a long time. That is, odd as it may sound, a word of hope, in two senses. First, remembering that the crisis of the moment isn’t all there is can help you resist panic by cultivating patience. Second, knowing that many factors contributed to our present troubles means recognizing that if you want to act, or to live, in a way that points in a better direction, there are many places from which to begin.

3. Find some practical things to do, whether things that obviously count as “politics” in the usual sense or community-building activities that aren’t so obviously political. Focus on doing those things well, even if they are modest. For example, find a political organization to belong to and support, or a group of friends whose concerns are similar to yours and who might want to do something together.

4. Don’t underestimate the moral and emotional resources you already have. Try to trace the sources, the roots, of whatever outrage you feel at current events, and figure out how to water those roots. Let yourself be renewed or refreshed by the perceptions or commitments, whatever they may be, that lie behind your outrage. They are more important than the outrage itself.

George Scialabba on the New York Intellectuals (from What Are Intellectuals Good For – which, sadly, seems to be out of print):

Their primary training and frame of reference were the humanities, usually literature or philosophy, and [they] habitually, even if often implicitly, employed values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize contemporary politics...They were generalists: they drew, from a generally shared body of culture, principles of general applicability and applied them to facts generally available. Their "specialty" lay  not in unearthing generally unavailable facts but in penetrating especially deeply into the shared culture, in grasping and articulating its contemporary moral/political relevance with special originality and force.

Paul J. Griffiths, distinguishing intellectuals from dilettantes ("Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual,“in First Things, a few years ago):

Perhaps you’ll be a dilettante: You’ll love what you think about and you’ll think hard about it, but you’ll be easily bored and won’t think about anything for long. You’ll read many things and (perhaps) write many, but you’ll read and write about disparate topics, and once you’ve read for a while about something, and perhaps written about it, you’ll move on to something else. Clever people—quick studies—are often like this. They have properly intellectual gifts, but they lack the patience for attention’s long, slow gaze (on which see below), and so their intellectual life coruscates, sparking here and there like a firefly on the porch, but illuminating nothing for long...I’d like to warn you against this tendency [because] the extent to which you embrace dilettantism is just the extent to which you won’t do serious intellectual work.

C.S. Lewis

Ignazio Silone

Irving Howe

Wendell Berry

Michael Walzer

Wilson Carey McWilliams

George Scialabba

The writers who do the kind of writing I want to be able to do aren’t necessarily the authors I most enjoy reading (although there’s considerable overlap there) or those I think are the greatest (that would be a much more diverse list – demographically, thematically, and above all temporally). These are writers whose works happen to have hit me at just the right time and who do things with words in a way that has left me wanting to be apprenticed to them. Perhaps there could have been others, but for me it has been them. (This is a running list: there may be some who belong here whom I haven’t thought of in a while, and I may add them later; I haven’t included anyone of my own generation; I might add some peers later, too.)

What do they have in common? (Some are living and some are dead, but I’ll use the present tense.)

1. They write essays and essayistic books. (Those on the list who also write novels or poetry are here for the sake of their essays.)

2. They are all members of or sympathizers with ethical socialist or egalitarian-communitarian traditions of political thought.

3. Some hold academic positions and some not, but none are traditional academic specialists. Yet they’re not quite generalists or dilettantes either: each has a set of themes or problems that he returns to persistently. (Think of Silone’s remark: “I should gladly spend my life writing and rewriting the same book: the single book that every writer has within him that is the image of his soul and of which his published works are more or less rough fragments.” Every writer? I’m not sure. These writers? Yes.)

4. Some are religious and some are ambiguous or ambivalent about religion, but none is resolutely and narrowly secular.

5. They all write in a certain way. I know it when I see it, but find it difficult to describe. It is, among other things, unburdened, frank, subtle, self-questioning, principled without being didactic, at times personal but never self-indulgent, neither resting easy with their own answers to the questions at stake nor dodging the risks of answering as best they can.

The congruence of those features – the way they accord with one another – is probably what attracts me to these writers.

I used to think of “public life” (the life we share with neighbors and strangers, in public space) as the basic concept in the study of politics. I now think a better concept is “common life.”

Politics does not equal publicity: it depends also on what we encounter in silence and in solitude.

Wendell Berry writes, in the second of his 1979 Sabbath poems:

Resurrection
Is in the way each maple leaf
Commemorates its kind, by connection

Outreaching understanding. What rises
Rises into comprehension
And beyond.

This seems to me like the place to begin thinking about our common life: that our most important connections are mysteries, matters to be approached with reverence and without undue claims to comprehension.

Asking about the nature of our connections—pushing past what’s historically situated or culturally specific, moving toward what’s simply true—does not lead us to secure, transparent knowledge. But it leads somewhere. I want to learn how to speak and write about that “somewhere.”

Here’s Berry again, from another Sabbath poem (with some elisions):

I would not have been 
an essayist except that I 
have been bewildered and afraid