All Politics Is Glocal

Due to being sequestered for four days last week, it took a little later for the recent Gallup poll that provides some fairly damning evidence against the GOP directive to stay the course to catch my eye. The mountain of that evidence continues to grow and,  as E.D. notes, the calls to double down on a notion of  remaining “true conservatives loyal to the base” are revealed as delusional given the dwindling nature of those quarters. The uncomfortable fact of the numbers is that the Republican Party in particular and conservatism in America generally need to engage in the process revisioning with an eye to revitalizing if the country is to avoid some kind of decades long liberal catechism.

Of course, there are numerous conservative pundits whose primary complaint is centered on the notion that the GOP ceased to be a conservative party in any meaningful way over the past eight years and that the corrective measures that need to take place turn a return to conservative principles proper. And while I might not be inclined to disagree with this notion that government under the Bush administration was largely conservative in name only, I don’t correspondingly think that a back to the trenches game plan is going to seal any deals. The fact of the matter is that a.) people started poisoning this well long before Bush Jr. arrived on the scene and b.) there has been so much partisan mortar fire that if you look back, the trenches just aren’t where you left them.

So the question becomes, what is it that conservatives must return to? The answer, of course, varies depending on which camp you happen to ask, and the schisms that have developed around what constitute true conservative principles aren’t so easily filled in as to avoid a meaningful discussion about what the contents of conservatism in America herein constitute. I would suggest that conservatives who deny that such a conversation need take place are operating in a land of self-constructed and reflexively reifying delusion designed to obscure the hard reality of significant concessions nestled in their future.

But let me take this revisioning one step further and suggest that the framework for such a discussion/debate ought not to focus on a return to anything. Change averse as conservatives are, I think the real discussion, as I have suggested in the past, is one that asks not the question, “Where have we strayed from the conservative principles that have made us strong in the past,” but rather the question, “How do we see and situate our conservative principles so that they will make us strong in the future?”

The need for such a reframing is, to my mind, the devil in the details of those polling statistics. Which is to say that when I laid eyes on those stats, what I immediately saw was a demographic shift that extended beyond mere party affiliation. The situation facing the GOP and Republicans is less one of branding and more one of evolution — namely, people’s beliefs and values, much like the world in which they operate, are not static, they will change and evolve over time. Ideologies and worldviews, as well, emerge in particular temporal and situational contexts based on the prevailing perceptual and ethical winds, but to assume that the world ceases to keep on keeping on after that emergence is to move from the venal sin of lethargy and stagnation to the mortal sin of complete reification.

An evolving public has little forgiveness in its heart for an ideology, party, or movement that can’t keep up — just ask China.

Sure, there will always be a segment of the population hewing to the perceptive lens that gave birth to a specific ideology, but the momentum of a moving world and inquiring minds will, in the end, ensure a forward moving victory against the forces of inertia. In short, bases themselves will, over time, ensure their own entropic disintegration and reintegration into a more up-to-date locality, whether their proximal clergy like it or not. As such, one might be better advised to keep one’s eye on the likes of Meghan McCain than Rush Limbaugh for reasonable discussion about a conservatism for the twenty-first century. Rush isn’t going anywhere, to be sure, but Meghan is going a good deal further down the road and I dare say represents a burgeoning proportion of conservative thought.

All of which is fine and well if the ideologically nomadic lifestyle tickles our fancy; however, at some point we have to ask ourselves in what ways our willingness to evolve with the shifting currents of public opinion has bleached our ideology of meaning. Which is to say that while those pundits who continually look behind their shoulder for the answers aren’t likely to find what their looking for, neither are their concerns about unmooring from the docks of particularity wholly unfounded. There does indeed come a point at which charges of liberalism-lite (or Reagan Democrats if viewed from the opposing perspective) are more than just fear-mongering and party line enforcement.

The real question, then, is not just how do we go about setting sail on the dynamic seas of ideological evolution, but also where we might find a long and flexible enough rope to keep us moored to our roots in a way that is salient but not slavish. Not surprisingly, I happen to think the idea of glocalism has something to offer in this regard.

Before going any further, I think it is somewhat important to take a brief step back in terms of this ongoing (and increasingly obsessional) discussion of one (or maybe three-four max) about glocalism that I am intent on waging. What I’m really looking to articulate here is a different way of  perceiving the world, or, in other words, I’m attempting to carve out a somewhat unique and novel perspective on the world — somewhat because, of course, I’m building on all kinds of thoughts and ideas with which I’ve come into contact. The contents of those effort generally come out in discussions surrounding the notions of localism and globalism and so I have nominally dubbed my efforts “glocalism”, but really the ideas presented here within extend beyond just discussions of  localism and globalism.

I think I probably nailed it most succinctly in my original post, quoting a previous email on this topic, when I said that what I’m after is a conception of, “[u]nity without violence to particularity”. I like this formulation because I feel like it throws the doors of the fundamental paradox with which I’m grappling open the widest and allows for the greatest number of participants in terms of collective brainstorming.

Of course, the question of the relationship between unity, or the One, and diversity/particularity, or the Many, goes back thousands of years, so in essence I’m not asking any novel questions, but rather trying to hit upon a marginally novel way of approaching that question through the specific lens of politics, economics, and cultural analysis. Two of the greatest philosophers of all time used this question at the core of their paradigmatic structures. For Plato, the focus was all about intellectual and personal purification through the practice of philosophy until one had achieved the ability to apprehend the Forms — those singular structures that provided the light generated the pale shadows of particularity in the world to which we are born. For Aristotle, this striving towards this ephemeral forms of oneness was a waste of time and the focus of one’s studies must be those grounded and real entities of particularity — the things of the world into which we are born and of which we are.

My own inclination, arrogant as I am to think that I have any business in this arena, is to flip the notion of the One and the Many on its head by assuming the subject of our inquiry not to be discrete ontological objects, but rather an exploration into perspectives. From the point of a view of a perspective, the One is here, ground into the our very understanding of the world around us. Perspectivally, the One is the particular, it is our innate and given perspective, along with all of the experiences, beliefs, values, and biases that accrue to the assuming of a particular perspective on the world.

The Many, then, is “out there”, it is the multiplicity of other perspectives that populate the world and into which we come into contact in a variety of different ways at a variety of different times throughout our lives. In this regard, the Many — that multiplicity of of “other” perspectives — is the ephemeral and seemingly unknowable variant in our analysis. And so in trying to gain a better understanding of the world, into cultivating a greater degree of skillful means in navigating the world, we are not attempting to escape the Many in search of the One. Nor are we eschewing the One in favour of the Many. Rather, we are attempting to cultivate a greater intellectual and identificational dexterity around the ability to hold, assume, understand, and ultimately, feel a variety of different perspectives in this world.

The trick in this endeavour is to grasp that by cultivating such a dexterity, we do not seek to escape from the oneness of our own perspective. In fact, what I take to be a proper understanding of this project entails that any attempt to escape the oneness of your own perspective is a fool’s errand because doing so is patently impossible within the context of this specific project. The exercise of the project is predicated first and foremost on your existence as a particular perspective on the world. The project then extends out to endeavour to come into an intimate contact with as many other perspectives as possible. But in doing so, one does not seek to thereby sever the relationship one has to the perspective of origin, and for all intents and purposes within the context of this project has no ability to do so anyhow. Indeed, it quickly becomes difficult to see how the project maintains any degree of coherence is there is not some manner of starting out point from which it launches and to which it returns. In short, identificational dexterity does not mean complete loss of identity altogether.

So you can begin to see see why the term glocalism has proven so helpful in terms of giving my thoughts a framework insofar as it provides a bit more malleable housing for these notions of perspectival dexterity by contrasting cultural content in the contexts of the local and the global. One step further; however, the term glocalism also gives us a window into an additional nuance around dexterity of perspective by connotating that there are perhaps different fulcrums of perspective that we’re dealing with here. The whole notion of locality and localism lends itself to the reality of a collective perspective that we can share and participate in via the entity of community. Within the walls of community we both contribute to and influence the collective identity of community, while at the same time drawing part of our own personal identity from the collective identity of said community.

A global viewpoint, then, gives rise to a terrain that encapsulates a whole world of communities and the initial drive to such a conception was to find a way of meshing together all of these communities into some kind of whole — a global community. The results have been, of course, of mixed success, with the primary emergent concern one of an eventual cultural monolithing that flattens of all these communities or localities and strips them of those characteristics that make them unique. In this regard, I still take the mono-culture argument of localists to be the most compelling and persuasive. At the same time, there are some goods that have come out of this process of integration such that there is reason to suggest that the whole project ought not be bound for the intellectual scrapyard. Our individual communities and localities are better informed, more tolerant, and in some non-North American centric cases, better off financially than they were prior to the initiation of globalization.

But apart from the explicit clues these movements/conceptions provide us, there is also a more implicit pearl of wisdom that is unearthed through our machinations. Namely, this whole notion of localities within a global context and their relationship brings about the idea of nested interiorities and exteriorities with reference to the perspectives we are exploring on their interrelations.

Ultimately, when we talk about our innate perspective, that perspective to which we are looking to accrue a certain dexterity, we can see that on an individual basis there is nothing more interior to the lens of that experience. And yet, if we look at the kind of perspective we realize from a local identity with a community, we can also see that there is an interiority or subjectivity to the experiences that accrue from said identification that is exterior to our innate or born perspective, while at the same time possessing a simultaneous quality of exteriority. We are not reducible to our local communities and neither are our ocal communities reducible to us, yet we are not wholly exterior to one another: there is a relationship that is both internally and externally oriented, and the cross-over nature of that relationship starts to provide us with an outline of how these perspectives might interrelate and how we might look to cultivate that sought after dexterity.

So too, if we look at other individual innate perspectives do we see them as at least initially wholly exterior to our own perspective and the perspectives of different localities, but already through the cultural connectivity of globalization, when it is not envisioned as a mono-cultural wrecking ball, we see a cross-pollination of cultures occurring across the planet. And so, if we can approach our increasing integration with an eye to exploring the interior and exterior relationships of different perspectives, we might not only discover a means of developing a true global community that provides unity without doing violence to particularity (because, at the end of the day, non of these perspectives are wholly reducible to any other, there are merely interreleated), we also might find that this project of exploring the interior and exterior relationships of different perspectives concurrently builds a latice-like patchwork of bridges along which our identificational dexterity, both as an individual and as a part of a collective, can be run.

The nested relationships of interiority and exteriorty provide us with the freedom to move, explore, and learn, while the fundamental irreducibility of all of these perspectives maintains that locus of self that we are incapable of violating, even we so chose.

So fine, what does all of this have to do with politics?

Well, for one you can start to see where my unwillingness to locate within any specific political camp comes from. Rather than setting up shop in a rigid sphere of political philosophy, I am instead looking to build a latice-work of relationship between different political perspectives with my own innate perspective acting as the anchor point to these ideas. Some ideas suggested by these different perspectives will be accepted and others rejected — I’m not suggesting a whole sale acceptance of any and all ideas present — but neither am I willing to reduce any particular perspective to another and at core I take all perspectives to hold some degree of relationship that can be formed into a dynamic coherence when allowed to constellate into a variety of useful patterns.

But without even going that far, we can circle back to this question about evolving ideologies and philosophies without sacrificing that locus of coherence. The evolutionary movement of different collectively held philosophies can indeed move in pertinent and vital directions to encapsulate different perspectives without disintegrating altogether precisely because the evolutionary movement is between perspectives that are inherently relational due to nested interior and exterior points of contact.

For lack of a better phraseology, this is glocal politics, and it is, I think, the natural movement we are increasingly experiencing and with which we are forced to reckon as our dynamic world spins forward with complexifying force. Our job then, so far as I can tell, is not to fight against the inevitability of this phenomenon, but rather to find ways of working within that phenomenon to make sense of the ever emerging and illuminating multiplicity of perspectives available to us.

By my lights, this is the only move that really makes any sense.

Tagged as: evolution, exteriority, glocalism, ideology, inter-subjectivity, interiority, nested relationships, perspectives