Joyful Rebellion

So this is one of those blog posts that is likely to get referred to as fluffy or trite or just generally lacking in any serious content. I write it all the same because it deals with a topic that has been gnawing at me for almost two months now and seems invariably to rear it’s head every so often. No amount of obfuscating or ducking, bobbing, or weaving will persuade it to release its not overwhelming, but persistent grip.

My pitbull topic of reference here is the distinctly negative cast of our politics and political conversations.

Maybe I’m just being a pansy Canadian, but it seems like an unassailable underlying assumption that if we are to talk politics, we must therefore be calling somebody (or group of somebodies) out, tearing somebody (or group of somebodies) down, delineating why a particular line of thought is both incorrect and makes its thinker(s) a bad person/people, or otherwise raking some person(s) or set of ideas over some subset of coals. That is what serious political thinkers and actors do.

And to be sure, there are important instances where ripping the ever-loving hell out of someone’s argument is necessary. Indeed, standing guard against immoralities and harmful intent isn’t just important work, it is an obligation. The price of freedom, as Jefferson said, is eternal vigilance.  Such are the responsibilities that fall to free peoples of democratic republics.

But I sometimes wonder whether that is the whole story and whether our inclinations towards political pessimism aren’t a learned knee-jerk reaction, rather than an intrinsic necessity of political discourse. In other words, is our tendency towards always casting our political conversations in an overtly negative light less the product of eternal vigilance and more the result of a set in laziness, a familiarity with a certain modus operandi that we are loathe to challenge in both ourselves and in others. Do we fallback to attacking one another with a certain unspoken bitter maliciousness, like the schoolyard bully whose own corrosive home life leaves schadenfreude as the only option for a sense of exhilaration and freedom, because of a fundamental lack of imagination and a deadened state of civic spirit?

Increasingly I fear the answer is yes.

Which is not to suggest that I’m going all latter day, Canadian Rodney King — why can’t we all just get along? — because, you know, there will be times, as I’ve mentioned above, where we won’t get along and, indeed, where it is important that we don’t get along. And, of course, the degree to which we’re able to get along has improved in no small fashion from the kinds of violence and vitriol that has marked previous periods and times. But while it is true that we are less inclined to use guns, swords, or fists to settle disputes these days, it also remains true that our use of language as a means of inflicting psychic and emotional harm has become, shall we say, ever more refined.

In that regard, history’s long march forward seems more akin to a never ending battle whose genesis is long since forgotten and whose grinding routine leaves all participants ever more sadistic for the sheer normalization of the violence in which they are forced to persist.

But can’t we find ways of jousting that call forth a greater vision of the very ends our means are aimed at achieving? Is it so cliched to talk about our political transactions as a means of rousing a sense of inspiration in us in such a fashion that more and not less people feel inclined to participate in the modern day marketplace of ideas? Was it really so bad and so unfounded for millions of pepole the world around to get caught up in the excitement and possibility and hope — yes, hope! — of Barack Obama’s candidacy? Is it required that we let go of those feelings of momentum and opportunity that, I think it’s fair to say most people felt, when America elected its first black president?

Why is it that we only see the honour and nobility and importance of those moments captures in phrases like, “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” or, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” or “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’” from the rose-coloured vantage of hindsight? Why does it seem so very silly to insist upon a cultivation of vision and purpose as a greater component of our political paradigms?

When we disagree, can we not do so in the spirit of a Buberian I-and-Thou, rather than I-and-It? Can we open ourselves to the act of seeing one another, learning from one another, appreciating one another, and, yes, loving one another, and not even, but especially in the most heated moments of divergence? Can we grapple with a sense of honour and trust that the engagement is born of a mutual desire to do good, even if our definitions remains worlds apart?

When might we challenge ourselves to do better than we have? How might we cast off the blinders of our poisonous mediocrity? Who will have the courage to lead a joyful rebellion?

(h/t: K-Os for the title and to whose album I was listening when this post first occured to me)

Tagged as: bad faith, inspiration in politics, Martin Buber