“Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
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In a previous post, I alluded to political action being a public act of persuasion. This is so first because the hallmarks of humanity are rationality and spontaneity, and second because only in a public space can rationality be conditioned or spontaneity acknowledged and recorded. I hold with Hannah Arendt that acts taken in a void are essentially meaningless – it is the interaction of one’s creative will with others that gives it substance. Moreover, politics must be uniquely interpersonal in that it takes humans as its primary object, whereas labor and work are concerned with natural resources and physical capital, respectively.
One consequence of viewing politics as persuasion is that only that which can be communicated can be political. Communicability, in turn, is simply the ability of one person to make himself or herself understood to another person, which is dependent upon a shared language through which we exchange ideas. Thus, a shared language defines the outermost bounds of the political realm that can exist within any given society.
This ability of social activity to create space for politics enables human excellence, but can just as readily restrict the potential for action. We can exclude communicable ideas from politics by declaring them private opinions. For example, religion in the United States (at least in the case of Christian denominations, less so with Islam since its re-politicization after 9/11) is now broadly considered a private issue, not fit for public critique and certainly not a matter on which others will publicly attempt to change your mind. Calls in the wake of the Aurora shootings that “Now is not the time to talk about gun control” similarly remove subjects from persuasive (ergo political) discourse and therefore from the potential for excellent human engagement. If one person decides not to buy a gun for the sake of principle, it will have little or no impact on other people and certainly will not garner public remembrance. Were the same person to organize a successful movement to reinstate America’s assault rifle ban, then he would create a permanent and public legal record of political achievement. Thus, while there may exist some moral or even practical case for a particular subject being excluded from political discourse, we must weigh all such cases against the lost capacity for human excellence in the field.
A large number of topics available to political discourse draws people into political activity, courtesy of the well-documented tendency to care more about issues directly relevant to one’s own experiences. When someone feels that the prevailing public discourse excludes the topics most important to him, it stands to reason that he will be less likely to participate in that discourse. For example, if I am an ardent believer in transparent school boards, but nobody else thinks the issue is important, then I cannot easily engage in political activity to attempt to enact my agenda. At best, the opportunity cost of creating a dialogue where none exists could dissuade me from pursuing political excellence in the area of administrative accountability. My beliefs about transparency are, albeit innocently, marginalized and therefore privatized: I can believe that, but I should not attempt to persuade anyone else to join me in acting on it. Thus can social priorities limit political activity even without intent.
The ultimate triumph of the social over the political occurs when there ceases to be a plurality of persuasive voices. Tyranny achieves this singularity via propaganda and centralized control. The most extreme plausible example of this is George Orwell’s Newspeak, which goes beyond simply excluding topics from discussion but actually makes it impossible to discuss complex ideas by removing the vocabulary needed for their communication. However, radical liberty can also eradicate politics by emancipating people from persuasive activity and employing government purely as a mechanism for supporting the private sphere.
It may be argued that market transactions, being based on individual choices, can constitute a form of speech. However, merely economic forums, like markets, or social forums, like the Church of Scientology, cannot replace politics. Money is not speech, and economics is not persuasion, because economics is fundamentally the science of necessities, and it follows necessarily causal laws. Markets do not allow for creativity or persuasion, only accounting. Likewise, purely social forums, those that are self-selected and cannot enforce law, lack the elements that drive political activity, namely, divergent opinions and an incentive to guide the institution’s use of force by influencing its agenda. The lack of heretics within the Church of Scientology is precisely the evidence that it is an apolitical institution.
Deciding what to purchase or what groups to join can, of course, be connected to political action, as in boycotts, but only insofar as it conveys a recognizable and persuasive message. A boycott sends a recognizable message only when publicized alongside the reasons for the boycott; publishing reasons, of course, is political speech. The boycott itself adds no substance to the speech, it merely adds pathos by conveying the actors’ willingness to sacrifice economic benefits for the sake of moral sentiment. This, in turn, presupposes the primacy of economic, apolitical interests in our decision-making process, and so is itself an apolitical, or even anti-political gesture.
Unlike markets or social clubs, democratic government is an institution based entirely on persuading others to act together towards some common purpose. Such persuasive activity is the paramount human behavior. Therefore it is through democratic institutions that we express our humanity. The hastened emancipation of personal choices from public debate limits the accessibility and relevance of this forum and therefore marginalizes truly human activity. To best enable human excellence, we must expand, not contract, the scope of topics assailable in the public sphere.
We can start by recognizing that nearly all of our choices impact other people, therefore nearly all of our choices are worth considering in an unselfish manner. This does not mean that we must abandon our principles to the whims of the majority; indeed, defending one’s convictions politically is itself an excellent act. Nor do I believe that “big government” means lots of red tape, high taxes, and expansive welfare, but rather that any given regulation, tax law, and welfare program be subject to reasoned and public discourse that shapes the prerogative of the relevant authority.
Finally, recall that politics depends not upon the government, but upon persuasive speech. If one acts through persuasive speech to limit or remove government involvement in one area or another, that is itself a political act. One must merely be prepared to defend that limitation ad infinitum in further political discourse. The problem of small government arises from the categorical rejection of discussing government action in one area or another, in the deliberate exclusion of whole subjects from public debate. Insofar as broad governmental prerogative brings these questions back into the fold, we might consider a potentially expansive state as a worthwhile opportunity to fulfill our unique human potential.
Maybe government is really just about the same size as its citizens.
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(Photo courtesy of political-humor.org)
Angry Philosophy 