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THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS A blog by Barry Edelson CRUEL JOKE 9:We Have a ChoiceQUERIOUS I assume you voted the other day. ANTAGONĒ Yes, I did, for all the good it will do. QUERIOUS People who feel that way generally don't bother to vote at all. ANTAGONĒ I don't think it matters how one votes, but it does matter that one votes. QUERIOUS No one would have ever guessed that you were so civic minded. ANTAGONĒ For me, voting does not constitute participation in the workings of government, but is merely an act of enlightened self-preservation. QUERIOUS Would you care to explain that? ANTAGONĒ I may not be so naive as to believe that democracy has cured all the evils of the world by providing the ignorant and uneducated with an opportunity to express their ill-informed preferences at the ballot box. But, unlike many misguided revolutionaries who are blinded by their own bitterness and resentment, I am not such a fool that I can't recognize the extraordinary advantages that our hideously flawed form of government has over all of the others that preceded it, if I may paraphrase Churchill badly. QUERIOUS So you embrace the ascendancy of democracy— ANTAGONĒ "Embrace" is a bit strong. QUERIOUS All right, you begrudgingly accept that if we have to have a state, better that it should be a democratic one — am I right so far? ANTAGONĒ Quite right. QUERIOUS But you nevertheless feel that the votes you cast in the exercise of democracy are meaningless. Now how can that be? ANTAGONĒ Well, consider the word "exercise" you just used. When one exercises one's body, one doesn't seek the pleasures of sweat and muscle aches, though some profess to enjoy the sensation of physical exertion. One has a larger goal in mind, namely, a general state of health and fitness. Likewise, voting is a means of keeping the body politic in shape, if you'll pardon the pun, but it has such a minuscule effect on the actual workings of government as to be insignificant in and of itself. QUERIOUS So voting has nothing more than symbolic value? The policies of particular politicians don't matter at all? ANTAGONĒ Hardly at all, no. Governments, whatever their size, develop an institutional inertia that tends to override the best intentions and strongest wills that individual politicians can bring to the table. Policies do change over time, but only slowly and in response to perceptible shifts in public attitude. That's how accountability is maintained, not by holding elected officials' feet to the fire by reminding them of their expedient campaign promises, but by reminding them that they can't get elected in the first place unless their positions bear at least a passing resemblance to those of their constituents. I am always amazed that people complain when Congressmen exhibit a lack of principle and cast their votes strictly in accordance with what they think the voters want them to do. Isn't that the whole purpose of having frequent elections, to make sure they don't go off and satisfy their own interests with complete disregard for the people they are supposed to represent? The only way to remind them that we're still here and that we're paying attention — whether or not we really are — is to vote, regardless of who one votes for. QUERIOUS That is perhaps the most cynical description of elective politics that I have ever heard. ANTAGONĒ A moment ago you called me civic minded. QUERIOUS I must have been mad. ANTAGONĒ Are you going to sit there and tell me that you don't realize that all politicians are liars? QUERIOUS They do lie, naturally. ANTAGONĒ And that when they make promises during the course of a campaign about what they'll do in office that they have no intention of acting on the vast majority of them? QUERIOUS Even if they want to, they often find themselves constrained by unforeseeable obstacles once they take office. ANTAGONĒ Even allowing them the benefit of the doubt, as you are inclined to do, the result for you and me is the same. Promises are broken and more lies are told to rationalize these failures, hopefully in time for the next election. QUERIOUS What you are presenting is the classic argument against voting: politics is a filthy business, they're all crooks, you can't trust any of them, and so on. Few people are so childish that they can't see that, but those who do vote also see that politicians and their parties do stand for different things that have very concrete effects in the laws that get passed, or fail to get passed. How on earth do you make up your mind when you're standing there in the voting booth? Do you just pull levers at random? ANTAGONĒ Not at all. I have political views like everyone else who votes, as you well know. But I, for one, recognize that choice of any kind is an illusion. Our entire culture has been designed to promote the idea that choice is real and that it's good for you. From the useful household products we buy to the color of the cars we drive to the movies we decide to see, we are forever bombarded with the magical promise of false choices. QUERIOUS But they aren't false. Each in its own small way influences the fabric of our daily lives. ANTAGONĒ What is false is that our choices carry any importance whatsoever beyond the momentary pleasure of believing ourselves different from, and even superior to, our neighbor because we bought this particular lawn mower versus the equally noisy and annoying one that he got stuck with. We like to think that these infinitesimal decisions separate us from the pack, define who we are as individuals, when they do nothing of the kind. QUERIOUS Surely you can't equate these kinds of choices, which are admittedly unimportant in the scheme of things, with political choices, which certainly bear an incomparably greater significance. ANTAGONĒ Do they really? We're talking only about a difference of degree. In every election, those who are running have a vested interest in convincing the potential voter that this is the most important election in the history of the world. The media, political consultants and other industries whose survival depends upon our buying into that message are complicit in promulgating the myth of choice. My views of this matter, which you deride, are in fact quite compatible with those of journalists who also don't care who gets elected, either, as long as someone does, someone who will continue to screw things up and take bribes and get caught with his pants down — whether literally or figuratively — so the newspapers and pundits will have something to drone on about. Similarly, I accept that politics inevitably attracts selfish men and women with colossal egos and dangerous ambitions, so that if democracy is to survive their predations we, the proverbial people, had better be mature and skeptical enough to recognize them for the miscreants they are and judge them realistically. Commentators often bemoan the fact that Americans are becoming increasingly cynical about politics, but the opposite is true: we are not nearly cynical enough. The only reason the knight on a white horse turns out to be a disappointment is that we fail to realize ahead of time that underneath his gleaming coat of armor is a lying, grasping, power-hungry son of a bitch who wants our votes and then doesn't want to know we exist. Not voting doesn't reflect political cynicism but the most severe form of political naiveté. If Europeans turn out to vote in double and triple the number that we do, it's a sign that they have long ago learned to hold their noses when they vote. We are children of a still-young and idealistic republic, and it offends our delicate democratic sensibilities to distrust our leaders before we send them into the game. We will never cease to be shocked and dismayed by our fallen heroes until we understand that choice, whether in politics or any other aspect of life, is, indeed, a purely symbolic gesture that makes us feel better for the moment but has little impact on tomorrow's headlines. QUERIOUS What you're telling me is that participating in democracy cannot be understood, or even accepted, on the level of simple interest in the way we are governed. Are we doomed to wallow in ignorance unless we veer off into one of your abstract philosophical constructs? ANTAGONĒ The only thing that will be doomed is democracy. Mankind has managed to survive thousands of years of tyranny, but not happily. In any event, every question in life is certainly part of some larger problem, thought we usually can't see it at the time. The Greeks were grappling with the conundrums of free will and fate 2,500 years ago. The fact that we no longer bother thinking about such larger issues doesn't mean they no longer have relevance to today's politics or to the rest of society, for that matter. QUERIOUS The ancient Greeks, ironically, are another example of a young republic with a poorly developed idea of what democracy was all about. ANTAGONĒ I would have said that they were incomparably more thoughtful about the subject than we are. QUERIOUS They had to be. Democracy was brand new for them; they more or less invented it. I had a professor of Greek drama who posed a fascinating question that may be pertinent to this discussion. After studying Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides for a semester, we were asked to consider why, if these playwrights were living in a democracy, all their tragedies are about kings and other assorted royal persons. ANTAGONĒ An interesting question indeed. I've never though about it before, but it would be the equivalent of all American drama being about the kings of England, wouldn't it? QUERIOUS Exactly. ANTAGONĒ So what was his answer? QUERIOUS Athens was a very young and fragile democracy, whose population had been bred in an entirely different social system, one in which the violent resolution of differences had been the rule for as long as anyone could imagine. The world of Homer, a few hundred years earlier, was thoroughly autocratic, militaristic, socially rigid, superstitious and undoubtedly cruel. This was their heritage: hardly an ideal spawning ground for non-violent, deliberative decision making. In order for democracy to take root, people had to give up on the idea of blood vengeance as the answer to everything, abandon their family feuds which had been raging for generations and which made children guilty of their parents' transgressions. What the plays are really about is the central tenet of a free society, that each individual is equal before the law and must be judged on his own merits, not on birthrights which perpetuate the family legends about whose ancestors slaughtered whose in what dispute two or three centuries ago. The plays were meant to be instructive to their audiences of land-holding men, who had to be taught that democracy demanded an end to the vindictive habits of the ancient kings and warlords. ANTAGONĒ I'm not so sure they succeeded very well. QUERIOUS Well, for a while they did, perhaps. By the time of the American Revolution, at least Athens served as a model, so we didn't have to invent the idea of a republic from scratch. The point of this story is that democracy has always been a fragile form of rule, and that if people cease to believe in what you so casually dismiss as the illusion of choice, if we cease to hold equality and liberty and all the principles of democracy as real, then the whole structure will topple like a house of cards. ANTAGONĒ I can't disagree with a thing you've said, except that I must insist that it really is a house of cards. We're in the most danger of slipping into either anarchy or tyranny when we fool ourselves into believing that free will is absolute, when we indulge not voting as just another legitimate method of expressing ourselves. We face the same terrible dilemma about all aspects of morality, because it's usually impossible to explain to people why they shouldn't do what seems to be in their own immediate best interest in any given circumstance. What the Greeks understood, and what we have utterly forgotten, is that whether or not we have free will at all is an open question, and that taking it for granted, as we have done in our barely controlled system of inalienable rights, is the height of hubris. Anyone who has lived under a tyrant, as the Athenians or their immediate ancestors did, knows full well that freedom is a relative term. The modern myth that "anything is possible" in our society promotes the worst kind of ignorance, because anything is most emphatically not possible, and being born in America does not bestow any special favors on anybody that can't be snatched away in the blink of a dictator's eye. QUERIOUS I can't help feeling that you are encouraging people to vote for the worst possible reasons. ANTAGONĒ All I would like to see is people making such decisions without burying their heads in the sand. I would like to believe that we are capable, as a society, of putting the choices we make into a sensible context. QUERIOUS Don't you think it's a bit much to expect most people to contemplate how their vote for the local city council fits into the existential continuum? ANTAGONĒ Why? The Greek playwrights didn't consider it beyond the scope of their listeners to carry on profound debates about man's place in nature and society. QUERIOUS But their listeners, let's not forget, were only a tiny proportion of the population, the educated elite who were capable of such contemplations. And we really have no idea how much they actually listened. For all we know, they may have trudged off smugly at the end of the performance like wealthy burghers of any era, saying, "That was all very nice, but what does any of it have to do with me?" ANTAGONĒ By that reasoning, we should be contented that as many people vote as they do, and call it a major victory for the human spirit that democracy has worked as well as it has considering how ignorant people are of their own motivations. Which only justifies my claim that not only doesn't it matter very much how people vote, it doesn't even matter why, because democracy is preserved in any case. QUERIOUS That sounds rather precarious. ANTAGONĒ Yes, well, one can't help but be a bit dismayed and concerned that the overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens have swallowed the myth whole that their fate is entirely in their own hands, or should be. QUERIOUS And as a confirmed elitist, you are presumably convinced that it should not be. ANTAGONĒ The question is moot, because it simply isn't up to us what happens to us. Life is random and endlessly confounding. Nevertheless, contrary to all reason and evidence, we believe that when we fall in love it's destiny, when we hit it rich it was coming to us, and when our side wins it was inevitable. QUERIOUS Is that really so harmful? ANTAGONĒ Only if you ever want to learn to accept life's disappointments with some degree of equanimity. Isn't it curious that success is always our own doing, but failure is never blamed on our own limitations or bad choices? When things go wrong, our willfulness can't possibly be at issue; there are always mitigating circumstances, Hamlet's admonition to his friends about the stars notwithstanding. But if we recognized the limits of our will from the outset, we would be far less inclined to rave and despair and thrash about whenever things go wrong. Or, for that matter, to insist that we "throw the bums out" when we catch politicians in a lie or on the take. In other words, we would have a more mature culture, in which people didn't confuse liberty with getting away with anything they pleased, which would be a benefit to us all. QUERIOUS You're dreaming. ANTAGONĒ I am well aware. QUERIOUS You know, I used to have a friend who, whenever he heard someone complain about some unpleasant task, was fond of saying, "The only thing you have to do is die." ANTAGONĒ Not even pay taxes? QUERIOUS Even taxes are effectively avoided by many people. ANTAGONĒ Well, it's a witty line, and it proves my point. Everyone wants to believe that he is in total control of his life. QUERIOUS No, they need to believe it, just as they need to believe that their vote makes a difference. Otherwise, they wouldn't bother, and then where would we be? ANTAGONĒ You know, you never asked me how I voted the other day. QUERIOUS I think I would rather not know. posted October 2007 Return to home page • Send an e-mail All writings on this site are copyrighted by Barry Edelson. Reprinting by permission only. |