On becoming a politician

The question — and I have struggled with this myself — is where do you have the most impact, where do you drive most effectively. It is always changing as the world changes. I used to humiliate CEOs, and one needed to be sufficiently emotionally unaware to live with that ethical contradiction — of making leaders look bad in order to get your point across.

So Paul Gilding, former Greenpeace director, as quoted in an article about the Australian singer-turned-politician Peter Garrett [in the SMH's Good Weekend, apparently not online]. It's worth a read, although it's not always so ethically aware: the journalist wants to have his cake and eat it too, issuing cheap shots against Garrett at one remove, or maybe half a remove. The smarmiest of Garrett's critics is Bob Brown, head of the Greens, who has quite a line in moral one-upmanship. Here's a hint, Bob: if you have a former colleage, whom (as you say) you like a great deal, and feel empathy for, and yet you find yourself feeling "a great deal of anxiety for him as a person", pick up the phone, or walk down the corridor to his office, and talk to him personally. Keep your pious concerns out of the press. Or, you know, we might think it had more to do with establishing your own brand by trashing a professional rival.

Garrett on his own situation:

And I think that's the crux of this, you know, `Peter Garrett is not the person he was before. He's become a politician.' Well, yeah, that's right. I did become a politician and I made that step into the discipline of party politics.

Garrett, currently Minister for the Environment, Arts and Heritage, is — and I didn't know this — the second-oldest member of cabinet, which is a disorienting thought. And how he has ever been able to make it through the song Beds Are Burning, given his personal history, boggles the mind.

O'Donovan on compromise

You gave a fairly prominent place to compromise in this evening's lecture—twinned together, I thought very helpfully, with ideals. On my reading, compromise enjoys a dreadful reputation in the Christian community at the moment. And you're also emphasising the need to act together, or with one mind—whereas I picture myself in a room with my brothers and sisters, recommending some course of action, that could be described as a compromise, let alone myself describing it as a compromise, and this seems like the political equivalent of suicide within the community. Are these just the times that we live in? Do you agree with that reading, or is there some way forward from this? Because, as I say, I think compromise has a very bad name, but I agree with you it's necessary, so ...

Thank you for that question, which is rather searching. I'm not sure that I can do more than kind of feel after an answer to it...

I think we distrust compromise because we associate it with a certain kind of temptation, which is a temptation to fall in with what everybody else is doing. To being conformed to this world, as St Paul puts it. That seems to me to be, as a phrase, perfect for summing up the nature of the bad compromise. [We are] rightly concerned about that: rightly on guard against any such concession, and of course, as we all know, it's ferociously easy, even for the most serious-minded of us, simply to fall in with the way other people do things, because it takes so much less effort, and our effort is being seriously required for other tasks ...

We fail to see ... as it were, the other kind of compromise, which perhaps ... perhaps it's a bad thing that we end up with the same word to describe two things, except when words are ambiguous, they warn us against certain very easy mistakes, and the fact that "compromise" is used both, as it were for the good [compromise, the] trying-to-focus-on-the-sheerly-practical-in-the-situation, the actually-bringing-into-shape of what it is that we really can do that will bear witness to God's command and to the object set before us, and [also for the bad compromise:] failing to do this because we fall in with everyone else, warns us that it's easy to mistake the one for the other, and it's easy to mistake the one for the other because discerning what is actually practicable is difficult. And we may think that because everybody disagrees with a course of action that we think right, therefore that course of action is not practicable. And that's one reason why the two types of compromise are so necessary to keep clear.

The question we have to ask is what is the best course of action that is actually available. And both sides of that equation have to be brought together. If we do that, and if we regularly did that, then compromise could lose its bad reputation perhaps.

This from Oliver O'Donovan's 2007 New College Lectures, Morally awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith, in response to my question.

[This (unpublished) excerpt from the question time at the lectures is reprinted with permission from New College: the college at all times retains ownership of the intellectual property rights to all New College Lecture material (in printed or electronic form). The lectures themselves are available in PDF and MP3 form at the College website for personal review and study, but may not be retransmitted without express permission.]

Getting some perspective: (2) On teasing

From a New York Times article written In Defense [sic] of Teasing:

Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools... And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke... The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a sulking child, children (as early as age 1) mimic nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest. In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.

And, he might have said, the most social.

A very important point about human nature and wholeness is being made here. I was saddened to read the letter in response that the NYT published; a letter that, despite itself, rather proves the point of the article. Extreme and abusive, or merely dysfunctional forms of teasing, are indeed harmful and potentially crippling to their victims. OK. Yes. We get it. (Some of us already know this from experience ... although it would be unwise to enter into a contest on credentials here.) And to ask the victims to have a sense of humour about the wider phenomenon, may be to ask too much.

But that is not the question. The question is what the public policy should be. And I take the point of the article that it is improper, hubristic, and vain to try to bring annihilating force to bear against an entire dimension of human interaction; especially one so embedded in our nature, and so constitutive of positive and healthy development ... so constitutive of mature life.

Those of us who have suffered in this matter may find it hard to hear this argument: it reopens old wounds; and, more subtly, it torments us with a vision of functional relating which (we may feel) is inaccessible to us, and which others have achieved, in a way that excluded us. But this is a hurt that we should address in conversation with our counsellors, our friends, and our priests --- not with support for some utopian project.

The argument is still correct.

Hope and compromise, or, On not making a better world (2)

... There are, as we have seen, two types of question a moral doctrine may answer: what are the goods we may know within the world? And, what goods are appropriate to forming the right ends-of-action here and now? The kingdom of God is among the answers to the first of these questions. God has shown us his ultimate purpose in Jesus Christ, and will bring in the Kingdom of his Son. But what I have to discern is the concrete thing that is given to me to do in the light of that hope. And when somebody invites me to join in creating a new world free of misunderstanding and suspicion – just sign the petition here! – I know that he or she is bleary-eyed with moral hyperventilation. “Not everything that should be done, should by us be done,” said Paul Ramsey, articulating a basic principle of discriminating action.

That remark, made back in the nineteen sixties, was originally addressed to the need for a responsible foreign policy on the part of the United States. This reminds us that the bad idealist is not always a dreamy and ineffective poet, but can be dangerous. If my bewitchment with an ideal is combined with a great deal of practical energy, the negativity of the ideal will be the hallmark all that I do. Of such mental stuff is ideological tyranny constructed. Ideals must be focussed into practical and concrete conceptions of how we may do good. If a sense of the negative is a precondition for imagination, a sense of the positive reality of God’s good providence is a precondition for turning imagination into action. I ought not to linger among the yawning absences, but press on to the reality of what God does, and makes available to me to do.

This raises in its turn the question of “compromise”. Compromises are the decisions, explicit or implicit, that render ideals practicable. We compromise when we discard certain aspirations as unrealisable – either absolutely or simply in the circumstances... As a model of good compromise we may take lawgiving, which is the fashioning of a community norm that enables a multitude to live together in a disciplined manner to the fullest extent it is collectively capable of... An idealistic law is a vicious law, that requires too much; it has not compromised sufficiently with the practicalities of conformity and enforcement. A demoralised law, on the other hand, has required too little; it has not exploited the ways in which law can help the multitude live better. The well-framed law follows the very difficult line on which sustained attempts to hold one another to what we ought to do are fruitful and effective.

But there can be bad compromises as well as bad ideals, and not every difficulty ought to put us off...

So Oliver O'Donovan, in the third of his 2007 New College Lectures titled “Morally awake? Admiration & resolution in the light of Christian faith.” All three of the lectures were excellent, and very much in O'Donovan's signature style: dense, thoughtful, eirenic, and grounded.

[This material is reprinted with permission from New College: the college at all times retains ownership of the intellectual property rights to all New College lectures material (in printed or electronic form). The lectures are available in PDF and MP3 form at the College website for personal review and study, but may not be retransmitted without express permission.]

Mal's speech, or, On not making a better world (1)

This report is maybe twelve years old? Parliament buried it, and it remained buried, until River dug it up. This is what they feared she knew. And they were right to fear. 'Cause there's a whole universe of folk who are going to know it too; they're going to see it.

Somebody has to speak for these people.

You all got on this boat for different reasons, but you've all come to the same place, so now I'm asking more of you than I have before --- maybe all. [Because] sure as I know anything, I know this: they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people ... better. And I do not hold to that.

So no more running. I aim to misbehave.

In the DVD commentary on Serenity, Joss Whedon describes this as Mal's “St Crispin's Day speech”, and it's instructive to compare it against the original. Much as I love both the speech and the film, the comparison is not entirely flattering.

Let us be clear: Whedon holds that schemes to change the human condition are doomed to fail, and that it is wicked to make the attempt; I do not want to complain about this. There was quite enough utopianism last century to last us for ... well ... some time. We are not free of its pull, and there is a certain tendency lurking around the so-called progressive strand in our society that cleaves to the idea that if only we could make this modification, this tweak, then everything would fundamentally change for the better. I am happy for someone in popular culture --- even better, given the topic, for someone in geek-cult culture --- to set up a stall in opposition to this.

But there is more to the speech than resolve against such overreaching folly. I spoke approvingly of Whedon's ethic in an earlier post, but it is not without its own self-indulgence. It is, of course, romantic, and in a wishful-thinking kind of way. Mal and the other Browncoats, the losing side in the War for Independence, are nothing if they are not the Confederacy: courtly, honourable, local, and resistant of the encroaching, homogenising, antiseptic modernism of their opponents. But the Independents are a fantasy of the Confederacy, defeated in an Honourable Cause without slavery or intransigence or any real wickedness of their own. (Cf. the Bajorans in DS9, who were contentious, superstitious, and caste-ridden, as well as being plucky and Unjustly Colonised.) This is having one's cake, and eating it, all at once.

The speech itself contains an indulgence more modern, and in its way more worrisome. Finally, it says, and reluctantly, I have been goaded into action by a decisive and indisputable evil: an evil with a conveniently vast and identifiable roll-call of victims. Now I can, and I should, act; and I will be justified in acting.

Am I wrong to see the image of a certain Western sensibility here? I mean the tendency, at once jaded and enthusiastic, that needs to label some evil as “genocide” before it can be seriously opposed; the demand that any worthy military effort must be assimilable to the fight against the National Socialist Party of Germany. There is a lot of this about, and it will not do: on the one hand, we did not know that the Nazis were going to perform genocide when we (rightly) chose to fight them; on the other hand, we (and I do mean we, i.e. including myself) have at least in the case of Iraq made war recklessly, while in the grip of the view that We Have To Do Something.

The calculus, in having recourse to violence, is just not this binary.