Introduction
INTRODUCTION:
THE IMPORTANCE OF UNIMPORTANCE
Paul F. deLespinasse
"When men write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make others so?
-Thomas Hobbes
The central thesis of this book is that politics is not a fundamentally important part of human life. Unless we dismiss the great masses of mankind as fools, substantial support for this thesis can be seen everywhere. Political apathy is rampant throughout the world, but most obviously in those countries where relatively high levels of individual liberty make it possible for people most fully to follow their personal inclinations. Even voting, which is surely not an intense form of political participation, does not easily arouse the interest of the great masses; it takes a Soviet-style election to turn out 99% of the eligible voters, while even the combined hilarity and seriousness of an American presidential campaign is hard put to bring 60% of those who have bothered to register to the polls. Political apathy is reflected in the feeling of boredom found among a high percentage of high school and college students of government and is also shown in polls which report a high degree of public ignorance about political institutions, current issues, and leaders.
Most political scientists and many politicians have a bias which makes it difficult for them fully to appreciate the extent of public apathy and almost impossible for them to understand its implications. These people are active in their professions precisely because they think politics is fundamentally important; if they did not think so, they would probably have gone into some other line of work. Since we understand other people by understanding ourselves, it is only natural for such men to try to interpret what they see going on as an indication that other people feel the same way. And there are so many alternative ways of interpreting most actions that it is usually possible to find one that is compatible with a belief that politics is a fundamentally important part of life. Non-voting, for example, may be seen as a sign of alienation from the existing order of things rather than as a reflection of a basic lack of interest in politics. Of course it may well be that alienation does account for some non-voting; pushed to extremes, however, it and things like it may be used to account for all non-voting, thus allowing the possibility of enlightened apathy to be completely disregarded.
Even those political scientists who perceive and comment on the lack of interest in politics almost invariably lament the fact. Diverging radically from the prevailing climate of opinion, this book will maintain that politics not only is widely regarded as not being a fundamentally important part of human life, but that the large numbers of people who think this way are correct.
Even a subject that is not fundamentally important may be worth serious study. This present thesis has a double significance for those who want to learn something about politics. In the first place the student who regards politics as a fundamentally important part of life is compounding the difficulties of arriving at a clear understanding of the way things really work. Instead of explaining facts such as apathy, ignorance, and non-voting, he will have to explain away facts. Worse still, he who exaggerates the importance of politics will find it almost (but not completely) impossible to face some of the most important facts squarely in the first place, because many political facts are so nasty that a person who is emotionally overwhelmed by the subject just cannot stand to think about them. Failure to face up to these nasty facts may lead the student to fall back on fairy tales and "civics book" thinking. But it is obvious that students should strive to see things as they really are.
In the second place, the present thesis is significant for students of politics because the student is (at least potentially) also a political actor. The political actor who exaggerates the importance of politics runs a serious risk of developing a badly distorted style of life, of becoming an extremist, of putting third things first, and-ultimately-of being a completely miserable person in several senses of the term. The one thing extremists of all persuasions-the John Bircher and the Maoist, for example-agree upon is that politics is of ultimate significance and that if the political order is bad or fails in some respect all is lost. As Mao has put it, "Not having a correct political outlook is like having no soul."[1] If the political order is defective, a decent life is regarded as absolutely impossible, and politics is seen as the road to personal salvation. Thus the totalitarian philosopher Marcuse characteristically charges that the current American political system "isolates the individual from the one dimension where he could ‘find himself' from his political existence, which is at the core of his entire existence."[2]
Such an orientation can be particularly catastrophic in the lives of people who, in spite of exaggerating the importance of politics, are intelligent enough fully to perceive the nastiness of politics. For if: 1) politics is fundamentally important (first premise); and 2) politics is also highly nasty (second premise); then 3) present political institutions must be totally unacceptable. It would be intolerable to think that the universe might be so flawed that a fundamentally important part of it could be inherently so nasty. As Jubal Harshaw says in Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger In A Strange Land, that would be "a hell of a way to run a universe."[3] If one accepts both premises, it does not take too many more assumptions before one is led quite logically to become a revolutionary. In spite of the vast amounts of evidence for the second premise, however, the revolutionary conclusion does not come anywhere nearly as easily if the first premise is untrue. The strong denunciation of revolution in the next to the last chapter of this book is therefore closely related to our rejection of the premise that politics is fundamentally important.
In addition to the temptations to exaggerate its importance, there are at least two other reasons why politics is a difficult subject to study: 1) it is extremely complex; and 2) it has a peculiar relationship to language.
Political science is not the easiest of modern academic disciplines. Any student who wants a relatively uncomplex, straightforward subject probably should forget about politics and devote his energies to nuclear physics, chemistry, or higher mathematics. Of course, the natural sciences involve extremely complicated concepts and relations, and present more than enough difficulties to the student. The argument that political science is more difficult to master properly is one which constitutes no insult to natural scientists. After all, it was Einstein who told us that "politics is far more complicated than physics."
The complexity of political science is largely a reflection of the outrageous complexities of the individual human personality and of the possible interactions among individuals. There are several billion people living on this planet, each one of whom the student of politics must consider to be a potential "variable." A huge number of facts can be ascertained about each of these people as individuals-for example age, occupation, religion, political affiliation. On top of this wide range of possible facts about individuals there is also a multitude of facts about the relationships between facts about different individuals-for example, correlations between party affiliation of children and parents. The political scientist thus has no difficulty in finding facts to record and analyze. Indeed, the embarrassment of riches is such that he hardly knows where to begin and can easily become confused. The ease of ignoring any undesired facts is also, of course, greatly increased; when there are plenty of other facts, it is easy for some to get lost in the shuffle.
The relationship between language and politics does not serve to minimize confusion, but indeed only aggravates matters. Politics, of course, is like many other subjects in that it is studied through the medium of words. A given word has no inherent meaning, and the same word is often used to refer to several different things. For both of these reasons words may not mean the same things to different people, and communications problems are therefore an inherent possibility. Likewise, a given individual may not employ a particular word consistently but may think or speak in a way which confuses two or more different meanings. To put it abstractly, of word B has two different meanings, and A = B (one meaning of the word), while C = B (the other meaning), then failure to keep the two separate meanings of B in mind (i.e. disregarding the index numbers) can lead to a false chain of reasoning: A = B, B = C, therefore A = C. Although these are problems which may afflict any subject studied with the aid of words, this does not make the task of the student of politics any easier.
Language is also a prominent part of politics. In this respect politics is quite different, say, from physics, in which students may talk to one another about the behavior of electrons but the electrons talk neither to one another nor to the students. The words of political actors are a substantial part of what students of politics study. This in itself would be bad enough even if political actors always spoke frankly, but things are further complicated by the fact that lying turns out to be a natural tendency of all political discourse. (This is one of the principal "nastinesses" that will be discussed in this book.) Thus the student must contend not only with the inherent difficulties of a complex subject and the inevitable problems posed by words as a means of thought and communication, but also with the deliberate efforts of political actors to confuse and deceive people.
The plan of attack in the following chapters is designed to minimize as far as possible the difficulties posed by the complexity of politics and its relations to language. The strategy has two main components.
First, the main focus, particularly in the first four chapters, will be on individuals. By putting individuals at the center of our attention we start from the semantically correct place-the low end of the "abstraction ladder"-and then work up to the higher abstractions pertaining to the more complex interactions among individuals that are normally the main interests of students of politics. We thus avoid the proliferation of uncontrolled high level abstractions at the heart of our line of reasoning. And simultaneously we allow for a maximum amount of empathy by the reader, who is also an individual and knows what it is like to be one.
Second, the thesis will be developed with the aid of a very few basic concepts or, in several cases, pairs of concepts. The fewness of our basic concepts has two main advantages: 1) it allows for relative simplicity since there is not an infinite number of possible relationships among such a small number of entities; and 2) it allows us to establish with relatively high precision the way the words associated with the basic concepts are being employed.
Both of these aspects of our strategy seek to avoid confusion without paying too high a price for the avoidance. Of course there is much to be said for an honest confusion, a willingness to admit that one's grasp of a subject is inadequate, that all of the answers are not presently available. But much of the confusion which prevails in political thinking is a "dishonest" confusion. It is dishonest not in the sense of a lack of intellectual integrity but in the sense that one is not aware that he is confused when he thinks about the subject matter. This is not, of course, to say that total confusion prevails. Nobody is perfect! The typical pattern of thought about politics is a mixture of sense and nonsense-often intimately related. If we can safely assume: 1) that a certain amount of confusion in thinking about politics is inevitable, and 2) that the less confusion the better, then we are logically compelled to accept as an operational principle a third proposition, 3) that awareness of confusion is good.
Awareness of confusion is good because it motivates us to seek to straighten out our thinking. But awareness of confusion has its dangers, for it may encourage us to pursue clarity at the expense of more important qualities. For example, since World War II the literature of political science has witnessed a rather dramatic decrease in confusion as a result of the rage for "behavioral" studies. Unfortunately, as this literature has become less confused it has also become less relevant to any of the major problems confronting humanity. Clarity has been achieved more by concentrating on sophisticated approaches to superficial problems than by any general qualitative improvement in the thinking that has been going on. It is not difficult to avoid confusion if you are "counting manhole covers," but it is next to impossible to maintain that what you are doing is a matter of cosmic significance. To be sure, it can be argued that the scientist must be content with understanding something, while the effort to understand everything is left to philosophers, but this is not the same thing as saying that the scientist should be content with understanding any old thing.
It would seem, then, that the political scientist should strive simultaneously to minimize confusion and to maximize relevance, or at least to arrive at some optimal accommodation between the requirements of these two values. Recent experience seems to indicate, however, that while such an approach is desirable, it is not by itself adequate. The present world is well-supplied with doctrinaire analyses of politics (whether or not claiming to be "scientific"-a word which has increasingly taken on an honorific rather than a descriptive function), which are neither highly confused nor particularly irrelevant and which are nevertheless highly unsatisfactory.
The doctrinaire thinker tends to push plausible assumptions to "logical" but empirically disprovable conclusions, and then to make matters worse by refusing to accept any evidence which might be incompatible with his analysis. And he tries to stuff too much raw reality into too few conceptual categories, which again may result in a temptation to doctor the facts to fit the framework of analysis. However if-as unfortunately appears to be the case-it is necessary to choose between being confused, being irrelevant, or being doctrinaire in thinking about politics, the best approach may well be to try to be a sophisticated doctrinaire. Neither confusion nor irrelevance has much to be said for it, but two aspects of the doctrinaire's approach represent a potentially very practical way of dealing with the complicated subject matter of politics. Assuming employment of valid logic, pushing plausible assumptions to their logical conclusions may reveal whether the assumptions are not merely plausible but also true, or whether they are true if slightly modified or true within certain limits, or whether they are plausible but false. The attempt to discuss complex reality with only a few key concepts forces us to try to figure out which elements of the many things we observe are the most significant. If it is possible to divorce these useful practices of the doctrinaire from his normal refusal to be bothered by observed facts and from his tendency to doctor the facts to fit his analytical framework rather than to modify the framework to fit the facts more closely, then it may be possible to think with greater than customary clarity about political matters of considerable (though never fundamental!) significance.
This book presents a conceptual framework, admittedly somewhat doctrinaire, with the aid of which it is hoped the reader may be able to perceive events in a connected fashion and to evaluate their relative significance. The book is not intended to provide the reader with an ultimate framework, however, but rather with one that is better than nothing for use until improvements or a different framework can be found. The framework is only a point of departure, and different readers who pursue its implications may well arrive at quite distinct destinations.
This book is based on seven lectures presented to my introductory political science class at Adrian College several years ago. The material was converted to written form primarily for use by my students, and secondarily as a means of inviting criticism and suggestions from students and from cohorts at Adrian and elsewhere. The present version has been greatly influenced by subsequent discussions, but I can still make no claim that the job is done. As indicated earlier, I think most writing about politics is a mixture of sense and nonsense, but this is not very profound; the real trick is to determine which is which in a particular work. Although I have tried to make the ratio of sense to nonsense as high as possible in this book, the reader must presume that it is no exception to the general rule, and I solicit his comments as to just what is nonsense and how it might be separated from the sense without destroying thereby the latter.
P.F. deLespinasse
Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 17, 1970
[1] "We see things only in terms of our training and interests. If our interests are limited, we see extremely little; a man looking for cigarette butts in the street sees little else of the world passing by. Furthermore, as everyone knows, when we travel, meeting interesting people, or have adventures before we are old enough to appreciate such experiences, we often feel that we might just as well not have had them. Experience itself is an extremely imperfect teacher. Experience does not tell us what it is we are experiencing. Things simply happen. And if we do not know what to look for in our experience, the happenings often have no significance to us whatever." S.I. Hayakawa, Language In Thought And Action (New York, 1963), p. 327.
[2] It is by no means certain that we have treated him justly merely because there is a logical relationship between what a person does and what we do to him. Thus when Hitler or Stalin murdered people who opposed them, there certainly was a logical relationship between the behavior of the victim and his fate, but this could hardly be called justice.
[3] Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York, 1960), pp. 20-21.