Nothing is apolitical, but politics is not everything
Whatever hot-button topic is being discussed by the Vocal Minority this week, a common refrain is guaranteed to be heard at some point. “Keep politics out of it” and “I’m not political but I believe in such and such” are just two of the most common versions of this chorus. But how true is it?
Of course, some people simply lie. Masking their internal biases with intellectual arguments is a common form of deception that is entirely unremarkable. There is no mystery to it, nor does it reveal anything new about people, events, or ideas. It is also delusional to interpret every banal action as a political statement. People do not consider politics when choosing what brand of toothpaste to buy.
So, while its influence is less than total, it is far more than you would think.
Here is a far more interesting proposition: people, events, and ideas are not completely apolitical, because they cannot be. One of the most pervasive myths of our time is that things like scientific discoveries and new technologies (which have the potential to significantly impact society, not always for the better) can be free of politics.
It is like the quote from Sophocles: “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” In the same spirit, here is my slightly modified version of the quote:
No great change can occur in human society without being subject to politics.
By selecting liberal democracy as the standard model and science (or reason, logic, empiricism, etc.) as its guiding principle, we are faced with a contradiction. A citizen may exercise political power, usually expressed as the right to vote, but will be discouraged or even prevented from politicizing other spheres of their lives.
However, while the average citizen may be dissuaded, three key areas that are supposedly off-limits or irrelevant remain powerful sources of political influence. The politics of identity, technology, and art have much to do with how the modern world works.
The Politics of Identity
Identity is easily the oldest of the three. Its politicization goes back into the mists of prehistory. People disagree with each other about whether or not that is a good thing, but it is a rather obvious fact. What is less obvious is how that identity is forged in the modern age.
Throughout most of history, people did not have to think about their own identity. It was embedded into their very existence. You were born into a family that belonged to a community and shared a belief system, which defined you for the rest of your life. This is still how many members of the human race still define themselves. However, the modern post-industrial age has been tugging away at these old threads of identity, wearing them thin in many places. Modernity teaches us that identity is not something to be inherited, but to be forged.
In certain ways, this is an uplifting message. If identities can be created, people no longer need to be burdened by the words and actions of past generations. Instead, they can choose to be defined by their own words and actions. The problem is that hardly any individual person can come up with anything resembling a belief system, let alone a complete identity. Therefore, new communities must be formed to foster new identities.
The creation, organization and preservation of a community cannot occur without politics in some shape or form. A small, tightly-knit community can practice true egalitarian democracy. Weaker communities that share a shallower sense of identity are likely to collapse into dictatorships and oligarchies. Perhaps the worst of all are the hyper-capitalistic religions that group people based on consumption of goods and services. As people identify with increasingly vapid ideas and objects, it becomes easier to gain power over them without drawing too much attention to its political nature.
Traditional identities are rooted in the past, emphasizing the continuity of history. Modern identities are almost invariably future-facing, often touting themselves as rebellions against the past. Both can be politicized, but they are not equally stable or sustainable. Traditionalists can rest assured that their place in the world is set in stone, even though future generations may be at risk of losing it. Meanwhile, modernists must protect their identity through constant vigilance.
Vegans, at least those of them who think of their dietary choices as part of who they are, feel the need to justify their veganism, using scientific and moral reasons. Those who are vegetarians by tradition feel no such need. Their diet is a consequence of their traditional identity, not the origin of it. Nationalism fuels the rise of nation states that see themselves as the product of ideals embodied by certain people in certain (relatively recent) historical event. This is not the same as ethnic or religious traditions, where ideals and practices are passed on without much explanation, where people and events, however venerable and exalted, are merely players on the grand stage created by something much greater.
If you were a political schemer, what type of identity would you choose for manipulation? Hint: It is easier to control things that people can see than to influence things they must take for granted.
The Politics of Technology
Technology is often treated as ethically and politically neutral. We are given to understand that it is just a tool, the good or evil that comes from it depends entirely on the wielder. However, as information technology invades more and more of our lives, we have come to suspect that this may not be the whole truth.
The important question is: what does a technology enable or disable? A tool cannot fundamentally alter human nature, but it can influence decisions, by making certain actions more costly and removing consequences from others. If this influence is exerted continuously over enough people, it will inevitably shape political outcomes.
Agriculture brought us together, for better or worse
Let us consider a relatively old example. Hunter-gatherer tribes that have survived into modern times are sometimes cited as examples of benevolent, cooperative societies free of contemporary problems such as struggles for political power and conflicts arising out of property ownership. The truth is that these tribes, and their prehistoric ancestors, did not encounter these problems because they never became settled societies with food production (agriculture and animal domestication).
The concept of property ownership only makes sense in a settled society. Hunter-gatherers are almost always nomadic because, unless they are extremely lucky, they cannot realistically expect their environment to provide a steady supply of animals to hunt and berries to pick. In the natural world, food supply changes due to seasonal variations within a year and longer environmental trends over multiple years.
Food production allowed humans to form permanent settlements, where their numbers would grow too large to be governed effectively by everyone sitting around a campfire. It allowed them to produce enough food to feed armies, artisans, bureaucrats, and kings. This was a profound change for the prehistoric societies, which had been accustomed to a kind of forced egalitarianism made possible by technological limitations. How exactly would a hunter-gatherer become wealthy? Even a so-called “big man” would not be able to build up a significant stockpile of food, nor would his tribe have much incentive to obey his orders. Settled societies gave rise to hierarchies, which are the source of much misery and frustration in modern political structures.
Despite this radical transformation of society as a whole, it did not create a very strong relationship between rulers and subject. The vast majority of people went from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled farmers who paid tribute to whoever happened to occupy the seat of power. The rulers and their proxies, as long as their tributes were paid, did not generally involve themselves in the lives of their subjects, unless called upon to resolve conflicts. Technologies such as agriculture, metallurgy, and writing could be used by small communities without relying on giant infrastructures and centralized government. However, the Industrial Age put an end to that.
The industrial age turned society into a machine
The rise of machines, followed closely by mass communication, was really what kick-started the invasion of technology into our daily lives. Th span of years between the steam engine and the television was quite short compared to the rest of history, but they brought about the most profound change in our political reality in the previous hundred centuries, since the start of agriculture and animal domestication. It went further, however, by transforming the relationship between rulers and subjects.
Food production, although “unnatural” in the sense that it is man-made, still followed the rhythms of nature. But factories must follow clocks, machines must be well-oiled, and trains must run on schedules. Efficiency and scale were the driving objectives of the Industrial Age, so small-scale technologies were no longer enough. Large-scale technologies became highly sought after and attracted huge investment. Because of their dependence on mobilization and organization of a great number of people en masse, their consequences went beyond economics and spilled over into politics.
Roads, railways, telegraph wires, and radio waves connect people, not always to their advantage. Mass industrialization created new opportunities for those with the reins of political and economic power to control minute details of our daily lives, which was previously unthinkable. We have a mental image of pre-modern rulers as despots with absolute power, but they could only exert that power on a fraction of their subjects at a time. They had no way to monitor and control a large number of people spread over vast distances, nor did their subjects have any incentive to submit such attempted measures. Advances in transportation and communication changed all that. The time needed to travel and send messages were both dramatically reduced, removing the physical and temporal barriers for rulers. As the agrarian economy was transformed into an industrial one, an increasing number of people migrated from rural to urban areas in search of factory jobs that paid wages, instead of striking out on their own as farmers with an uncertain future.
The upshot of this whole transition was that, as the reins of political and economic power became more intertwined, so did the state apparatus and the life of the average citizen. The technologies that power industrialized societies cannot be sustained without large-scale social organization which, in turn, can only be achieved by tying the population more closely with the state. Hierarchies had existed since humans began to settle down in large numbers, but now they had a purpose beyond resolving conflicts, extracting tributes, and making war. As the machines multiplied and became ever more pervasive and relevant, so did the bureaucracy that sustained and oversaw them.
The brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla had a vision of freeing people from manual labor. “No more will men be slaves to hard tasks. My motor will set them free, it will do the work of the world,” he remarked to a friend. However, his alternating current motor, along with other inventions in the Industrial Age, enabled the rise of a new form of labor: paperwork.
Information technology is the bureaucrat’s fantasy
In Utopia of Rules, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber wonders why we don’t have flying cars yet. He believes that our technological development has been heavily skewed towards a single direction, by design, at the expense of flying cars and many other inventions dreamed up by science fiction writers in the early twentieth century. Graeber suggests that the meteoric rise of information technology is, at least partially, a result of its usefulness to bureaucrats.
There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment in technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control
We have been trained to think of bureaucracy as politically neutral. But is there anything more deeply political than labor discipline and social control? Even if Graeber is wrong in his cynical view of the computer revolution, the fact remains that information technology has become pervasive enough to impact not only the public stage, but also the privacy of our homes and, possibly, even our own minds.
Those who are still in denial (or perhaps, willfully blind due to conflicts of interest) about its political power should probably look at how social media has been co-opted by groups around the world as a tool for propaganda and misinformation. However, it goes much deeper than that. Politics is ultimately about who holds power. We live in a world where information has become increasingly synonymous with power, so it is little wonder that the wielders of information are gaining more and more control of the society at large. With the constant impetus behind artificial intelligence, regardless of whatever else that may lead to, we have achieved an automated surveillance and decision-making system so detailed that it defies the wildest dreams of the most despotic ruler.
So, while you may not be thinking about politics when buying toothpaste, there is always an entity (possibly not human) thinking about you and trying to influence your choice. Is it too difficult to imagine the same entity reaching into other areas of your life, such as who you vote for, what your beliefs are, and how you identify yourself? Is it reasonable to expect such a thing to be politically neutral?
The Politics of Art
Art (or more broadly, culture) is the last refuge of those looking for something to believe in after being frustrated by divine religions, political ideologies, or just the general lack of either in their lives. Some have an almost religious devotion for it. The absence of divisive political and social issues has been part of the attraction, but that has become harder to sustain as artists reveal themselves to be human beings with opinions. However, neither artists nor art itself are to blame for its politicization. As with identity and technology, it is a consequence of our relationship to it, which has changed over time.
The role art plays in the lives of the average person now is different from the pre-industrial age, especially since the inception of mass communication. Artistic expression became much more commonplace (at least among people outside the upper echelons of society) as the means to spread it far and wide became more prevalent, taking on additional functions that were hitherto impossible or improbable. It became a force to be reckoned with, binding us in harmony and discord, becoming a rallying point for a large cross-section of society, allowing a handful of talented artists to become the dominant voice. Like technology, scaling it up transformed its nature.
How we consume art has also changed. This is partly because of the medium, but also due to our habits and expectations. We expect art to be entertaining, to be produced either by highly-skilled specialists for a passive audience (eg. feature films) or less capable but more engaging generalists for a distracted, restless audience (eg. social media).Professional artists exist to cater to our need for regular entertainment. The intentional and institutional use of art for entertainment is not so different from factories that manufacture physical products. Conversely, this means that professional artists are subject to the same incentives as any salaried worker and similarly constrained in their career choices.
With this altered role and dissemination method, the intersection with politics was inevitable. I have always held the view that art can only reflect what is going on in the world at large and never be the cause of any changes, but there are plenty of people who seem to believe otherwise. They think that art, though apparently useless, can be a vehicle for spreading propaganda and influencing behavior. How effective it is in reality is beside the point. Their sincere belief in its power and their own righteousness (or cynicism) is enough to make it politically significant. Politics is not just about actual power but also the perception of who and what has power.
Conventional politics is an empty ritual
Personally, I have never been much interested in conventional discussions of politics, because they focus too much on people and events. Some of the dullest topics of conversation include which person or party came to power, what policies they enacted, what role they played in a great historical event, and explanations of their success or failure (especially those that make it seem inevitable). I am a strong disbeliever of the right side of history, a concept invoked by incumbents to legitimize their rise to power. I am far more interested in systems and trends that connect our daily lives to greater changes in society, such as how we define wealth and factors that explain our political and social reality.
Politics is mainly for slaves and kings. A slave yearns to have some control over his fate. A king aims to keep the reins of power. Those that are neither slaves nor kings should be aware of the political reality and exercise their rights, but they should not expect it to make a difference. Unlike the slaves, they have too much to lose. Unlike the kings, they lack actual power. They will not risk going too far outside the system to make a difference, nor will they be able to bend the system to their own will. For these people, the main instrument of political expression is what they do in their individual lives and how they contribute to the communities they are part of.
This is not defeatism. It is simply an acknowledgement of how human beings operate, as summed up by this timeless quote from Confucius:
The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.