There's politics and then there's politics

When politics matters and when it doesn't

A friend texted after last week’s post to ask whether there might be a teensy bit of privilege in the argument I made there to ignore politics. What if your child or your identity or your well-being or your very survival is being actively threatened by political forces? Isn’t that, then, a good reason to be political?

And the answer is, of course, depending on how you define politics.

Politics as Concern for Human Happiness vs. Politics as Blood Sport

When Aristotle said that politics was the architectonic science because it alone is concerned with human happiness and how to achieve it in communities made up of different kinds of human beings, he didn’t have in mind the kind of thing that passes for politics today. He had in mind a much broader definition of politics, one where humans come together in community to discuss the good, the just, the harmful and the unjust and how to create communities that provide all humans the chance to flourish.

If that’s your brand of politics, go for it! That happens to be my brand of politics, which is why I spend a lot of time thinking about politics every day but very little time reading the news or engaging in (too much) internet scrabbling.

So what kind of politics should we spend our time on, if we really care about making the world a better place?

There’s good politics, which is probably worth engaging in:
1) Conversations about values and ideas with people you know/respect/can influence.
2) Passionate lobbying and direct action on issues that you know a lot about and where the action that needs to be taken is clear and concrete (see below for more on this).
3) Working with or even participating in local governance to make your own corner of the world a better place.
4) Supporting organizations with good track records for initiating change, either through effective altruism or via legal challenges to terrible laws.
5) Voting with your feet by removing yourself and your resources from areas that have become too hard/dangerous to live in.

Then there’s bad politics, which is what most people probably waste most of their time on, thinking they’re doing something productive:
1) Getting involved in hyperpartisan/polarized blood feuds that masquerade as political campaigns
2) Doomscrolling, compulsively consuming media and/or engaging in conversations with random people on the internet that won’t go anywhere or accomplish anything.
3) Virtue-signalling about things instead of actually going out and doing them.

My Rules of Thumb for Engagement

Even knowing the difference between good and bad political activity, it’s not always easy to figure out when to engage and when to step back. After all, there’s still a lot of injustice in the world. Maybe we really do need to spend more time fighting it at a formal political level. But even then, you have to draw the line somewhere or you won’t sleep, eat, or do your real job. And there are times when activism can do more harm than good because the government is a blunt instrument for achieving social change and our best intentions often go horribly awry. And there’s still always the danger that you’ll become more tribal as you get more involved with politics, so narrowing your focus is a good way to ensure you don’t get sucked in.

Because of these concerns and maybe also because I’m lazy and inherently skeptical of government power, I tend toward a rear-guard interventionist strategy, where I intervene or spend time on politics primarily when I think government policies are actively harming people. As one example, I think our maternity care policies are terrible, so I’ve done some public writing and some state-level lobbying to try to change those regulations. Those were pretty targeted interventions, aimed at a set of specific policies that I happen to know a lot about that are causing concrete and demonstrable harm. That’s probably a pretty good litmus test for when your political activism might have an effect.

I’m much more cautious about lobbying the government to intervene in order to rectify some complex social problem like poverty or discrimination because the government’s track record of solving these issues is…. not good, to put it mildly. The proposed solutions to these problems also tend to be ideological in nature, which makes them both less likely to be actual solutions and more likely to thrust us back into the arms of the hyperpartisan Scylla of modern politics.

At any rate, the goal of radical moderation is not to disengage. I wouldn’t spend a lot of my free time trying to make the world a more radically moderate place if I didn’t care about improving everyone’s 4D landscape. Pulling people out of pits is perhaps the most important work we can do and everyone should find their own way of contributing to that effort. But trusting politicians and formal political processes to do that work or spending our own precious resources of time and money on formal politicking is probably the worst way to do it, not only in terms of real, measurable outcomes, but also in terms of your mental health.

In the end, if we really focus on finding ways to get people out of pits that actually work in real life, we’ll be depoliticizing our lives at the same time as we help other people lead better ones. Win-win!

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