|
August 28, 2004
In the previous post Gaita had argued that the implication of the connection between truthfulness in politics and love for country is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. Gaita mentions the Aristotlean (and Marxist) dictum that the ethical requires completion by the political, without mentioning what that actually means.
He argues for a modification of this by considering a classical objection, that ethics and politics are in deep ways irreconcilable. He mentions Plato and Max Weber's 'Politics as Vocation' essay.
His argument modifies the Aristotlean dictum by acknowledging the need for politicians to have dirty hands. Gaita says that:
'Readiness to do evil when it is necessary to safeguard the conditions of political communality is, as Weber put it, the most salient aspect of the "ethic of responsibility" that defines a political vocation. But it defines it only when it is in genuine tension with what he called the "ethics of absolute ends."....Politicians must, as politicians, sometimes do what morally they must not do. That dilemma, soberly acknowledged, constitutes the misery and the dignity of a political vocation.'
Gaita says that a politics that fails to acknowledge that tension in political reality is suspect:
"Politics that avoids or subverts that tension declines into moralism of a kind that threatens the conditions of political communality, into reckless adventurism or into the ruthless pursuit of economic or strategic interests justified by appeal to necessity when none exists."
However, Gaita then makes another qualification.
He says that acknowledging the reality that politicians must sometimes lie if they are honourably to rise to the responsibilities of their calling "is a far cry from the cynical expectation that politicians will lie to protect their parties and even their careers."
That is fair enough. Then he makes a good point about our political language:
"Because our political language is now so debased, we think little of the difference between what belongs to the very nature of politics, and what, contingently if pervasively, politicians do. There is no good reason to think that our expectation that politicians will routinely lie to promote party and career is an insight into the nature of politics. It seems, to the contrary, to reveal incapacity to understand the possibilities in politics. Our cynicism is not so much a moral failing as it is the expression of how impoverished our life with the language of politics has become."
Gaita says that what often looks like a conflict between ethics and politics is more likely to be a conflict within ethics.
What this part of his argument is trying to do is to show that the flaw in someone who says that politics is always answerable to the ethical. His argument is that such a position :
"...is as dangerous to a sober sense of political responsibility as the belief that it is never answerable to the ethical. In their different ways, but just as surely, each undermines an understanding of the integrity of a politics that must rise to a lucid love of country. Most - perhaps all - loves stand in complex, sometimes tense, relations to ethics. Love of country is no exception."
And so we come back to the touchstone of love of country. It is this particular touchstone that many people on the left will have big problems with. Chris Sheils is one example. Chris says that:
"The essay gets off to an impossible start, imo, by standing on the notion of 'love of country'. Can you 'love a country', I immediately wonder? What is love? What do we mean by 'country'"?
Chris gives an answer in terms of 'belonging.'This can be developed in terms of belonging to a place that is our home which we care about.
Gaita says that from his love of country perspective, the common view, that the pervasive mendacity of the Howard Government does not seriously threaten the interests that politicians are elected to promote and protect, is a form of cynicism. It is cynicism that "expresses not not so much the abandonment of standards as the loss of key political concepts." Thus we come back to Don Watson's idea of the decay of public language. Gaita says that a sign of this conceptuual loss:
"A sign of the conceptual loss that I have been pointing to can be seen in the fact that in the universities, serious talk of a vocation gave way to talk of a profession and that in politics, talk of a vocation moved quickly past talk of a profession onto talk of a career. Perhaps that is why so many people accept that there is nothing in the very nature of politics, as there is in professions like law or medicine, for example, that should make politicians ashamed to lie as often as they seem to - ashamed, not just as human beings but as politicians. Few people believe that politicians who lie regularly disgrace their profession. The ethical standards of a profession do not only regulate the conduct of its practitioners, they define what it is to be a professional of this or that kind. Were they merely regulative rules, like the rules of the road, observance of them could not be a deep source of pride and satisfaction, so deep as to be partly constitutive of a person's identify."
He adds that our failure to see politics as more than a career is more than the effect of longstanding disillusionment with the conduct of politicians.
It is also about our historical memory that what were once standards constitutive of an honourable profession (and before that, a vocation) are now merely rules (considerably relaxed) that protect us from the low behaviour that we have come to expect of many politicians.
Hence the decay of our political language. Raymond Gaita says that he puts his point about the decay of political language (ie. a conceputal loss) because it would be misleading to say that we have ceased to believe in vocations. He says:
"We have not, for good or for bad reasons, come to believe that the concept of a profession is better suited to characterising the defining responsibilities (in both senses) of teaching, nursing, doctoring and so on. Rather, the concept has fallen away from us, or perhaps we from it. We see it only intermittently and dimly. Certain ways of speaking have gone dead on us."
What replaces this old way of speaking and acting (comporting) is the scripted and rehearsed language of political marketing.
|
|
