Political Despair and Moral Injunctions

I often make reference to despair in the course of discussing something else. So, today, I aim to write specifically on political despair and the role it plays in my thinking.

To start, we need to distinguish political despair from spiritual despair. The despair I’m talking about is specifically political. When I say that I am in despair and when I encourage other people to embrace despair, I am not encouraging people to adopt a negative attitude toward existence itself. This is not the despair one might associate with, e.g., Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard. I’m too much of a Platonist to go in for that sort of thing. What exists is flawed rather than empty. Every day I remain committed to try to perform my roles well - I try to be a good theorist, a good family member, a good friend. Political despair doesn’t involve giving up on any of these things. It therefore has no connection whatsoever with suicidality or even with negative affect as such. You can be energetic and even sanguine about many things while being in political despair.

Political despair is specifically despair about the possibility of having a political form of life. It involves a recognition that one is not living politically and that one is not likely to lead a political life. This is not merely to say that I am not running for office or joining a political party - it is also to acknowledge the non-political character of many activities I have engaged in that, at one time or another, seemed to me as if they might be political. For instance, I used to think that I was a political writer or that my podcasting was political. Other people think they engage in politics when they vote, participate in demonstrations, or join organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America. I don’t think any of these behaviors are properly political. But because these people think they are engaged in political activity, they are not with me in political despair. In my view, they are not leading political lives, but they think that they are. They remain hopeful about the consequences of these activities, or they are afraid that if they don’t engage in these activities, someone else will succeed in coercing them or people they know.

Politics, for me, involves the management of intractable disagreement. Intractable disagreement is not tractable, i.e., it is not dissolved by social discourse. Many people think that when they participate in social discourse, they are engaged in political action. They think if they try to persuade someone to do something, or they try to have a discussion with someone about some problem, that this is political activity. But, on my view, we don’t properly enter the terrain of the political until we acknowledge that our disagreement will not be resolved by these methods and resort to some further political process. That process produces a decision not by persuading everyone to come to a consensus, but by imposing a decision in the absence of consensus.

That’s not to say that persuasion doesn’t occur in politics. But the goal of the persuasion is not to produce consensus. Instead, the purpose of political persuasion is to legitimate the decision that was imposed. When someone says to you, “I don’t agree with decision X, so why should I abide by it?” you might attempt to show them that the decision does in fact align with their values. But the fact that a political decision was required in the first instance makes it unlikely that this will be effective in many cases. So, instead, you may resort to some further story about the procedure by which the decision was taken. Perhaps it was made through a fair procedure, or perhaps we have reason to think the decision-makers made the decision from a superior epistemic vantage point. Even these stories are not likely to be fully satisfying to someone who disidentifies with a decision, who feels alienated from the decision-making power. Such a person feels what Bernard Williams called “reasonable resentment.” Political decisions generate resentment and this resentment must then be managed, lest it produce disorder.

In this way, there is a difference between political persuasion and merely moral suasion. Moral suasion operates at the level of the social. It is insufficient in a political context. Once we recognize that we are talking about a political matter, we also recognize that we are talking about a matter on which merely moral suasion is unlikely to be effective. To take a decision and legitimate that decision in the face of intractable disagreement and the reasonable resentment that is its product requires a thoroughgoingly political type of persuasion.

It is possible that I conceptualize the political in this way because I live in what I take to be an embedded democracy (where authoritarian alternatives lack credibility) that is subject to deep pluralism (to the spread of intractable disagreements to ever more areas of life, including even epistemology). If I lived in a different time or place, where consensus appeared more readily attainable, I might not conceptualize the political in the way that I do. My concept of the political might really only be appropriate for the kind of place in which I live. Nevertheless, it is mine.

So, political despair is a despair about the possibility of taking decisions and legitimating them. Even though we live in a context in which intractable disagreement is increasingly pervasive, the political has become increasingly inaccessible. So even though more areas of life require the political now, this has not produced political capacities in people. People have instead become bad at taking and legitimating decisions. Indeed, people have become uncomfortable with the political and instead hope to do everything through moral suasion, i.e., through the social. Whenever anyone attempts to take a decision, they are treated as if they were a tyrant. To be political, in our time and place, seems to involve appearing tyrannical. This, for me, is a symptom of the chronic legitimacy crisis, a symptom of our creeping inability to generate and sustain high levels of legitimacy. Decisions are sometimes still taken, but political actors who take real decisions on important matters usually lose elections or are otherwise forced from office.

Nevertheless, people continue to issue moral injunctions. They attempt to motivate people to do things that those people cannot and will not do unless political decisions are taken to impose a context that produces the behavior. They do this by subjecting them to ad hoc social pressure, to blame and shame tactics. These social tactics do not work in situations that require the political. They presuppose a level of consensus that does not exist in what I take to be properly political situations. The primary effect of these social tactics is to worsen the conditions for social cooperation, increasing the need for the political. And, because people think these social techniques can solve political problems, an increase in the need for the political tends to produce an increase, instead, in the prevalence of counterproductive social pressure tactics.

Perhaps the most damaging moral injunction is the moral injunction to engage in superficially political behavior that does not generate a real political capacity. You’re told to vote, or to protest, or to join some pseudo-political club. But if you do these things, why do you do them? It’s not because there is good evidence, in most cases, that this behavior allows you to take or meaningfully influence decisions. Often, you do them because of ad hoc social pressure. People around you issue moral injunctions demanding you do these things, threatening you with shame or judgement if you don’t do them.

Political despair involves recognizing that in situations where there is intractable disagreement but no political capacity, moral injunctions are not effective. This includes the moral injunction to be political - if you cannot be political, then you cannot satisfy a moral injunction to be political. Political despair thereby liberates you from the burden of these moral injunctions.

It does not, of course, free you from morality as such. I feel deeply obligated by my love of the good to take up and perform to the best of my ability a host of social roles. But these roles are not usually political. When I make decisions with my family and friends, I rarely take decisions and then legitimate them. Instead, I operate on the basis that ad hoc cooperation is possible with them.

If I had children, I might make decisions that I would have to legitimate to them. There is a sense in which politics can occur within families, and there’s some possibility that my life might include that sort of thing. The family is an attractive structure in part because there’s some possibility of political action within it. But families are difficult to operate in no small part because the conditions for acting within the family are heavily shaped by the conditions in wider society - conditions which we increasingly lack the political capacity to shape.

To put it simply:

1. Most improvements in human behavior require a change in social conditions

2. Changing social conditions requires a political capacity (i.e., a capacity to take decisions about matters on which there is intractable disagreement)

3. The political capacity has sharply declined, making it extremely difficult to purposefully change social conditions.

4. Therefore, those changes to social conditions that do occur happen largely through impersonal systems from which we feel alienated (i.e., capitalism).

5. Therefore, improvements in human behavior occur rarely, often in a seemingly ephemeral or random way.

6. Therefore, moral injunctions demanding improvements in human behavior (including the demand that human beings develop political capacities that they presently lack) are futile and even counterproductive.

7. Therefore, we ought not to feel ourselves subject to such injunctions, including the moral injunction to be or to become political.

Freed from these injunctions, we can focus on the roles we are actually able to perform well. We don’t have to feel bad about ourselves or judge others for not being able to do things.

In these ways, political despair actually protects against spiritual despair. It prevents us from hating ourselves, others, or existence itself. Instead, it strengthens our fortitude, enabling us to persist in practicing the virtues in the areas of life where this practice remains meaningful.

Now, because I am a political theorist, I personally cannot stop paying attention to the possibility of politics. To perform my role well, I must continue to study and observe the ostensibly political units and keep a careful watch to see if political possibilities emerge in the future. Because I love political theory and have committed to it as a vocation, I am obliged to do this. It’s a bit like a marriage - in good times and bad, I must study the political. And while this love is difficult and requires many acts of devotion that yield nothing of pragmatic value for me, I do not intend to opt for divorce any time soon. But political despair is still helpful for me, because it frees me from any moral injunction to immediately politicize my work or to engage in any other forms of allegedly “political” behavior.

You, however, may not be this sort of politically musical person, the person for whom the political is a muse. Political despair can free you in a way that it cannot free me. If there’s something else you love, you are free to commit to that thing and pursue it.

Of course, the lack of political capacity haunts all of our projects. There are more and more areas of life bogged down by intractable disagreements on which decisions are needed but never taken. This makes all pursuits more difficult. But you can try, if you like, to do something else. And because you have a clearer sense of the limits imposed by our context, you are more likely to succeed, in so far as success remains possible in your chosen field.

Those are the two choices for people who are not in denial about the fundamental character of our situation:

1. The negative mood, in which you stay with me in political despair, abandoning the political while remaining bound to it.

2. The enclavist mood, in which you try to do something else, dealing with the limitations imposed by political incapacity.