Being a Politician

 I am trudging through today's reading instead of blitzing. The reading glasses do give me a bit of a headache. 

That said, I will try to do justice to James Vitali's Why do we get the wrong leaders? from Engelsberg Ideas. It might be better to just skip what I am about to write and follow the link to the original essay.

It seems to me, over here in the U.S., that Mr. Vitali only comes close to the real problem of judgment in public affairs in his last pragraph:

Providing the space for our political leaders to begin to address the great tasks before us requires that we put aside our cynicism about their profession. That we recognise that politics is purposeful and distinctive as a sphere of human activity in and of itself. That we appreciate again that being the man or women in the political arena can be a noble enterprise. Improving the quality of our political leadership will not come from disparaging their endeavour. Nor will the situation be remedied simply by importing more experts or people from different occupations. We need more politicians, not fewer.

We have the politicians who represent our judgment. 

 Vitali describes judgment this way:

No — the quality that our politicians are deficient in is something simultaneously more specific and more difficult to put your finger on. ‘We speak’, as Isaiah Berlin put it in his essay On Political Judgement, of,

an exceptional sensitiveness to certain kinds of fact; we resort to metaphors. We speak of some people as possessing antennae, as it were, that communicate to them the specific contours and texture of a particular political or social situation. We speak of the possession of a good political eye, or nose, or ear, of a political sense which love or ambition or hate may bring into play…

This political quality is not to be found in the substance of any particular value or conviction or body of knowledge, but rather in an attitude towards how all of these things should be weighed up in the process of decision-making. We call this quality judgement. And once you know that this is what makes for a good politician, you see it, or more precisely you see its absence, everywhere.

If the people do not have judgment, how can they select politicians with judgment? 

Vitali relies on Max Weber, the founder of sociology, where I would mention William James and pragmatism:

The problem, though, is that judgement is a rather difficult quality to get a grip on. It isn’t a prescription for specific decisions to be made in particular circumstances. In fact, it is almost the opposite of that. Judgement is a dispositional attribute; it refers to an attitude towards the taking of decisions in a context of imperfect information and uncertainty, when the best course of action cannot be known in advance.

For the sociologist Max Weber, judgement denoted the ability to weigh up and strike a balance between two divergent ethical imperatives: one, to follow one’s convictions; and the other, to take responsibility for the consequences of pursuing one’s convictions. Such an activity is moral, rather than scientific; there is no formula for how to get a ‘correct’ mix of conviction and responsibility in any particular decision. It is this uncertainty that distinguishes judgement from something like intelligence or ‘knowledge’. To make a judgement is to come to a decision without knowing whether it is the correct one, but to do so effectively, and responsibly.

This uncertainty was critical for Weber. And it was partly what characterised politics for him. In science or law or medicine, dilemmas might be soluble through the application of reason. We can have a degree of certainty about what is true and what is false in such fields. Yet what distinguished politics from other professions for Weber was the fact that he considered it a domain of human endeavour that cannot be straightforwardly understood in terms of truth and falsity. Politics in Weber’s mind is defined by the clashing of and compromising between various irreconcilable moral imperatives. It is a profession entirely unsuitable for those who cannot cope with such a lack of certitude.

Americans want that certitude that does not exist in this world. It seems to me that when jazz was king, we had a better handle on the need for improvisation. Yes, it is a silly idea to explain how we became a nation of thumb-sucking whining muddle-headed imbecilic spongers. 

The following led me to a conclusion:

The West faces great problems, and many of them are not straightforwardly about policy, but politics – about compromises between different and potentially irreducibly conflicting interests and values. Some of those problems – ageing societies, global immigration trends, the development of artificial intelligence –  are driven by factors that seem entirely out of the control of individual political leaders. But it is the condition of being a politician to take responsibility, rather than to leave things up to fate.

My conclusion: the condition of being a citizen in a democratic republic puts a responsibility to judge and compromise for the good of all.

sch 10/12