Politics has shrunk
What would it take to make it big again?
If you look back and forth from our predicament to our politics, it’s hard to escape the feeling that our predicament is big and our politics is small.
So much of our politics is about change within the system. Yet our biggest social problems seem to relate to the loss of something more profound. If we’re going to heal our troubled society, it feels like we need not technocratic tweaks but something bigger — a rekindling of our political imagination and a debate about what it takes to live well.
One book I’ve found illuminating on this front is Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (1968). It explains how politics got small in the first place and it helps us understand what ‘big politics’ means.
So I thought I’d share an insight from the book on how politics shrunk and three reflections on what it could mean to make politics big again.
How politics got smaller
The subtitle of Roszak’s book is Reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition. It starts in this vein as an ethnography of the 1960s countercultural movement but soon fractures into a series of essays on countercultural figureheads like Allen Ginsberg, Alan Watts, and Paul Goodman (a major shortcoming of the book is that it is inexcusably male-centric throughout). It culminates in a stunning chapter on the limitations of the scientific worldview.
Roszak’s focus is the rise of technocracy, which he sees as a process in which government becomes all about spreading a logic of efficiency and rationality to the exclusion of other ways of seeing the world.
Roszak pictures technocracy as a process that extends the “meticulous systematisation” of Adam Smith’s pin factory to all types of social problem and ultimately to every domain of our lives. He doesn’t deny that we gain a lot from the spread of technocratic methods — they enhance our capacity to solve certain types of problems together. But he thinks we also lose something profound.
That’s because there’s a hidden premise in the rise of technocracy. Namely that the most important aspects of our lives — and the most important social problems — are technically specifiable and subject to technical solutions. Because of this premise, we end up reducing politics to problem-solving on a mental model of diagnosis, prescription, and cure. Or, maybe more accurately, we treat all social problems like mechanical problems, and we bring engineering-style solutions to bear.
Roszak shows us two examples of this technocratic mindset in action, starting with John F. Kennedy’s Yale commencement speech in 1962:
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need are not labels and cliches but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead. I am suggesting that the problems of fiscal and monetary policy in the Sixties as opposed to the kinds of problems we faced in the Thirties demand subtle challenges for which technical answers — not political answers — must be provided.
John F. Kennedy, speech at the Yale Commencement (1962), New York Times, June 12, 1962, p. 20.
The second quote is from Robert McNarmara, United States Secretary of Defense, writing in 1968:
Some critics today worry that our democratic, free societies are becoming overmanaged. I would argue that the opposite is true. As paradoxical as it may sound, the real threat to democracy comes, not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement. To undermanage reality is not to keep free. It is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. That force may be unbridled emotion; it may be greed; it may be aggressiveness; it may be hatred; it may be ignorance; it may be inertia; it may be anything other than reason. But whatever it is, if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential.
Robert McNarmara, The Essence of Security (1968), p.109–110
Aside from the dumb gendered language, what’s striking about these quotes is the way they turn politics into management. They exemplify the idea that by the second half of the 20th century all the really big conflicts had been solved, and all that was left was to tweak parameter values, ensuring the smooth running of the machine.
Roszak’s point in all of this is not that technocracy fails to deliver, but that technocracy does deliver — on its own terms.
The problem lies in the way technocracy defines those terms, which involves, for Roszak, a tragedy of diminished aspirations. He argues that technocratic forms of government serve: “to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with”. And then — to be fair — technocracy delivers on that diminished promise.
This all takes us to the question of how we can stop politics from getting so small — we need to resist the levelling down. This means insisting that we retain a politics in pursuit of higher, more human aspirations. And this, in turn, is what brings Roszak to his closing attack on the scientific worldview, which he sees as the root issue. He argues for the vitality of other ways of seeing the world, from the transcendance and communion of religion to the visionary splendour of poetry and art.
So where does all of this leave us? If politics got smaller in the 20th century, what would it mean to make it big again in the 21st? Three quick reflections.
1. Levelling down
I like Roszak’s observation that technocracy involves a ‘levelling down’ of problems. Having worked in public policy for well over a decade, it rings true to me that we tend to take rich human problems and translate them into problems we can specify and therefore solve with technocratic solutions, losing much of the original point.
What I don’t buy is the conspiratorial undertone of this writing, which is also present in other writers like Jaques Ellul. This is the idea that we level down because a daft or inhumane band of technocrats either just don’t get it or are intent on stripping out all that is human.
It seems to me the truth is more interesting than this, namely that most people — including most people who work in highly technocratic institutions — actually don’t think that all our social problems can be specified in technical terms. Yet the system has this tendency anyway.
To me this feels more like unintended drift than conspiracy. Or maybe, less naively, it’s the drift that happens in a world that is dominated by a homogenous class of people — men with an analytical worldview.
When this way of thinking dominates our systems of government, we end up building institutions that only speak a language of technique. And you can see how, over time, we therefore end up making progress on technically-specifiable problems (e.g. unemployment) and less progress on problems that don’t submit to a language of technique (e.g. issues like loneliness or belonging). In fact we might even find ourselves confused by a paradox — making progress on issues like unemployment even as we go backwards on issues like loneliness or belonging.
I find the process by which this all happens really interesting, and I don’t think writers like Roszak are curious enough about how it works.
To give a specific example of how this process plays out, think of the way economics — and a highly ‘technical’ flavour of economics at that — has come to dominate public policy, crowding out the richness of disciplines like design, sociology, history, or philosophy.
This didn’t happen because of a conspiracy of evil economists, and not even really because economists felt they had a monopoly on wisdom (although there is some of that going on). It happened mainly because economics is very good — and better than those other disciplines — at giving us practicable tools (models, concepts, techniques). Tools that are useful and scalable partly because they work to the same gauge or logic as the bureaucracy itself, and so run smoothly along its tracks, unlike the tools of design or sociology.
As a result, somewhat by accident we’ve ended up over-applying the tools or mindsets of economics and under-applying the tools or mindsets of these other disciplines.
For me this raises quite a productive set of questions about how we could redesign our institutions to be more conducive or friendly to a richer set of methodologies and mindsets — ones that might help us to retain more of the humanity of social problems.
For example, here’s a thought experiment: what would the state look like if its dominant discipline wasn’t economics but design, and if it also worked to a design-friendly language and logic? And might a state like this be better at healing social wounds like loneliness or the absence of a sense of belonging?
2. Governing in poetry
Another theme of Roszak’s argument is that technique is totalising. Meaning that, over time, the non-technical domains of our lives get squeezed out. He’s thinking here of domains that don’t ‘speak a language of technique’ but a language of intuition, or spirituality, or human relation. Domains like religion, for example, or the family. Or more general modes of being, like the role of felt experience, or the feeling of being immersed in nature, or the role ritual plays in our lives.
Meanwhile, to the extent that these domains aren’t diminished or crowded out, they’re invaded by technique. So, for example, when rituals survive — like Christmas, or Sunday afternoons — we end up commoditising them or expressing them in a technical language of optimisation (‘5 ways to make the most of your Sunday afternoon’).
Think similarly of how dating app algorithms have made us shift away from talking about new relationships in an intuitive language of ‘sparks’ and passion to talking in a technical language of swiping and matching.
What does this all have to do with politics? It’s relevant because of how, in the late 20th century, politically rightwing parties came to be seen as the defenders of the non-technical domains of life, from religion to the family, while the left came to be seen as a technocratic movement — focusing on themes like globalisation and income distributions.
Because of this trend, the left became became an unwitting collaborator in the extension of technique (which in the long-run of history is quite an odd outcome). But the left also lost out politically because people — sometimes consciously, and sometimes unconsciously — mourn the loss of the non-technical aspects of life, and feel drawn to the warm glow of rightwing parties that can speak — to borrow Roszak’s phrase — a ‘non-intellective’ language. Namely a language of intuition or feeling, whether those feelings are ones like belonging and control, or anger and hate.
This all takes me to a question I’ve asked before: how could the left learn to govern in poetry, not prose? Or, rather, how could the left re-learn to govern in these less technocratic ways?
‘Re-learn’ because this is really about remembering that progressives used to conceive of their project in more expansive ways — before the narrowing that took place in the late 1900s. At which point leftwing thought came freshly under the influence of utilitarianism and a shallow/materialist reading of the philosophy of John Rawls (e.g. consider how the left has narrowed its conception of equality).
(A side note on this: I’m often struck that people on the left spend a lot of time complaining about ideological triangulation — the way the centre-left struck a compromise with economic liberalism in the 1990s. But they spend much less time talking about what, for me, is the bigger story and the more significant sacrifice of ground. Namely the way the left levelled down by retreating into a cold language of technique, and in the process ceded a swathe of territory about feeling and belonging.)
Anyway, the point politically is that no-one outside of Westminster think tanks gets steamed up about the Gini coefficient or the distribution of equivalised household income. So maybe another way to make politics big again is for the left to remember that its goals aren’t ultimately technocratic in nature. i.e. the progressive project isn’t ultimately about optimising the allocative efficiency of the system. It’s about emancipation — building a world in which people can be themselves and live big lives, partly by keeping alternate possibilities alive.
3. Consciousness
As I said at the start, Roszak finishes The Making of a Counterculture with a quite remarkable chapter on modes of consciousness and the limitations of the scientific worldview, more on which in a future post.
For now I’ll just say that I found this a useful reminder that the progressive project has always been pursued on two fronts — one of politics, as above, but also one of individual emancipation.
What I mean is that the history of progressivism is partly a story of democracy and the state. But it’s also a much broader story, bringing in traditions like Christian socialism and progressive artistic/craft movements and the role of ritual, spirituality, ethics, and charity.
If today’s world is anything it’s a reminder that these deeper questions — of our mode of consciousness, or the way we relate to the world and to each other — sit beneath a lot of our social problems. When we show up in the world in a problematic way — when our dominant mode of being, and interacting with each other, is angry and unkind and mindless, rather than mindful — it will be hard to heal our social problems.
This all raises a pretty big question: where could an individual strand of progressive politics come from in the 21st century? How do we change our consciousness or way of being in the world? Particularly in a society that is even more secular than when Roszak was writing.
My hunch personally is that it’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing a surge of interest in wisdom traditions like Buddhism and associated practices like mindfulness and meditation. It’s striking that concepts and language derived from these traditions now come up so often in discussions about social change or leadership and even public policy.
I’m thinking, for example, of ideas like ethical knowhow, mindful leadership, acting with presence and intent, kindly compassion, and the importance of felt experience. Which I think are partly coming to the fore because it’s so obvious that digital technology makes us the opposite of all these things — i.e. mindless and angry. And because this mode of being is so clearly the root cause of a lot of our messy social predicament.
So, a question to end on: if early 20th century progressives drew on spiritual traditions like christian socialism, might a 21st century progressive movement draw more on wisdom traditions like Buddhism? And might this be part of how we make politics big again?
For more on a similar theme, see my recent post arguing that Labour will need to bring new mindsets/modes to government. Or this post on freedom in the age of autonomous machines. And as always, for the big picture take on how we govern a digital age, there’s my book, End State.
