The Politics of Humans
I recently read an article by a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the name of Langdon Winner, titled “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, which addresses something that is I think rarely discussed in common discourse about the history of modern works of art, architecture, and technology. Winner suggests that “Artifacts”, as in any human-made creation in history, have a political value, that is to say that by the motivation for their creation or by their very function they serve, in one way or another, some political means. Looking at modern creations like the dozens of low-hanging overpass bridges in Long Island, New York, which served in their original design to limit the ability for public transportation to travel into certain areas of the city, just to name one example, it is easy to see how politics can play both explicit and implicit roles human creations.
But what about humans themselves? By this I mean can it be, or is it, the case that humans just as well as human-made creations can be politicized? Firstly, I’d like to clear up any confusion by emphasizing that I am referring to others projecting political meaning onto like people, and not political ideology as a whole. Indeed, what I am more concerned with is how, say, a Republican in power projects his own values onto the Republicans they represent, rather than a Republican projecting onto a Democrat values in which they both disagree.
We see throughout history that political values are assigned to people for the sake of either maintaining political status or shifting it. This assumption that humans can be assigned political values without said values necessarily being true falls in line with the Theory of Mind. We as humans have the capacity to project our own beliefs onto others, or to think about and understand the way in which our own beliefs differ from others. However, in cases of political power, it is often the case that we dismiss the differences as problematic, and instead vie for the former option of projecting out political beliefs. Politicians typically expect those which they represent to be of like mind, in most respects, so they act with that accordance in mind. This is how politicians are able to make the claim that radical or minute changes to a system, at any level of government, can be “the will of the people”, even if only a small minority of the population actually desires such changes.
To many intellectuals and critics of such politics, especially within the United States, this way of thinking and acting in positions of political power would seem like an example of misconduct. However, this is a theme that it consistent throughout human history. No politician is exempt from making such mistakes as projecting their own goals onto the people. This concept even coincides with the overpasses of Long Island mentioned above, where even though the bridges were built between the 1920s and the 1970s, it is still the case that they were never renovated nor were the heights of subsequent overpasses adjusted in order to accommodate for the clear bias that their construction had on (typically poor and/or PoC) individuals who utilized public transportation. The Long Island case is an example of how, despite knowledge of the political functions projected onto the architecture, it was not changed.
We like to believe that everyone around us believes the same things we do. And of course, when finding differences, there is no way to properly accommodate everyone. However, it is important for both individuals as members of a politic and those in power as heads of a politic to consider who it is they represent, in all of their decisions, to ensure that the politicization of the masses does not only positively affect a minority of the population, but the population as whole.
For the article on the Theory of Mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
