Utopia and Politics
Chris Stirewalt recently cited a comment of the late Charles Krauthammer that is important in the context of Radical Centrism. The occasion for the comment was the Savannah Book Festival, one of an increasing number of such gatherings around the country which bring together authors and the educated public for mutual advantage. C-Span telecasts about 20 such book festivals each year and I try to watch at least some of each such festival when they come along, at least those that feature speakers or panels of experts that talk about issues that are important to me. About Krauthammer, by the way, he is someone I miss greatly for his original thoughts on just about every topic. He could be wrong, of course, and sometimes he was far off the mark, but he was original in the 90% range, and without originality you can't have productive politics. The quote, or close paraphrase, was this: "Politics is like the wall and the moat around a medieval city. Politics is what protects the city from the barbarians outside." Get the politics wrong and what happens is that the moat is bridged and the walls collapse, and the barbarians get inside and destroy the city, that is, they ruin families, they ruin the economy, they ruin the environment, they ruin countless lives. Which is precisely why Radical Centrists need to be as well informed about politics as there is time for in anyone's hectic life. The metaphor has its limitations, as do all metaphors or analogies or figures of speech. For instance, the "barbarians" are already inside, in the form of criminals, stupid or uneducated people, psychologically damaged people, people with dysfunctional values, and so forth. Moreover, politics can take a myriad forms., To take the original metaphor further, politics is also the weaponry of the soldiers defending the city, it is the chain of command of the soldiers, it is the stockpile of supplies needed to withstand a siege, and all of that. But you surely get the idea. Bad politics and you get bad outcomes, and the city falls. That is, the Roman Empire gradually falls apart, or the Aztecs, despite all their wealth and the size of their armies, prove unable to withstand the aggression of the very small Spanish forces arrayed against them. Or, to use a Biblical example, you get the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. The outcome of bad politics is not pretty, it is ugly and tragic. To be sure, it is easy to understand why, on one level, politics seems like a waste of time. What good is my one vote? What good are my ideas against a juggernaut of media power with a huge budget that network TV and the big newspapers and every other communications media uses at will? Also, too much time spent on politics, arguing about, say, foreign policy, when you or I or anyone else has so little influence on the outcome, seems pointless, is time poorly spent. I get that, I really get that. However, what is Radical Centrism all about? Ultimately we want to replace the existing rotten and dysfunctional political system with something that is far superior. But for any such thing to be remotely possible it is vital to understand actual messy, dirty, crass politics as it is experienced in the real world. Politics is not Plato's Republic. That book has the same relationship to politics, by way of analogy, as a foetus in the womb does to a grown man or woman who is married with a family. Yes, it is a good thing when the infant-to-be is healthy and all the biological parts are in place, where they should be. But the grown adult cannot look at all like a foetus at 12 weeks, and it is essential, in any case, to think about prenatal care, about hospital bills, about good nutrition, about baby clothes, about diapers, about all kinds of details that have nothing at all to do with that tiny creature in a mother's abdomen. In other words, politics is all that stuff that makes it possible for the foetus to become a baby and then grow to maturity. I don't know about Plato's Republic. Maybe Thomas more's Utopia is a better model, or maybe one or another mythology like that of Shangri-La or Xanadu or El Dorado. Or, s'il vous plait, The City of God or the civilization described in Bellamy's Looking Backward (from the good future to our troubled present). In any case, we need some vision of a "utopia." The vision gives us purpose and ideas to try and live up to. But that only is the start of the process. We absolutely must have all the other stuff, everything necessary to get to Xanadu, to any ideal future we really hope to see. Which is also to say that any image of utopia, or Xanadu, will necessarily be modified greatly in proportion to what is realistically possible as a political movement starts to try and build it. But ignoring politics is guaranteed to bring about one certain outcome: Complete inability to get anywhere near to Xanadu, ever. For anyone not to understand this viscerally amazes me. Of anyone on Earth Radical Centrists need command of political knowledge as much as possible. Thorough, realistic, detailed knowledge of politics. But how can apolitical animals become political animals? It seems to me that RC needs to be redesigned from the ground up so that this basic understanding is built into it as foundational, necessary, and desirable. For without it you build sand castles in the air and nothing gets done. For now there isn't much that I can do except point such things out. But I am thinking ahead to -with luck- a future when there are actual resources to work with and there is opportunity to create a movement based on principles of Radical Centrism. At such time I would want to surround myself with people who understand culture at a level of detail, who understand economics, who understand modern technology, and who understand politics with the best of the political class anywhere. For the way I conceive of politics it is that politics, in essence, while it can be other things, is most of all a form of WAR. This is not open for debate. Billy -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
