My Philosophy: On how we live

My initiation into political work occurred when I was twelve.  I spent several hours delivering leaflets for the local Liberal Party candidate who contested the parliamentary seat where I grew up, which in those days was reliably Conservative.  On election day itself I helped collect voter numbers, cycling between several polling stations where other volunteers were keeping tally of those who had promised to vote for ‘our man’, taking this information back to the local committee room, where the agent’s assistant aggregated the data and identified those among our known supporters who had yet to vote.  Other volunteers were dispatched to knock on their doors and remind them to hurry to the polling stations before they closed.  The process was rather amateurish compared with the technology-enabled campaigning of the modern day, but it was also courteous and civic-minded.  ‘Our man’ knew he wouldn’t win, but he sought to secure as many votes as he could, not least because the higher his tally the greater the pressure on the incumbent Member of Parliament to serve his constituents well.

My interest in politics must have derived in part from the influence of my father although, since he believed that, as a civil servant he should abjure from direct involvement in party politics, he didn’t play an active role until more than a decade later, after he retired.  I suspect I drew some of my political values from him, although he was careful not to try to influence my thinking too directly.  In addition, I had a strong sense, as many young people do, that the world was not well organised and could – and therefore should – be re-organised to make it better, meaning fairer.  Over time, this basic principle has been nourished by other ideas, borrowed from both liberal and Marxist thinkers, about what a fair society would look like and, more prosaically, how we might make steady progress towards it without the imposition of additional human suffering, which has so disfigured the previous centuries.

Politics, for me, has always been about an interest in better outcomes, rather than the enjoyment of participating in the political processes themselves.  Nor was it ever about wanting to spend time with other political activists, whom I have mostly found to be tiresome; and often slow: people can be very successful in politics who have neither the intelligence nor the good judgment necessary for success in other professions.  Playing the game of politics, and caring about winning that game, has never been the point, merely the entry fee.  Politics continues to fascinate me, but I consider it a duty rather than a pleasure.  By contrast, I have always found political ideas attractive and spent four years in my early twenties, as a doctoral student and then a post-doctoral fellow, studying and writing about political philosophy.  When I immerse myself in a lengthy book about the history of democratic thought, or the foundations of theories of human rights, I do so with pleasure.  When I immerse myself in a lengthy process to secure votes for a political candidate, or to help develop a policy proposal for implementation, I do so despite the lack of pleasure.  Political action is an obligation to be taken seriously, but not for the intrinsic pleasure that political thought supplies.

Yet, for many years in my twenties and thirties I was active in British party politics, as a fully engaged member of the Labour Party.  I sat on local party committees, helped to organise the vote at elections, attended meetings to develop new policy ideas on financial and economic issues, attended conferences, marched on demonstrations, and donated money to the causes and candidates that I believed in.  All this while also pursuing a career in the City and becoming a father.  I took my civic duties seriously.

On reflection, I am pleased by this.  Although my participation in the work of politics absorbed much of my time and frequently caused me frustration, I now consider it to be time well spent.  I contributed – albeit in a small way – to the creation of a decade in British political life during which the values that I most admire, the promotion of social equality and economic security, were the principal focus of the government.  There were plenty of mistakes: undue caution and the unnecessary embrace of much of the cultural conservatism of British life, that even today still needs to be swept away; policies that were poorly designed or inadequately funded; compromises that blunted the effectiveness of new initiatives; and insufficient action to mobilise the population to take climate change more seriously.  Nevertheless, there was also serious progress in making the welfare system more user-friendly and putting its finances onto a more secure and sustainable basis, mixed with a social liberalism that made British society – and London in particular – an attractive place for younger people from all over the world to make their home.  The decade from 1997 to 2007 was better, in my judgement, than most of the preceding fifty years; and, certainly better than the years since, which have seen British politics retreat into economic irresponsibility and social conservatism at home, and an infantile chauvinism abroad.

Arguably, this would all have happened irrespective of my contribution.  My role was not as a protagonist, merely an extra.  Just as philosophers like to describe the paradox of voting – that at almost all elections, the impact of any individual vote on the outcome is negligible, for which reason none of us have a clear incentive to give up our time to go and cast our vote – so too there is a wider paradox of political participation, which suggests that the contribution of almost all participants in politics make no material difference to the outcome.   We would all be acting rationally if we stayed at home and tended our garden, instead of spending time and effort in political activity.   Except, of course, that while this is true for each individual contribution, it is not true for these contributions in aggregate.   Collective agency (or, to call it by another name, solidarity) is real.  For every person like me, who worked hard to secure the election of a pragmatic, moderately progressive Labour government, there were hundreds of other doing the same.  We won because we all turned out and worked for the cause.  Each needed the contributions of the others.  Without my efforts the outcome would have been the same, but without the efforts of many people just like me, they would have been very different.

For which reason, I recommend political activity as an important element of the considered life.  Not necessarily active involvement in party politics: sometimes, the rewards are simply overwhelmed by the costs and the compromises.  I left the Labour Party in 2015, after thirty years of membership, and have no immediate intention to re-join.  But when the parties become obstacles rather than conduits to progressive social change, then there are other avenues for political action.  I have become involved in campaigns on single issues, local and international, and in socially minded businesses, which have found ways to employ my technical skills and moral energies.  Doing something useful to make the world a better place, still seems to me to be a good way to spend my time.   If the study of science and history helps us to understand who we are and how we came to live as we do, political action helps us to shape the future.  Those who share our values rely upon us to play our part in constructing the new world, each making our individual small contribution to a better future.

I have recently re-read Max Weber’s famous lecture, Politik als Beruf, delivered to students in Munich in November 1919, a year after the end of the Great War.  The traditional translation into English is Politics as a Vocation, but a new translator prefers The Politician’s Work, which makes good sense to me.  (Recently published, together with The Scholar’s Work in a volume titled, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, NYRB, 2020).   I recognise the influence of Weber’s thinking on my own views about politics, and his distinction, towards the end of the lecture, between those who practice a politics of conviction and those who practice a politics of responsibility, resonates especially strongly.  Convictions – perhaps today in English we would say ideals or values – tend to be abstract, non-negotiable, unquantifiable.  They are the beliefs which motivate us, which draw us into the political process, which connect us to others in movements and alliances, which provide us with the standards against which to measure our successes and failures, and those of our political opponents.

By contrast, those who practice the politics of responsibility are more concerned with the foreseeable outcomes of policy decisions, irrespective of our good intentions.  They are consequentialists, not in the utilitarian sense of thinking that the only thing that matters in the moral calculus is the impact of our actions on overall welfare, but in the more limited sense of thinking that in addition to the pursuit of our convictions it also matters that we take into account what is likely to follow from any policy decisions we make.  Most politicians, for sure, combine both elements: they have ideals, the values they entered politics to champion, but they also think about the impact of their actions.  What matters is the relative balance of these elements in the mix.  For some, politics is primarily about building the stairway to heaven, and for others it about avoiding paving the road to hell.  When I first read his work in my early twenties, Weber’s lecture forced me to take this second idea much more seriously than I had previously been disposed to.

Thinking about the foreseeable consequences of a policy and being alert to the risk of consequences that are both unforeseeable and undesirable, does tend towards cautious experimentation in politics rather than radical change.  I recognise that, in retrospect, this can often appear unduly timid.  Nonetheless, it can also be a strength, particularly for political parties with radical aspirations, which need to build and maintain support over many years in order to have time to implement fully their policy agendas.   Aesop’s story about the tortoise and the hare is apposite.  In Britain since the end of the second world war, there have been three short bursts of progressive and reformist Labour government, but they tended quickly to run out of energy and popular support.  (Blair’s governments are the exception to the rule.)  The dominant political force over the past seventy-five years has been comfortable and complacent conservatism, which has left the traditional distributions of power and wealth largely unchanged.  (Paradoxically, Thatcher’s governments are the exception to this rule.)  Serious change needs time, and in democracies time is the gift of the electorate, who mostly crave reassurance that change will be managed carefully, with any errors speedily corrected.

Voters are also notoriously bad at thinking about the future.  In democratic societies, the short-termism of the political classes is a trained reflex.  Older and wealthier citizens are mostly hostile to the idea of higher inheritance (estate) taxes, preferring the right to endow their children and grandchildren with assets that they have accumulated over their lives.  These same people are mostly also the beneficiaries of generous pension schemes that provide more current income than they need, certainly more than they earned through prudent provisioning, leaving behind them the growing risk of bankrupt pension schemes to be refinanced by their children and grandchildren.  Yet the discordant sound of liabilities cascading down through the generations remains unheard and unheeded.

Economists refer to this phenomenon as hyperbolic discounting: an irrational preference in favour of more immediate but less satisfying outcomes, and against more satisfying but less immediate ones.  One way of thinking about Weber’s politician who takes responsibility seriously is to say that in a democracy their role is to persuade the voters to overcome this tendency to short-term satisfaction, in favour of a more patient approach to gratification.  We can achieve better outcomes for our society by taking more account of long-term costs and benefits.  But to do this the voters have to be persuaded – against their natural instincts – to trust their leaders to stick to long-term plans, rather than abandon them as soon as circumstances become troublesome.  Few of our leaders are capable of earning that trust and very few of them deserve to earn it.  In the absence of credible tortoises, it is easy to be seduced into voting for hares.

Over the past few weeks, we have observed political leaders around the world confronted by a health emergency without precedent in our lifetimes.  Huge commitments of resources have been made to support not just the health systems that must deal with the pandemic, but to limit the economic damage from the disruption caused by illness and economic inactivity.  Although the virus is invisible it is immediate; as such, it has galvanised the political classes into action.   For thirty years now, scientists have been telling us that we need to change our lifestyles in order to limit the damage to the atmosphere from carbon emissions.   But pollution, although sometimes visible, is not immediate in its effects.   The climate emergency is almost certainly a greater political problem and a greater economic risk to the world than the current pandemic, but our politicians have failed to take responsibility.  Mostly, in the democratic states, because the voters have been unwilling to acknowledge the costs that they have incurred and that their children will be forced to pay.

Max Weber did not live to see German society destroyed during the 1930s, by men of conviction, men without responsibility, who led their country to ruin.  A little over a year after he delivered the famous lecture on politics, he died while in his mid-fifties, a victim of the influenza pandemic that swept Europe.   I will mark with respect the centenary of his death in June this year.  In the hundred years that have passed, liberal social democracy in Europe and North America has proved itself resilient against the forces of fascism and communism, it has confronted economic and health crises, and it has survived.  Better still, social and economic well-being has improved greatly, and the benefits have been widely (if unevenly) spread.  Where we have been less successful, is persuading our fellow citizens to take a long-term view about their society, to see beyond immediate gratification in order to build up stocks of wealth, knowledge and social capital for a safer, stronger, better future.