Politics unlimited

No one wants their politics to change — that’s bad

Self-portrait using Midjourney.

After a bit of a hiatus, The Stark Way is back — with a post about politics. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with daily politics or anything relevant. It’s a big picture idea of politics that I’ve never seen framed like this.

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I ask people where they place themselves on the political spectrum and then, regardless of their answer, I pose this follow-up: 

Do you think you’ll have the same views in ten years?

My interlocutors generally stumble, because they can tell I’m making some annoying point. Which is: shouldn’t you want to have different politics in the future? Surely you might change or grow and keep learning about the world. Even if you don’t change, the world will, so it will require a new politics.

Most people I talk to are on board with this idea, in principle, but it’s hard to get anyone to embrace it. I think your politics should be something like a theory or set of ideas that best explain the complex world of humans, nations, and laws. Even saying it like that, it seems obvious that we so far lack anything up to the task, anything like a general theory of humanity and society, so you’re hoping for some provisional least-worst explanation that is open to ongoing revision and refutation.

Instead, as we know, politics is about identity. People affiliate with a tribe, a team, an ism, or go with what their friends and family believe — and they stick to it against opposition or criticism from other teams. When new information arises, rather than making a new politics to carry into the future, people use their longstanding politics to triage and deflect that new information. Politics is a fortress one erects to weather the contingencies of life shared with other people. 

My idea of politics, however, is that it should respond to the contingencies in order to help us navigate new terrain.¹ My politics is, in a word, open-ended because I believe the future will be different and different in different ways. 

This extends to my own future self. I expect and hope that I’ll have a different politics in the future because it means I will have learned something. Right?

I oppose this to all static political ideologies: pretty much all of them.

Classical liberalism is meant to be open-ended, because it says the government should guarantee people are left free to experiment with new lifestyles.² In practice, liberals tend to assume they have the answers (which were figured out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and we simply need to be better liberals to make it work in the twenty-first century — even though we have deep fakes and algorithmic trading and nuclear weapons and other weird shit unanticipated by John Locke or James Maddison.³

Democracy, as a system of government, is kind of open-ended too. Theoretically, the legislature can make any new laws required by new circumstances. Even the constitution can be changed to adapt to a new world. In practice, the slow rate of change built-in to parliamentary democracy is suited to earlier centuries. And democracy still has the classic glitch where it can vote itself out of existence and become a static dictatorship.

In the absence of anything new, I bravely and originally endorse milquetoast parliamentary democracy, because it’s open-ended-ish.

Sometimes I call myself a pluralist, partly to avoid being labelled anything else, and to emphasise my point of difference: I want there to be others unlike me in the world. Most people, most philosophers, are convinced the world’s problems would be solved if everyone shared their worldview. Frequently this is openly stated. Even among self-professed liberals or advocates for diversity, I sense that what they think but cannot say is that the world would be fixed if everyone converted en masse to their worldview. Yikes. Even if your worldview is the “best” currently available (it isn’t), surely the presence of rival ideas can only improve it and militate against mass group think. Also, as Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”

I don’t expect most people to be attracted to a politics that acknowledges its own mutability. It requires more calories to live in a state of uncertainty. It’s understandable that people adopt static worldviews to filter the deluge of new info. 

Yet for long-term survival, politics must be unlimited. The conditions of the world have no limit, good or bad. They have to obey the laws of physics. But these are so wide that we are nowhere near any of the frontiers. In the big picture, until the free energy of the universe runs out, the future can be almost infinitely different to the present. To cope, our politics must itself be in flux, it must enshrine change into its own rationale.

1. An echo here of Julia Galef’s well known distinction between the scout mindset, which looks to discover new knowledge to change our beliefs, versus the soldier mindset of defending one’s beliefs.

2. At least that’s one version of it, from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

3. The worldviews that are coalescing in tech circles to deal with the future of AI are certainly not open-ended (as I wrote about last year). The goons of e/acc and tech optimism just think it’s inevitable that progress is coming. This gross techno-optimist manifesto, like all futurist and fascist manifestos from the early twentieth century, makes no mention of people’s choice, differences, diversity. The longtermism crowd, meanwhile, see infinite reward in a future of mind uploading where some centralised force will deliver us from all of our pain and suffering and give us what they have determined is the greatest good: pleasure or hedonism for one version of what they call sentience. Perhaps some of us don’t want this future. Regardless, they have assured us it is what we need.