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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 25, 2011
Politics of prudence
All the world's a stage, according to a prominent English writer (now deceased). That the human being is a born mimic, and must by necessity become an actor in many roles, comes close to pleonasm. We are always "stage actors" on some sort of stage, however small; and those who act are acting. Theatrical metaphors abound in political life, along with pugilistic and military ones often themselves derived from the stage, for there are "theatres of conflict," etc.The task of this column is not to change the world, but when possible to help gentle reader understand it. We deal with public life in the broadest sense - with the public stage, if you will - and I try not to tell people what to do, or even how to vote. Instead, I try to make this self-evident. More and more, as I grow older, I am struck by the pointlessness of explaining the political mechanics, the cause and the effect: why "doing this leads to that." The effort should nevertheless be made, even when no one is listening. Sanity requires that we think through every option in a prudential way, summoning everything we know to foresee the likely consequences of our actions. Indeed, the linchpin of my religion, is prudence. This is so both at the immediate moral level, and at the less tangible spiritual one. An act is good or bad according to its consequences, and human beings are endowed with the equipment to grasp what they will immediately be, in almost every instance. We cannot see around corners, however. The religious believer allows a higher level of prudential action. An act may, to put this at its most vulgar, help more or less to turn us toward Heaven. It may be intrinsically good or bad, even beyond immediate consequences. There is thus a lower and a higher prudence: the latter to help us see around corners. It is there, in our basic human equipment - this higher sense, of what is intrinsically good, beautiful, and truthful - yet is itself ultimately prudential. These things are for our own final spiritual good. The highest prudence, in the teaching I have embraced, is itself a form of mimicry. It was called by Thomas à Kempis, and many others, "the Imitation of Christ." But prudence isn't cool, and never will be. In particular, the spiritual modesty that it requires - real modesty of outlook, not an affected self-deprecation designed to charm or deceive - can be painful. We must think outside ourselves, "objectively," as it were. I know this is sounding like a Sunday sermon, and of course it is. But recall, my subject is politics. Politics are the awkward business of acting prudentially "above" the level of individual or family (one might also say, "below"), on matters that affect everybody. A good politician is, to the way of thinking I espouse, vividly aware that his acts have consequences in the lives of the many; and likewise, aware that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He is alarmed by "visions." A friend just forwarded a link, with the brilliant comment, "Jazz is an intensified feeling of nonchalance." I disagree almost entirely, but laugh the harder for the modicum of truth in it. Jazz music can be "cool" musically (unusual time signatures and so forth), but also cool "socially." It has an edge, a swing, which can cut through smugness, or be used by the smug to cut. In political analogy, it can subvert tyranny. Or it can be tyranny. The puzzle I've been struggling with through many years of thinking about politics, while writing newspaper columns, might be encapsulated in those last two little sentences. Historically, I've been fascinated by one dimension of political life, which has often seemed the dominant dimension, continuously since the 19th century. This is the dimension of "coolness." There is no pendulum in modern political life, no natural swing of fashion between "Left" and "Right." Left has always been cool; Right has always been uncool; and when something (such as Mussolini's fascism) ceases to be cool, it is re-filed in historical memory from "Left" to "Right." But as a rule, the Left always wears the beret. The "visionary" politician is always of the Left. He is, for his time, the embodiment of coolness, and his power in democracy is a pied-piper charisma. Through a time when the churches have been emptying out, he offers "spilled religion" - the slobbering of a religious idealism over the irreligious surfaces of public life. Only when the vision "fails," in visible catastrophe, do we turn away - usually to some unfashionable hack, to do the thankless job of picking up the pieces. Until enough have been picked up, that we may scout for a "visionary" again; a "nation builder" or whatever. (Always, it involves nationalism; always, it involves socialism.) Which is why I have come to favour the politics of dullness, the politics of making ends meet, the politics of de-politicization; the politics of prudence. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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