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| Thumbs up for democracy after voting last week |
I went to vote early last week (and you should, too, my fellow voting eligible Americans!). As I did so, I thought about one of the stranger aspects of my personality. I’m interested in politics. I’m interested in philosophy. You’d think I’d love political philosophy, but it has never been my favorite part of philosophy. I’ve been known to dabble (another feature of my personality: I dabble in just about everything). But sometimes I even wonder if too much philosophy makes for bad politics, at least in one specific way—it often leads to making perfection the enemy of the good.
To understand this odd fact about myself, I think—as I often do—about Buddhist philosophy. In particular, I think about the two truths.
Originally this distinction was intended to make sense of a perceived incongruity in the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha (in)famously denies the existence of a self or a core of personality within each being. But then he also talks about “persons” and “beings” in other contexts.
It would be downright embarrassing if the founder of your tradition were to contradict himself so blatantly, so Buddhist intellectuals came up with a neat trick. There are two levels of truth: ultimate and conventional (originally this was expressed in interpretive terms as “drawn out” meanings versus “that which is to be drawn out”).
Ultimately, the Buddha is saying there is no self, no core of identity, no essential “you” apart from the causal hustle and bustle of the rest of reality. But we do have conventions of talking about “persons” with “names” and “pronouns.” These are, as one of my favorite Buddhist texts, The Questions of King Milinda, informs us, “mere appellations” or “mere counters” that name bundles of what are actually impermanent streams of impersonal events.
The classic example is a chariot, which goes back even further to the nun VÄrjira in the early Buddhist texts. “Chariot” names what is ultimately a bunch of non-chariot parts put together in a way that we conventionally designate as a “chariot” depending on human conventions like needing transportation, wanting to look cool with your horses, etc. Other examples might include statistical abstractions like “the average college student” (there is no such person) or my favorite, a cake, which cannot be reduced to the flour, water, sugar, chocolate, eggs, etc., but is in fact a complex causal process that arises from these items interacting in various ways.
What does this have to do with 21st century politics?
Ultimately, I’d describe my political views as anarcho-socialist, owing as much to science fiction authors like Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson as to any more standard political philosophers like Emma Goldman or Noam Chomsky. I think we’d be better off without anything quite so organized as nation-states, militaries, prisons, social hierarchies, capitalism, Soviet communism, etc. But as social creatures, we’re all in this together and cooperation is key—I’d just prefer it to be on a more local, nonviolent, egalitarian, ecologically sustainable, and voluntary scale. There’s no real reason we can’t make a relative paradise of this Earth for each and every human being. This is “utopian,” sure, but it is, as Le Guin would say, an “ambiguous utopia.” It would not be easy, but nobody ever said realizing true human freedom would be easy.
Neither the United States nor any modern nation-state is currently anywhere near my political ideals. Should I wait until anarcho-socialists are on the ballot before I decide to cast a vote?
That would be ridiculous. There are many things I care about more than my political ideals: human suffering, for one. And there’s plenty of that. Thus, I feel called to take part in the conventional world of politics. For a citizen of a relatively democratic nation-state, one of the most powerful ways I have of doing so is to vote.
I’m willing to ironically entertain conceptual abstractions like nation-states and city governments as long as they serve real human interests, like reducing suffering. The problem, as I see it, is that humans often end up serving these ontological mirages instead of the other way around (a similar point can be made about much of our technology, most obviously these days AI controlled by tech behemoths).*
There’s a lot of talk of voting as harm reduction, and some critiques of this idea. Some argue that the longer you focus on harm reduction the less you are focusing on harm elimination. Voting for the lesser evil still leaves you with evil.
I take this critique seriously. It’s not easy, for instance, to vote for national candidates who are going to continue my country’s military exploits (even a relatively benevolent military-industrial complex is still harming a lot of humans). I do understand the impulse to keep one’s hands morally clean, to quote a famous Le Guin story, to walk away from Omelas.
But for me, voting is about better and worse, not good and bad. Good for me would require such a radical transformation of the human world that it would take far more than one election to accomplish this.
I also don’t see this as an either/or. I can both engage in conventional political action and also work toward my ultimate political ideals. I can show up to vote, to protest, or to work for a political candidate one day and on the next day do the deeper conceptual work of challenging and changing the thinking of myself and others, often through the radically transformative work of philosophy and science fiction.
To riff on Le Guin yet again: conventional politics is working as a realist; ultimate politics is working as a realist of a larger reality.
Some of my favorite parts of Plato’s Republic are when Socrates and friends wonder, quite openly, about whether this “beautiful city” (Kallipolis in Greek) they’ve been imaging could actually exist on Earth. They never quite come to an answer, which gives both career Plato scholars and my students something to think about.
Are my political ideals even possible? I simply don’t know.
But I take heart from Mary Midgley’s essay “Practical Utopianism.” Utopian ideals are not precise blueprints for some possible future. This is, in fact, the problem with a lot of political philosophy: it’s far too specific. Like Midgley, I think utopian ideals can be directions on a map or spotlights plunging into the space of possibility showing us futures muted by the mists of our inability to predict the future.
Ignorance can be a beautiful thing. In ignorance, there is hope. Despair comes from a belief that the future will be a certain way, often by the same predictive capacities of dystopian science fiction writers (last year I covered The Hunger Games in a class, which seems far more prescient in the 2020’s than when it was published in 2008).
My favorite dystopia is the Parable series by Octavia Butler. Butler’s brilliance there is not just her dystopian predictions (she even got “Make American Great Again” right), but her way of finding an ambiguous utopia through that dystopia. My own utopian ideals don’t necessarily require humanity to “take root among the stars” as the character Lauren Olamina says in the novels.
Yet I think it’s precisely because I don’t know if my ideals are possible or what they would even look like should they be achieved on Earth or elsewhere that makes them hope rather than optimism. Recent election results in Serbia and Brazil give me optimism, as results here in the US may next week.
But hope is deeper than optimism. It must live in Le Guin’s larger reality. Hope cannot be found in conventional politics, yet it animates conventional politics. Hope may even be ineffable, as some Buddhists claim—paradoxically or not—of ultimate reality. Hope lives in that space of “we can do better than this” even if we’re not entirely sure what “better” is or how we’ll get there.
Conventional politics is always, at best, the lesser evil, but less evil is how to you get to more good—and eventually maybe even to an ultimate good.
To use another Buddhist metaphor, voting and conventional politics are the mud from which the lotus of ultimate ideals may grow. Of course, I can’t know that. It would take an enlightened Buddha to know any such thing. But for the rest of us, ultimately all we have is the hope that the seeds we plant in the mud of conventional politics just might yield lotuses in a better world to come.
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My fellow voting-eligible Americans: we have an important election on Tues. Nov. 3. I hope you will vote if you haven't already voted early. If you need information about voting, see here.
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*This is why I’ve never been “patriotic” in any conventional sense. There are great things about my country. We invented jazz, rock ‘n roll, and hip hop—all led by the efforts of African Americans, of course. We are the land of insipid boot-licking modern country music and Kid Rock, but we’re also the land of Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, and Rage Against the Machine. We’re the land of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, but we’re also the land of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Angela Davis. I love America, not because of its government or because I accept mythologies that ignore the horrors of our past and present, but because I love humanity, and part of humanity lives here, complicated as we are.
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Concluding Conventional Postscript
Descending into the conventional mud a bit, what do I recommend? Here in the US, almost all of our political conventions work as a two-party system. For all practical purposes, if one wants to defeat MAGA Republicans electorally (as I do as a form of obvious harm reduction), then the only real way to do that is to vote for Democrats.
I, too, have been known to enjoy the favorite pastime of almost everyone on the left in America: Knowing What the Democrats Should Do. But if I'm being honest, I don't really know what the Democrats should do. They're in a tricky situation; I'm glad I don't have to try to please multiple competing constituencies simultaneously.
But whatever Democrats do will almost certainly not be as bad on the whole as what the MAGA people are doing. And decent people of good will can, at times, work with Democrats in a way they can seldom work with MAGA Republicans. Not on everything. Democrats are not going to overthrow capitalism or usher in MLK's Beloved Community tomorrow. But those things are not going to happen if you don't vote, either. There's no reason to withhold your vote just because none of the options are ideal. To think so is to confuse ultimate and conventional politics.
I also think it's a mistake to think we have to wait for candidates that are "exciting" or "align with my values." Voting is not a consumer product that has to cater to your personal desires; it's not about you. Rather, one gets down into the mud to help build something that may someday produce a system that will produce viable candidates with better values. Here in the US, I could see running third-party candidates at a lower level to build up to viable candidates later, but I also seldom see this sort of system-building happening in our third parties, who often confuse ultimate and conventional politics.
So, my fellow Americans, please vote early if you can. Or vote on Tues. Nov. 3. And please vote for Democrats.
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