Above and Beyond All Sides Now
"I don’t know which side anybody is on any more. I don’t really care. There is a moment when we have to transcend the side we’re on and understand that we are creatures of a higher order. That doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you courage in your struggle. There is on both sides of the struggle men of good will. That is important to remember. On both sides of the struggle, some struggling for freedom, some struggling for safety and solemn testimony of that unbroken faith which binds generations one to another …"
- Leonard Cohen
I used to think this, but now I'm not so sure. I agree with the first part. But politics over the years has been drained of good faith and good will. I think the idealists, people who enter politics to serve the public good in some way, are in extremely short supply. They divide now over ideologies and interests, which tend to reduce to self-serving motives. I wouldn't trust any of them as far as I could throw them. The political sphere is too remote from proximal relations and social practices. I'm cleaving to an "ordinary ethics" and an "ordinary politics." People argue it out day after day on social media. And it is pointless.
"Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of all of you by then? Will you be bitter? Utilitarian? Will you simply and dully accept world and occupation? In every case, I shall draw the conclusion that they have not measured up to their own doings. They have not measured up to the world as it really is in its everyday routine. Objectively and actually, they have not experienced the vocation for politics in its deepest meaning, which they thought they had. They would have done better in simply cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations. And for the rest: they should have gone soberly about their daily work." - Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," a 1918 lecture that Max Weber gave at Munich University at the request of the student union, first published in 1919 as Politic als Beruf.
Win, and you win 'nothing' in such a world, just the right to fight again in a world of constant battles, to no end other than power for the sake of power. The world still hasn't come to terms with Nietzsche. Which isn't to say that Nietzsche was right - Nietzsche was right about modernity and its moral emptiness, but wrong about the way out - it's Nietzsche or Aristotle, but we live in an age of self-made man that is simply unable to see the stark choice before us. So we are constantly being invited into some rehash or retreat of Enlightenment rationalism as if this this restatement of reality will be enough to see off the descent into delusion. Such people fail to see that such thinking is the source of the delusion, particularly in the way that the worlds of fact and value, reason and emotion, parted company.
Until people show some inkling of grasping the nature of the (post)modern predicament, I am wasting no more time and energy on the issue and, most definitely, am not joining in the dog fight to shout 'up with this' and 'down with that.' It's as productive as spitting in the wind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYHrq6r1UgY
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