Politics has oft troubled me due to its technocratic and inevitably impersonal nature. Democracy perhaps is the closest that comes to remedying the problem of impersonality through structural means, but it does so only on the surface. For a political democracy to work it requires a stable administrative bureaucracy, and this bureaucracy remains ever so opaque, hidden from the common man. What is lacking in politics and much of the modern world, is love. By love i do not mean romantic love or even filial love, I mean love as care, as a feeling of responsibility towards one’s surroundings.

What Marx called alienation, I think of as a state where one is no longer in love with their labour, for they no longer are able to identify with the product of their labour. They are merely a node in a system assembling the product, there is a feeling of wholeness which stays missing in the heart of modern man. Politics is an abstracted, organized, systems oriented solution to problems faced by society. As opposed to soveriegn societies where the King was directly morally responsible for his citizens, in a democracy ‘society’ is responsible for governing itself (note this is not me advocating monarchy or democracy, that is irrelevant). Society governs itself through the election and re-election of politicians, but a politician, assuming best intentions (a rarity, if not an impossibility), must still work within a bureaucracy that remains invisible. To this end, even systemically, democracy remains rather flawed in its ability to maintain accountability, for there are no leaders, just an amorphous blob of politicians and bureaucrats going in and coming out of the Capital city. Furthermore care is removed from the equation, instead you have administrators for whom it is a job, they are not people but instruments.

The lack of love we find today sees its birth in the advent of what might be called the ‘economic’ age of man. Preceding this stage, man’s understanding of himself was as an immanent part of the world, perhaps as the center of the world but never Lord. Man understood nature as he ‘stood under’ it. There was a reversal of fortunes during the economic age. Man ascended to his throne of godhood, having killed god to ascend, and he now held dominion over other men as well as nature. This is where we move from notions of nature or men to natural resources and human resources. Modernity is marked strongly by instrumental reasoning, and it is this form of reasoning that paves the way for capitalism, markets, and the quantification of increasing parts of our world. The history of this period is not unknown to us.

After the Cartesians divided the world neatly into subject and object, matters pertaining to society tended towards objectivity. The two greatest benefactors of this: the scientist and the technocrat. The reason for this division and our subsequent compartmentalization of tasks is twofold. The first is an impulse inherent to modernity, which desires certainty. Descartes’ dualism was born from a desire for certainty about the existence of a self, and modern epistemology has certainty at its base. The establishment of certainty in every proposition is an essential feature of modern epistemology. Only that which may be measured may be true. This imparts on the truth a structure, the structure of rationality. The impulse for certainty in modern epistemology is further elaborated through statements which must be universal in their nature, for certainty must not only be certain to specific situations, though such knowledge is useful, but it must be true in all situtations. This is why moral systems which dominate today tend towards utilitarianism, for it allows for smooth conversion of humans, nature into cold digits, and fields such as economics are built on this shaky moral ground. Democracy too, is a blunt utilitarian invention. It simply says that the needs of the many trump the needs of the few, and as long as the majority are kept happy, the costs incurred by minorities count for little. There is an inversion of this principle when one thinks of the tyranny of the minorities in democratic setups as well.

Which brings me to the structural issues present within democracies, and within politics more generally. Democracy in theory does sound close enough to an ideal. It allows for local representation, local administrative units, and to some degree a federalised power structure which prevents excessive centralisation. The trouble comes when one believes the structure itself is a solution. A structure is a means to implement solutions, but without the impulse to serve or care, a structure becomes a constraint, nothing more.Let us consider this further. The law is a blunt instrument. The general tendency on both the right and left to bake into law things they desire to see in society is informed by a misunderstanding of the role of law The law is a blunt instrument, it can place constraints that prevent you from acting a certain way. But the absence of malice is not the presence of acceptance or love. Both sides seem intent on avoiding the discourse required with the other side in order to arrive at a middle ground. Democracy actively facilitates this, when increasing bipartisan tensions necessitate the imposition of one’s will over another. This tension is further exacerbated ideologically for each side believes their worldview possesses more coherence than the others, and the function of ideology is to provide coherence in an incoherent world.This impulse to impose one’s will is a violent impulse, and violence will beget further violence.

There are no moral actors when we act without love, even for our enemy. Corruption and evil are not defeated through compromise but certainly not through violence, for evil sustains itself not in the body of another but in the form. It is only through profound compassion for another, perhaps even inadvisable compassion that we may transform another, and without love there is no system, no ideology, no technology that may deliver us from our present crisis.