Art and Politics: Part 2, The Deafening Roar

In my previous post, I observed that whenever I blog on art, there’s nary a peep. When I blog on politics, on the other hand, there’s a cacophony of voices. Although facts are often tossed around in discussions of art and politics, both subjects are matters of opinion. How is it we’re so insecure about offering our opinions about art in public, while so bold in expressing our opinions about politics?

In my first post, I suggested that a lot of people hold back offering opinions about art because they think they don’t know enough about it to talk about it intelligently. Understandably, then, even if they use a pseudonym, they’re reluctant to go on record talking about art in a public forum like Brainstorm. Educated people, in particular, don’t want to appear unsophisticated, and when talking about art, it’s easy to end up sounding either like a Philistine or a nincompoop. A few readers said that reticence in talking about art comes about because the heart of art is ineffable. That may be true, yet ineffability at the heart of other subjects—like love, for example—doesn’t prevent us from going on at length.

When it comes to politics, people don’t feel they have to know a lot to have a political opinion. Nor do they seem to care whether they sound sophisticated. Politics is an art (with its accompanying ineffability problem), but at the same time, the modern approach has been to treat it as an objective thing (“political scientists” approach  politics by gathering and measuring data). Most of us observe politics from the sidelines, by following the news about people running for political office. But because we all negotiate the social world in order to try to get what we want, we “get” politics better than we “get” art. We understand from experience a lot of its inner workings—that power seems to corrupt people, that there are greedy people who know how to get what they want, and ambitious people who ruthlessly crush others on their way to the top. We know politics in our daily lives, then, in a way that is not true of art.

Our background, the social and economic class to which we belong, and our education, all contribute to whether we lean left or right politically. Yet the forces that initially inclined us one way or the other politically ultimately become embedded in the deep past, like events from our childhood, and are replaced by emotions and passions about politics that we rarely, if ever, stop to examine. For all our political opining, and even when we are informed about issues and candidates, reason has very little to do with our political leanings. In a democracy, all opinions must carry equal weight, but each of us thinks that every political opinion other than our own comes from ignorance or stupidity or, worse, represents a cynical manipulation of facts for the purpose of winning elections.

All of this is a far cry from the ancient Greek political philosophy that I studied with awe in college. The philosopher’s idea that man’s expression qua man is manifested in political action was brutally overturned by Machiavelli’s idea that modern people, instead of getting bogged down in figuring out the ways in which right actions lead to the proper exercise of power, needed to analyze how the rightful exercise of power indicates the right set of actions. Today, almost 500 years after Machiavelli wrote his slyly vicious The Prince, we understand politics as squabbling over how to distribute the goodies of life.

For most of us, talking about politics has become merely another means of self-expression—another way to yell (if we’re bullies), rant (if we’re full of tension), sound reasonable (if we’re nice people).  They say there’s only a small sliver of Americans who are undecided in any given election, and that political candidates pitch everything to them. The rest of us have settled the matter in our heads so long ago we can’t remember ever doing it. We’re either conservatives, thinking of ourselves as realists who understand human nature, love liberty and freedom, and are opposed to softy liberals who want big government to take care of everybody, or liberals, thinking of ourselves as concerned citizens focused on the good of the whole, and opposed to the greedy, selfish conservatives who promote policies favoring big business over the little guy.  

People eagerly opine about politics because talking about politics today has deteriorated into nothing but a game of chatter—a way of responding to the unsettling modern world that seems so devoid of much that’s beautiful or good. None of us is interested in persuading others of the verity of our opinion; nor do we know, in a rational sense, whether our opinion holds any verity. The result is that many don’t necessarily believe the particulars of their  “arguments.” When politics descends to such “ideas” as  “Halliburton controls everything” or “Obama is a secret Muslim,” people aren’t holding their political breath to cool their porridge.