The Politics of the Present Imperfect
by: Michael Hogue on December 22nd, 2010 | 6 Comments »
It is a time of year when many of us take special occasion to reflect on whether we’ve been living our lives the way we mean to, whether our communities and our society as a whole have become a little more sane-minded, more sustainable, more beautiful, a little more just in the past year.
In my experience this exercise often leads to heartburn and nausea: the gap between the way things are and the way I hope for them to be is so vast as to seem impossible to bridge.Health care reform didn’t turn out nearly as well as many of us hoped. The DREAM act failed for unconscionable unreasons. Climate legislation isn’t even on the table. The Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy were extended, at the expense of desperately needed social services. Unlimited corporate campaign contributions count as free speech.
In the face of so many disappointments, despair becomes tempting. But despair is a luxury of privilege. For many to despair would mean not merely to detach from goals, to retreat from hope, but to disappear from life, to dissolve of hunger or loneliness. To despair is also apolitical. Politics is never about the best, but about the best that is possible. Despair is apolitical as well as being a luxury of privilege.
Might utopianism also be such a luxury of privilege, might it also be apolitical? I don’t mean to call into question big ideas and big dreams and hopes. I’m absolutely that kind of a guy. Very idealistic…too idealistic much of the time, according to those who know me well.
Progressives tend to think big. But it’s just as important to join big thinking with small acts. Small acts are critical to bigger ones. Progressives tend to think of social change in revolutionary terms. But revolution is small work as well as big work. Revolutions have never happened all at once. It is unlikely that they ever will.
The revolution most needed in our moment is a revolution in moral perspective, a revolution against the tyranny of perfection. To paraphrase my colleague Sharon Welch, in order to act ethically in an age of expediency, in order to stand for justice in a world of exploitation, in order to act compassionately against despair, cynicism, and indifference, we must, paradoxically, give up the myth of a moral perfect world (A Feminist Ethic of Risk).
If we ever hope for our acts to yield anything close to the hoped for consequences, we must give up the myth of moral commensuration. A morally improved world depends upon giving up the lie that good intentions will always yield good consequences. By breeding despair, the flip side of utopianism, the perfect debilitates and subverts real progress. Every one of us is morally flawed and the world is, always has been, and always will be morally ambiguous, top to bottom, side to side.
Paradoxical though it may seem, the way of imperfection, of incremental hope, leads not to defeat, not to despair, but to the freedom really to risk impossible things. The only way to bridge what is and what should be is to act lightened of the weight of the perfect. The only possible bridge to what should be is a bridge we bravely build together by risking ourselves beyond the privileges of despair and utopianism.
At the turning of the year, may we who are imperfect risk committing together imperfectly in the imperfect present in order to repair the world the only way it has ever been done, one little imperfect act at a time.
A very helpful – and hopeful – perspective, especially in this season. Thank you, Michael., for this balanced and mature point of view.
What if the only way in which the systematic network of problems that Tikkun and Tikkun Daily readers and writers frequently note and critique can be effectively addressed is to build a network of social individuals (much broader than the readership of Tikkun and Tikkun Daily, and limited neither to the U.S. nor to the “advanced capitalist countries”) that can challenge and start to dismantle the problematic network?
I agree completely that we cannot demand perfection of ourselves prior to acting, and that we should not beat ourselves to the point of powerlessness if our actions are imperfect, but I think we need a an organized bridge to a fundamental social/political/economic change that can–imperfectly and incrementally at first, yet substantively, over not too long a period–bring a halt to the system-generated drift towards barbarism and environmental destruction.
Jan, great comment. And I agree completely with you. Networking and organizing small acts is necessary to shaking and moving the powers and inertias of big systems. My real issue in the post was not to prescribe an exhaustive political-moral strategy, but to offer a counter-perspective to the despair that so many of us progressives seem to be experiencing at the moment, despair that I think is rooted in either in a decadent, insufficiently pragmatized utopianism.
Your story was really ionframitve, thanks!
Mike, your post reminded me of Voltaire’s “The best is the enemy of the good” and I found a nice discussion about it here, a bunch of short quotes for and against the notion: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheBestIsTheEnemyOfTheGood.
My own sense of it is that utopianism works differently for different people, or at different times in our lives. If you come to believe, as I did at one stage in my life, that nothing but remaking the world was worth doing and almost nobody outside my minority group understood how to do it, then at least in my case it did become a recipe for despair, and it took me a long time to get over that despair. I could only do it by being forced back to accept very basic things about life: that a healthy organism requires hope, and needs to give and receive love and nourishment, and have some basic trust, a secular (in my case) equivalent of faith. Small acts saved me.
But then towards the end of the two decades of my recovery from utopian movements I came to see that in the process I had put up with and made excuses for the mediocre and the pragmatic. In order to survive psychologically I had lowered my goals so far that I was doing far less than I was capable of. I thought of people like the French cognac merchant Jean Monnet who in the depths of exile in Algiers in WWII had dreamed of a federally united Europe after the war, and who made it happen. The EU is by no means perfect, but it is an absolutely stunning achievement, that the most warlike nations of modern times now cannot go to war with each other.
So it is simply not historically true that we need “to repair the world the only way it has ever been done, one little imperfect act at a time.” Sometimes it is done by one huge imperfect act at a time! And often those huge imperfect acts (we could mention many but let’s stick to recent familiar history and note universal suffrage, the New Deal, ending smallpox and polio, the Voting Rights Act, women’s and gay rights, and the Endangered Species Act) are achieved by people who dreamed of much much more, and believed passionately in achieving it or getting as close as they damn well could.
I know you know this. But I am wondering if some of the generalizations you made in your piece may be less universal in significance, and more applicable to certain sets of people at certain times in their lives. Just asking, and in a spirit of gratitude for exactly the kind of post I hoped you would write for us, one that grapples with the deepest issues of faith and action.
Michael: thanks for writing this.
Your thoughts and the four thoughtful responses all broke me out of my semi-paralysis while attempting to choose where to apply my post-retirement efforts “for the betterment of our communities”.
None of the organizations and groups that I’d considered joining met my “perfection” expectations, and that led me to doing almost nothing. It took a (figurative) slap in the face to remind me that I now need to take action with one or more progressive causes and stop worrying about how to fix ALL the World’s problems at one time.
Thanks, all of you, for the “slap”!