A Calling For Political Pragmatism

A few weeks ago I wrote the article, Genesis, Satan and the Übermensch: The Maturation of Mankind, examining the biblical story of Genesis and our fall from Paradise in the sense of an initialisation of our collective maturation. I tied this in with the quasi-Miltonian figure of Satan as a concept of rebelliousness and exploration, and its need for proper societal integration. While referencing the idea of Neitszche’s Ubermensch, albeit transferred from individual to collective form, as the completion of our maturation, I ended with a brief discussion on the horrific ideologies that plagued the twentieth century, and made clear our distance from the collective ideal of the Ubermensch. We concluded with an admission of the dangers of misaligned and rigid ideology, from both the left and the right, and the need to reframe our cultural and political structures around something else. This article is dedicated to a discussion of what those options may be.

It appears that two plausible alternatives to radical ideology exist: religion and pragmatism. Religion was what guided much of human history, and so the adoption of this would be something of a pre-enlightenment reversion. Yet that is not to say backwards in all directions, and it undoubtedly carries some promise. An official and thorough reconciliation with science, alongside a renunciation of the sacred texts as literal fact, would be a brilliant and very necessary beginning. As regards its societal organisation, Catholicism in its current form couldn’t last, and a reform, aside from the foundations, of decentralisation and individualisation, would be in order. 

The reason for these reforms lies around the fundamental reinterpretation of religion not as fact, per se, but as an ethos, both individually and societally, and one embedded within a story. God is the all-encompassing figure of greatness. He is not truthful or just. He is Truth and Justice itself. He knows and has power over all. Does he exist? Maybe, but, as I outlined in my last article, we may never possess any certainty about the matter. But he is real as an abstract archetype of the utmost greatness and perfection. We, lacking his powers, will never be worthy of being equal with him, but we – with our limited lives and limited knowledge – can work our hardest to get as close to him as we can. This must be our conceptualisation of God, and the sacred texts must be our symbolic guide to move towards it.

This is the only form of religion that I can conceive of as succeeding, at a wide scale, in the modern world. However, a vital issue remains, and that is the inherent sophistication apparent in this reform. A cultural reform of this shape and magnitude must necessarily capture the hearts and minds of the mass public. Yet in mass, emotion dictates reason. That is where the resonance must lie. A highly evocative, and supposedly real, ideal must be conveyed — the God, in religious terms — to serve as the spirit that motivates and converts en masse. In doing this, it becomes seemingly mandatory that one sacrifices sophistication, and with this sacrifice, the value of this reform is lost.

The second, and most viable, alternative is not religious reform, or any other that demands wide scale public conversion, but instead one of institutional pragmatism. The core idea here lies in an elimination of radical ideology, religion, or any other bias that portrays some grand utopian end, from the political institutions. It is not void of morality, culture and meaning, but it leaves these to develop freely in the wider society. Unlike established religion and radical ideology, it does not provide rigid truth. It provides a functional structure within which the pursuit of truth may manifest unbounded. As such, it will demand all institutions of the politic – government, media, education – be stripped to their function. The chaff must be divorced from the wheat and burned.

Unlike the first alternative, it requires but a resetting of the institutional elite – a bittersweet endeavour, but, in my view, a plausible one. Of course, their size is small and their power is great. Once they are cracked, rapid unfolding is subsequent. The difficulty lies in the reshaping itself, and this requires speaking to power – no easy task. Power changes forms, and is only retained through constant remodelling. The trend will be supported, so long as it isn’t threatening. To purify the elite and rearrange them upon a pillar of guiding principle is unreal, but to show them a new way forward, that is plausible. It demands but one thing: a promise of power. How that is gained there are many ways, but that is the concern of a future article.