The rhetorical ‘we’ and the intractability of politics
I was scrolling through one of my social media feeds when I saw a post with the quote, “The idea that some people may poison others is one of the most astonishing but least contested aspects of modern life.” I agree, but that’s not what I’m on about today. Attached was a Guardian article by George Monbiot, titled, “We are being poisoned every day, so why do we keep voting for more pollution? Ask a lobbyist.” Monbiot is a problematic columnist in my view, but the aim for today has little to do with him, and more to do with how “we” use “we,” and what — in addition to lobbyists — accounts for our seeming (actual?) inability to vote our way out of a crisis-wracked interregnum.
My response is twofold. The rhetorical “we” is always imaginary, and the intractability cannot be accounted for by tracing some causal pathway that leads us back to a singular source.
People like to imagine the world as constituted of people like themselves. Of course, there is such a thing as human nature, but by the same token, there is tremendous diversity across the culturally particular and personally irreducible. This heterogeneity is good at some scales, allowing for all manner of complementarity and grace, but it can also become pathological when it fractionates into an adversarial free-for-all.
We are caught then between the absolute necessity of hierarchies — from parents over children to masters over apprentices to managerial bureaucracies over pluralistic industrialized societies — and the well-proven fact that any one of these hierarchies can be corrupted. In regard to managerial bureaucracies, they’re Rube Goldberg affairs, constructed in response to unforeseen emergencies over time, with each new component sedimented by newly created dependencies. There are many opportunities at every level and across each field for plain self-serving corruption as well as sophisticated political manipulation. These corruptions and manipulations are likewise consolidated in every crook and crannie through a process of self-organization; by which I mean adaptations from within and without which become habitual, whereupon those very habits themselves ramify into every fissure of persons and practices.
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