Politics making you exhausted and angry?

There could be a remedy for that!

A Pew Research survey in 2023 found that “nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55% feel angry. By contrast, just 10% say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4%) are excited.” The words “divisive” and “corrupt” were the most frequently used by survey respondents to describe the state of politics.

And if you’re not American, you may well sympathize. But what can you do about it?

There are plenty of people who’ll tell you what you should think, and indeed what everyone should think, about national and global political challenges – and there are many people vying for your vote, often in divisive or dishonest ways. But, in spite of their influence on us, we each make up our own minds; we each find a unique pathway through.

Our most intimate, private and personal experiences are in themselves political, as all relationships have power dynamics. The private personal and the public political realms overlap in our lives: they condition or shape one another. What politics and law have to say about reproductive rights, marriage and child support, for example, are all important. And it’s natural to have strong feelings about these matters.

We learn that there’s no unequivocally good or right political pathway, however. Many politically significant choices are beset by uncertainty and ambivalence. Not everything is unambiguously right or wrong. It’s hard to escape contradicting ourselves or being accused of hypocrisy, if someone really looks hard enough at us, even though we strive to be consistent with ourselves and our values.

So I recommend reading history, if you don’t already. Certain political concerns endure, in spite of technological progress, because they’re fundamentally human. By learning about figures from the past, we see radical differences, and yet we discover things in common. Reading about the past teaches us that life does go on, despite adversity and disaster. It makes our present burdens and worries somehow weightier because of their long history, but also easier to bear. And we find ourselves in fine company – with individuals as flawed as ourselves.

How we react to political events does matter – for ourselves and for the community around us. Our reactions may sometimes feel involuntary or “triggered”, but we always have choices in how to react. We can train our minds to react in new ways, just as we train ourselves, for example, to follow the rules of games, or get better at sports. There’s no law of nature that forges “hard-wired” links between Event A and Emotion B or Thought C.

There are different pathways that individuals in history have taken through complex and uncertain political terrain, but not always as examples you should follow. Reading about them gives us an opportunity to step back and reflect on our own reactions to events, and to think about changes we might make to our own ways of looking at and expressing feelings and thoughts about politics.

There are many good ideas about “what we need to do” to make a better world with better systems of politics and government. Perhaps we need to revise our values, improve our political culture, fix the electoral system, reform the economic model, stop polluting, defeat certain opponents, and so on. Many of these prescriptions may be good ideas in theory, but putting the changes into practice will only embroil us in the same messed-up political environment and contested policy-making processes that we wanted to fix. How can we ask a system that we don’t trust to reform itself into something that we can trust?

This sceptical note doesn’t mean we may as well give up in despair. Giving up is a failure as reprehensible as incompetence. From reading about events and individuals in history, we learn that there’s always something one can do. Structures and systems do matter, of course, but individuals matter too.

What’s the long view?

For most of recorded history, at least since Aristotle, philosophers saw humans as social animals (not unlike bees or cattle) but with a special capacity for speech – a capacity that enables, if not forces, us to debate what’s fair or unfair, what’s right and wrong. That is, we’re not just a social animal, we’re a political animal, and, in any kind of community, human existence is always a political existence, or something more than just a struggle for bare survival. In traditional states, the premises of sovereign power were the decisions over who lives and who dies, punishment and reward, and controlling the payment of taxes and tithes. The community or state was often thought of as a “body politic”: a living being with organs and limbs whose overall health (the common weal) is preserved through good government.

In the eighteenth century, things went up a gear. Industrialising societies developed means to estimate the potential of individuals and whole populations in terms of wealth, health and productivity. We could think of a nation (rather than just a household or an estate) as an economy; we began to calculate its actual and potential happiness. And we began to estimate the risks that individuals of different kinds posed, and the contributions they could make, to this entity called variously state, commonwealth, republic or nation.[1]

For the subsequent two centuries, our politics would be premised on the maximisation of human health and wealth. Our primary political debates would revolve around how best to achieve these outcomes for the whole community and for the individual. Radical experiments such as communism and fascism were undertaken – and failed. But the basic premise of sovereign power became the welfare of the population, on which the people’s political consent would be staked.

All-out wars were fought in the twentieth century, but no longer in the name of a king or queen, emperor or empress. The new form of warfare mobilised whole populations for the sake of the survival of those populations and of their national systems of government and economy.

All of this was made possible by new technologies: not just hard technologies such as the internal combustion engine, but also soft technologies such as statistics, insurance and education.

State power would not just be applied to the question of life and death and to wealth accumulation, but to the maximisation of the potentials of all members of society and of particular (often competing) social groups.

The high point of this development was reached, paradoxically, along with the invention and use of the atomic bomb. The ability to destroy whole cities or populations – or even the human race itself – brought into stark relief how life itself, in total, had entered into political and economic calculations. The state grew in its command over the nation’s economic productivity and in its abilities to do things, such as care for the ill, provide virtually universal literacy and produce the most advanced knowledge.

The average individual caught up in the titanic struggles of the twentieth century was much more likely to be literate than in the past, and to have the right to vote. His or her opinion mattered much more than ever and came to be obsessively surveyed.

But we still regarded ourselves as a social animal with the additional capacity for speech and reason, and hence for higher forms of intelligence. Indeed, we regarded ourselves as Homo sapiens: the highest form of intelligence, the outcome of millions of years of natural selection. The supposed omniscient God, praised by St Augustine, was dislodged. The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence had thus far been fruitless, despite the powers of modern telescopes. “We” were apparently at the apex of the order of living beings. Our basic political argument was about how to ensure that all members of a society could aspire to the highest standards of living ever seen – at least in some parts of the world, but all too often at the expense of others.

And then we began to invent machines more capable than ourselves, and they acquired the additional capability to learn autonomously how to complete administrative, literary and calculative tasks much faster than any human could. Furthermore, we uncovered the basic molecular code of life itself and found that it was nothing more than information.

Life itself can now be reconceived from the bottom up by a form of intelligence that’s not entirely our own, but nonetheless was a human invention. And we don’t yet know what this will mean for us. Will AI enslave and destroy us, or will it lead to new discoveries that can vastly improve human life and rapidly solve ecological problems? How much information, mass and energy will AI be capable of mobilising in pursuit of objectives? Will its powers come to seem unlimited? Will humans develop deep attachments to AI devices? Could AI come to be regarded by many people with such awe that they treat it as God-like?

These developments challenge what it means – or will mean – to be a self-aware intelligent being. Will AI belittle or empower H. sapiens? Given these profound and unpredictable changes, we need to ask what kind of political animal we’re going to be. But no single author or researcher can tell you what that demands of us, or what the human as such will become. That’s far too speculative.

What we can do is to reflect on what we’ve known, and what remains unknown, the better to prepare for what we’ll become.

History doesn’t repeat; neither does it rhyme. If history appears to have a reason or pattern, it’s because we’ve invented a narrative in retrospect. In the present, people seek predictability, but always face uncertainty. Learning about individuals within history puts into perspective our present-day concerns. We can see how much has changed, and how much has endured.

Reading history, we can recover and reflect on some past individual examples of that endeavour to know ourselves and to grapple with the unknown – in a political world. This invites us to step outside of our currently polarised politics and our present confusion and anxiety, and to reconsider how to be a political animal.

It’s a task that humans must perform inwardly as well as culturally. No one can really tell you how to do it, though many do try, often by making sweeping political statements. We can ask what you and I can do, no matter how powerless we may be, starting simply with a look in a metaphorical mirror. It’s not a new idea.

So if politics makes you exhausted and angry, there are remedies for that. And we need some clear thinking.

You’re now using more computing power than anyone could have imagined you’d have at your disposal only thirty years ago. You have access to the greatest storehouse of knowledge ever available, without leaving your living-room.

The next wave of change, however, won’t just be another exponential leap in computing power. It will make us rethink what it means to be a conscious living human in a political community. We will need more than ever the kinds of understanding and skill acquired through the study of history, literature, philosophy and art. ChatGPT itself will tell you that AI will take care of the technical stuff. But it needs human beings to help it navigate ethical, political and cultural concerns and to provide users with experiences that make them better off as humans. Our past will be a rich resource for designing our future.

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Note

[1] The shift in political thought in the eighteenth century is exemplified by three well known books: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780) and Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Although their conclusions are much debated to this day, these texts contributed to the growth of modern economics, demography and social policy. And it was the French Revolution that produced the idea of a “public opinion” that matters politically. Readers of philosophy will also notice an influence of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben in these passages.

This image is AI-generated on gencraft. I prompted it to imagine Anna Komnene in her library.