Hello friends,
A very happy, belated Canada Day. Amidst these troubling times, I remain proud as ever of and committed to what I view as the Canadian project: a multiethnic, multilingual, poly-legal federation seeking to model tolerance and cooperation in a context of overcoming historical (and some present) wrongs.
I am buoyed by some recent polling that seems to suggest many Canadians seem to view something like this positively, too, with 65% proud of multiculturalism and 64% proud of Indigenous cultures. We have plenty of work to do still, but in order to continue that work we need not only to think it's possible, but that it's worth it in the first place.
I’m writing from London today, where I have blessedly managed to escape the worst of the heat wave.
With two weeks off, it's been glorious to have a genuine place to land here, as I swap my apartment back home for my cousin's place here.
I am always surprised at how quickly body-memory develops; my feet have quickly come to know the number of steps from the underground stop to my new front door. A particular melange of coffee, fruit stands, and curry smells welcome me as the hurricane-strong blast of air changing pressure between the underground and top of the station cleanses me of the tube and practically spits me out onto the street.
Once you beat the jet lag, the space to simply wander, both re-treading what I have seen before and finding nooks and crannies anew, is truly joyful. Rest, for me, still has many footfalls.
Things worth your time
All that is solid melts into hype – Part of the joy of vacation is working your way through your reading list, and so for me this has meant getting through my LRB backlog and finally getting to William Davies' fabulous review of Anton Jäger's Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation without Political Consequences.
It was well worth the wait.
Jäger's thesis is that we live amidst a new, particular, and especially pernicious mode of (hyper)politics. The 2010s were "fertile ground for heretics, political entrepreneurs and narcissists, but these characters lacked the aptitude, the patience and ultimately the power to get involved in the long, tedious work of policy innovation." These were the practitioners of "anti-politics," a viscerally anti-institutional worldview found across a range of parties around the world; hyperpolitics, Jäger, keeps the raises the temperature even further, loses the specifics, and sees leading figures maintain visibility in their rage-mongering, even as move through the worlds of politics, business, and civil society.
It is a "viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage."
At its core, hyperpolitics represents a yearning to "break free of the iron grip of neoliberalism without the requisite tools to do so." Even as many of its leaders appear equally invested in their own visibility as they do in any kind of discrete set of policy outcomes.
This is aided by the changes within traditional political parties, and their fundamental decline. With few exceptions, we've been tracking the decline of traditional political parties' membership since the middle of the last century. What's befuddling is how this decline in membership continues to decline in a moment where it seems like the most intimate and minute aspects of our lives have become politicised.
Jäger lays this is as two dimensions of politics: politicisation, which is about both the content and the aesthetic of politics, and institutionalisation, which is about how parties and other organizations channel attention and maintain relationships to and between their members.
"Crucially," Davies explains,
while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence.
The core prescription, particularly for progressives, is to re-invest in the institutions that allow political actors to engage with everyday people in everyday ways. Dancing, revolutions, etc. It is not, as many people I respect say constantly, merely a "messaging problem."
As one of my favourite Canadian reports on this subject is titled, we must go "beyond the barbecue" and have both elected officials and their parties build lasting relationships with local communities that go beyond donation-seeking and voting day. In the Canadian context, this would mean freeing up Members of Parliament from the casework of helping people with passports and old age security to creating civic hubs for engagement and co-development of policy.
Socialist parties in the 20th century were the true masters of this. As Marcus Barnett recounts:
Through boxing and cycling clubs, gyms, pubs, libraries, musical groups, and schools, [the socialist movement] offered itself as a tool of improvement in working class life. This ecosystem of socialist culture helped pave the way for seemingly ordinary people [...] to lead extraordinary lives. The meaning of this work was not only to develop a toughened core of socialists and trade unionists, but to show to a wider periphery of the population that socialism was worth it — it could, and would, make your life better, should you place your faith in it.
Socialist or not, that same hunger for people to have something real to believe in – and a community to share that with – feels like the most important thing a leader can offer people today. I think some people are starting to get that, but it will take time to see how far it goes.
Courts have a different dress, but the underlying sociology is always the same – I have to space out my visits to bookstores when I travel, but an early snag I made here was The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński. It was my first read from him, but it absolutely won't be my last for someone who feels like the Eastern Bloc's answer to David Remnick.
As a study of true imperial court politics, the book is at times otherworldly. Every courtier of the Emperor stretches the limits of supplication with phrases like "His Most Supreme Majesty" or "His Most Praiseworthy Highness." But the social structures and incentives, stripped of their particular Ethiopian context (and, allowing for some translation and embellishment via a foreign intermediary) mirror other imperial contexts.
I first encountered what could be called "court sociology" when I wrote my final paper for my history degree on Albert Speer. I became fascinated with historian Ian Kershaw's structuralist approach to studying Nazi Germany, and his takedown of the view of it as a highly efficient bureaucratic system.
As he shows, Adolf Hitler's approach as an autocrat was remarkably informal and unbureaucratic, preferring to avoid written commands and spending large amounts of his time in unstructured ways. Ministers, therefore, were always "working towards the Führer" (Arbeit auf den Führer hin," as originally said by Werner Wilikens), interpreting and anticipating what he might want done, in the absence of many actual instructions.
Though vastly different figures and contexts, Kapuściński's characterization of the courtiers fits this mould exactly.
In a pithy phrase, Haile Sailesse is one of the most important and controversial figures in African (and maybe world) history of the past century. Emperor of an almost thousand-year dynasty of the only uncolonized part of Africa; a major figure in the formation of early pan-African institutions and supporter of decolonization; a feudal absolute monarch and champion of internal development; a sometimes violent upholder of Ethiopian unity amidst inter-ethnic conflicts; and both an extremely intelligent and quite vain man.
Though it's clear Kapuściński has plenty of poetry amongst his prose, and the courtiers are at pains to present the nobility of the man they served for their entire lives, the picture is vivid, if small. You are within the walls of the palace for the entirety, and you come to learn of the vast, complex system, working towards (and away) from this figure with a carefully cultivated sense of near-cosmic reach.
One thing I am still working out
Orbiting around similar questions to Jäger, I am increasingly curious about what pathways to institutionalisation are realistic and worthwhile in today's social landscape. As I read Robert Putnam, mutual aid practitioners, and even the history of the formation of medieval guilds and Chinese benevolent societies, the tactics many used to grow and thrive feel antiquated in the age of social media and our staggering social atomisation.
What is fit for purpose today? What are people doing today that brings people in and allows them to form lasting social bonds, not merely an issue-based affinity that fades when our attention wanes? How can this be done in ways that bridge social divides in class, culture, and geography?
If you have any ideas, I'm all ears.
Easy Listening
Modern Vampires of the City is one of my favourite travel albums. It has carried me through frantic jetlag and relaxing meanders on three continents and counting. For me, its apex is inarguably "Ya Hey."
For maximal impact, turn it on as you walk through a large crowd. Take in the drama of the smallest motions – the laughter and the tears – but don't lose sight of the bigger picture, the ballet of our strange, endlessly social species.
"But you love everything."
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