I wonder whether many people know what politics is. It is simple; but one has to be able to hold a subtlety in one’s mind. And the problem is severe, since simplicity usually goes with stupidity and repetition, whereas subtlety usually goes with sophistication, obfuscation and irrelevance – everywhere, but especially in politics.
Let me, therefore, announce Alexander’s Two Laws of Politics.
The first law is:
Politics is politics.
This means politics is a thing, an object, a phenomenon, something humans do. It is therefore something that we can understand, write about, and even study scientifically, in something called ‘political science’. There is, in other words, a thing called politics, and it is not any other thing. We know it when we see it. It concerns human order, collective formations, states, how they are ordered and ruled, and how these orders and rules form a framework for a miscellany of public and private acts of will in service of countless purposes. It has a vast baggage of concepts: government, constitution, power, law, justice, legislation, parliament, king, courts, tax, policy, liberty, democracy, ideologies, etc. This is the official definition of politics. It suffers from a weakness, however. It is insufficiently political.
The second law complicates the picture. It is:
Politics is not politics.
This means that almost everything that I’ve said under the heading of the first law is, though true, so infinitely flexible – because of the nature of politics – and so capable of being redescribed, so susceptible to the torments of human linguistic possibility, that there is no reality that cannot be inverted. Anything in politics which seems to be the case can also seem to be not the case. What is, therefore – in politics – is also not. Needless to say, this makes politics something which is not a science: or, let us say, it makes it a very paradoxical science, a very contradictory science: in short, a quantum science. Is politics a pair of human heads or a candlestick? Both. But only one at a time. Is politics a duck’s head or a rabbit’s? Both. But only one at a time.
Now, I am aware that the second law, unlike the first, demands justification. The justification is to be found in history. The inventor of politics in this advanced sense was not Solon, or Herodotus, or Plato. It was Augustus. After a hundred years of civil war in Rome, Augustus, in seeking to avoid the fate of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, did something absolutely remarkable. Caesar had not been a fool. He had taken power, and then tried to dignify his power in a way that would be acceptable in terms of the long established mores of Rome. Rome had once been a kingdom, but after seven kings had collapsed, following a rape and suicide so famous they were the subject of paintings and poetry for two thousand years afterwards, Rome became a republic. Romans were henceforth hostile to kings. Four or five centuries later on, Caesar was a king de facto but not a king de iure. Indeed, he was careful about this. When asked to become a king, he said he was not king, but Caesar. Caesarem se, non regem esse. But, in order to dignify his power he needed a role. He accepted the highly dubious, though admittedly constitutional, one of dictator. For this, he was assassinated. Augustus had to do something else after he defeated Antony. And he did something which rings down the ages. He declared that he was restoring power to the senate: that, in fact, he was restituting the republic. He declared that this is what he was doing. Yet he was not doing it. (Politics is politics.) And yet, because he said he was doing it, he was doing it. (Politics is not politics.)
The Victorian liberal statesman and writer John Morley wrote something astonishing in his Recollections, published over a century ago. It is a sentence which should be inscribed everywhere in Westminster and Whitehall, and set up on bronze tablets across the country. It is: “Most mistakes in politics arise from flat and invincible disregard of the plain maxim that it is possible for the same thing to be and not to be.” Morley said it in passing. But it is a fundamental observation. Across the world, countless political scientists continually confuse themselves by trying to make sense of political entities and events in one manner. They study democracy. But democracy is not democracy. Yet democracy is democracy. Both are true. Not at the same time – in politics. But to be understood – out of politics – we have to accept the truth of the thing that we cannot accept in politics. We have to accept that democracy both is and is not democracy. It is not democracy because it is ‘representative’, which means that it is, in fact, elective oligarchy; but it also is democracy because that is what we call it, and words are important.
The corollary of all this is that, in understanding politics, we are under the obligation of thinking politically and thinking unpolitically at the same time. By ‘unpolitically’ I mean thinking in terms of philosophy, history, psychology, literature, religion, even science. But an unpolitical understanding of politics is no more a complete understanding of politics than a political understanding of politics is.
This is, obviously, a great problem. For what it means, emphatically, is that no politician can adequately understand politics. Do not read politicians to understand politics. They only understand one half of it. Do not read Chris Patten, or Oliver Letwin, or Alistair Campbell, or Rory Stewart. Do not even read Owen Jones. But do not read political scientists either. They do not know the half of it – because they only know half of it. You should read only those who have a double sensibility: a sensibility which is both political and unpolitical. This is what Kant and Mill called an ‘enlarged sensibility’.
One of the great problems of our age is the fact that our habit of considering ourselves a democracy involves the making of much explanation to the masses. Politicians are involved in action, which is half meritorious, half not, and also involved in explanation, which is usually less than half meritorious. I say this because politicians realise that they have to engage in persuasion: and so employ the entire set of rhetorical arts – including the arts of exclusion, obfuscation, digression, displacement, distraction, forgetting, aspiration and inspiration – to get things done, and also not get things done. This is a problem for fundamental political order for the very simple reason that sometimes it is useful for a politician to deny that what is the case actually is the case. The Pope engages in a form of politics when he says that he is the servant of the servants of God, servus servorum Dei. The King uses the same language of service. He is a servant. Well, he is, but he is not. He is also a sovereign. Rulers rule as well as not rule. Consider. If we resist political claims like this one too much we will overthrow the system – and have to create another one, just as bad, or, Burke and Maistre would tell us, worse. But if we agree with political claims like this too much we will live in a half-lit, flickering world of falsity, where all truth is an inversion of the truth: as if each truth, though in a sense true, is the only truth. Sargon the Great was the prepolitical sort of king who could boast that he lay waste to his enemies by land and washed his weapons in the sea. But later kings, in early recognition of the power of politics, began to call themselves shepherds rather than the sons of dragons. Well. A king is a washer of his weapons in the sea, because that is what he is, but he is also a shepherd, because that is what he says he is.
This – these two laws, or Morley’s precept – can be applied to everything in politics. We speak of ‘ministerial responsibility’. Well, ministers are responsible. They also are not. We speak of ‘conservatism’. Well, conservatives are conservative. They also are not. Our collective inability to see this very clearly, as a fundamental fact of all politics, and all political subjects, is the reason why we return, again and again, to political stories in newspapers. In fact, there is a reason why politics was always on the front pages and sport on the back pages of the newspaper. Sport is unpolitical. A ball is a ball. A line is a line. A foul is a foul. Politics comes into it, a bit, as decoration, but not much. The back pages were always a relief from the confusions of the front pages. For in actual politics a ball is also not a ball. A foul is not a foul, even though it is. And there are no lines, even while the entire world is covered in lines.
Politics is what Aristotle called the master science. It rules. But it is also a servant science, a servile science: hence a tricky, subversive, duplicitous science. It is a cancerous science which takes over every attempt to state the truth of it. It is capable of subjugating religion, philosophy and science, all truth, to its imperatives, to turn them when necessary into something useful, something shameful, something expedient, something unwise: old, new, borrowed, blue (and red). Politics deserves the distrust which it has attracted in the last half century. But it also does not. It also deserves the respect which it inspired, say, between 1850 and 1950. The Victorians went too far in one direction: all frock coat, nonconformist conscience and empire exploited in a fit of absence of mind – but at least they believed in order; while the New Elizabethans went too far in the other direction: all Machiavellian misunderstandings, Private Eye prejudices, and worldly-wise trivialities which reverse-engineered the old stable liberal order to create something like, in our time, its Antichrist or Frankenstein.
Scepticism, I need hardly say, is the correct response to everything in politics.
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Baroness Morgan……
…….just let that sink in – almost as risible as Baroness Bennett – the former Green leader who gives new meaning to the word ‘mediocre’.
If in the last 20yrs we have not been presented with sufficient evidence to abolish the House of Lords, and say nothing and keep voting the same way – then I think we deserve everything that comes our way.
The left wing Establishment it only interested in women when it suits the agenda
Remeece – Choose Your Side (Official Music Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO3P7NeONVI
Upcoming events – don’t expect someone to fight this on your behalf
Friday 8th October 11am
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Abolishing the House of Lords is irrelevant in this context. Go and stand on a different orange box for that and concentrate on this Breast Screening
matter.
“My name is Boris Johnson, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
He has done this with his followers through his policies and his behaviours, he will as he is doing try to blame business, employers, ordinary people. It his work and his work alone that has done this
There is a bit of a confusion here – between routine screening and the follow-up of individuals with symptoms.
It is an important distinction. Routine screening suffers from the same problems as the PCR testing of an asymptomatic population – false positives etc.
The situation is often examined as a case study in texts covering statistical fallacies.
Well yes sort of. The difference is that 1 in 7 women will still get breast cancer in the UK! Even if a mammogram is “positive” then these results are still confirmed for definite with a biopsy or MRI. So yes it increases anxiety for the women who are waiting but they still get a proper diagnosis and treatment (well unless chemo is halted for covvie). Unlike cov screening it’s also optional, plus you get all these scenarios and the likelihoods in advance so you can give proper informed consent!
PCR tests are all kinds of bollocks because we have no idea what the incidence of covid is, what the false positive and negative rates are, the ct count significance, whether it’s just picking up fragments of dead virus or reacting to other viruses etc. And if you have symptoms they don’t test for the other 200 viruses it might also be. Even if there was zero covid you’d still get some positives.
I tore up the screening form when I saw masks were mandatory.
Right on. I had to argue and fight to get into a hospital so they could look at my daughter’s arm, but they caved in eventually!
Your fault, not the system if you get breast cancer then. Sacrifice your principles, not your health.
Project Veritas interview what they claim are 3 Pfizer scientists. They don’t tell us anything we don’t already know but it’s nonetheless interesting to have it confirmed.
https://brandnewtube.com/watch/project-veritas-quot-pfizer-quot_Tzk7jJbghHdgVlw.html
Savage Jabby will probably just say “well these women obviously *couldn’t be bothered* to get checked up”
If they don’t like cancer, they can just get another disease.
When is it going to sink in that the effects of the govt lockdown and refusal of the WahNHS to perform proper medicine means the UKs medical services are an order of magnitude worse than any other 1st world country, despite the billions shovelled into the ever more demanding ” stretched NHS”
It is the very structure of the NHS that condemns Britons to 2nd world healthcare in perpetuity.
Why will no one ask why Brits are not allowed the level of healthcare available to Germans, Austrians, Swiss Dutch etc etc.
It is no good comparing the UK NHS with any other country. Comparisons throw up very strange anomalies. The NHS is staffed with tens of thousands of nurses who are not performing nursing tasks at all. My daughter is a Nursing Sister but is actually a pen pusher, not even being able to help out during covid because she had not conducted any nursing duties in ten years. She is still listed as a nurse. I used to be a soldier, but I am not classed as a soldier still. Too many nurses are specifically trained and cannot be used in any other nursing discipline. There are still general nursing staff, but not like in the days of SRNs and SENs. Any nurse in those days could be used just about anywhere.
“if it saves just one life”
I heard, today, of a church elder whose wife has gone from “well” to intensive care, with breast cancer, in the course of a few weeks. Something is rotten in the NHS.
It isn’t just women that this is affecting. I have had an experience over the weekend which suggests that GP’s, as soon as they hear the word cough, want nothing to do with you.
I developed a chest infection over the last week, which was affecting my breathing. I finally plucked up the courage on Friday to call for a GP’s appointment, and was told to present at the surgery at 1600, where I was kept waiting intil 1700.
A routine exam,blood oxygen, blood pressure, checked my chest and she started asking me questions. As soon as I mentioned that I had a cough, and was bringing up a lot off rubbish of my chest, instead off asking further, or looking to see, I was told to go and have a covid test. She wouldnt prescribe me anythihg for the symptoms I was describing, presumably because a cough equals covid and you become a statistic.
My health detriorated massively over the weekend, with massive side affects of severe dehyration, loss of bladder control, panic attacks, and I finally got to talk to the same GP yesterday afternoon. She was still not willing to prescribe antibitics, refusing to accept me description. Instead, she arranged for an appointment with a colleague, who did one of the most comprehensive exams I have ever had including asking second opionions of the hospital about the possibility of a Urinery Tract Infection. it took over 40 minutes. The question again came up of the cough, and I got the same you need to do a covid test, but this time I was armed with a sample of the crap I had been coughing up. It was enough to prescribe me antibiotics that I should have been prescribed last Friday instead of letting a massive infection invade my body for four days and cause massive side effects.
So if you go to the doctors and have cough, which you KNOW is not covid related, go prepared to push back with evidence, because your GP is not likely to accept your word for it.
Covid is more important than cancer. It’s also more important than heart disease, diabetes, stroke, dementure…
Correction. Covid is easier to make lots of money out of compared with cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke and dementia.
Propaganda fed muppet. It is not. Or are you being sarcastic?
He’s being sarcastic.
My wife is a Breast Screening Clinal Director, Consultant Radiologist at a Major Regional Hospital in England. In spite of the pause in screening at the beginning of the Pandemic 2020, When she returned to work, she got on with the job and caught up with her lists, and she has continued and been praised for her success. So, not all is doom and gloom. It is a case of the GPs doing their job and refering their symptomatic patients by seeing them and not doing telephone or video triage, the government and media stopping frightening women who need screening from attending their appointments, and Breast Screening staff pulling their finger out and getting on with doing the job. And don’t use Covid as an excuse in England because vaccinated staff no longer have to isolate if in contact with an alleged positive case. The Government and Hancock have a lot to answer for.
Strange, how they haven’t yet found a cure for cancer, or have they? German New Medicine ~
Sacred Medicine. https://youtu.be/45ffPalsA0Y