❝We should never forget that politics concerns survival, and not only in the narrowest sense of food and shelter: how we are to have meaningful lives is a category of questions that must be asked and answered politically. Without politics, these words mean nothing at all.❞
"In our philosophy of education, you must know this: some will say that the best way to train a new recruit is to begin with a long, wooden pole, showing him how to use pikes and polearms to then progress by degrees through swords and maces, until you reach the point of instructing him on the art of survival with the smallest knife, finally showing him how to struggle with his bare hands, when he has no weapons at all. There is another philosophy that begins with what is closest to one's own skin, proceeding step by step through the use of weapons that are more remote, so that the reflexes that are first learned with the bare hand later come to be practiced with a knife, and then are extended to swords and spears. Each ability is a preparation for learning the others, but each can be an obstruction to gaining competence in the others, also. Some instructors would say that the students who've mastered combat at a stave's distance will never really learn to fight with their bare hands --and, vice versa, those who've mastered the method of the knife may be stuck with a misleading way of thinking about the motion of a long spear."
"Sometimes the problem may simply be that confidence in one skill results in a contemptuous attitude toward studying another, but in many cases people earnestly try to learn a new art (setting confidence and contempt aside) only to find themselves trapped in a way of thinking, a way of perceiving, and a way of moving --from moment to moment-- that they can never quite overcome. One man may drive a car as if it's a truck, another may drive a truck as if it's a car: the reflexes of the body and the habits of the mind cannot be easily learned again, starting from a blank sheet of paper. Instead, all too easily, one set of skills provides a template for the text, distorting and limiting our learning, even as we imagine ourselves better prepared for each new challenge by whatever we'd learned before. What we learn from the science of peace cannot easily be applied to the science of war, nor can an inference be made from the art of war about any other art."
"Each skill fails as an analogy for the others, just as learning to draw with a pencil fails to train you to sculpt with a chisel and stone. Hypothetically, at least, an artist might lose some of his ability to draw in gaining the ability to sculpt, as the reflexes react in a very different way, from one moment to the next, and the eye is trained to see differently --while the hand and the eye condition the mind to think differently. The placement of ink on paper is a process of addition, whereas the chiseling away of flakes of stone creates an image through subtraction."
"This thing we call democracy: should people learn what it is at a spear's distance, as a kind of allegory for what's most immediate to them (what is, frankly, involved in their own direct struggle for survival) or should they begin with learning the equivalent of 'fighting with their bare hands', to later try to master the art that's more indirect and remote? The negotiation of international treaties, and all the bombastic abstractions used to justify the beginnings and endings of wars, does the study of these things provide us with an education in what we need to know to engage in direct democracy, at the local level? The disputes at city hall about sewage treatment plants, parking spaces, or the dotted lines on the map within which the police tolerate overt prostitution and drug dealing, would any amount of experience in this theater prepare you to deal with the history of America's Cambodian Wars, or the possible future of America's Chinese Wars? What we learn from subtraction cannot be applied to addition, not even as an allegory: practice with the chisel doesn't prepare us for the use of the pen."
"Who, today, has the preparation (with the hand or the chisel or the sword) to bring about a revolution in our system of education, or in our system of policing, or even to recognize the revolution that would be necessary in both, in response to the simplest complaints about police brutality? You cannot pretend that this is one art, with a mere difference in scale: drawing may be extended from a small page to cover a large wall, and sculpting may be extended from a small stone to a huge boulder. We are not merely extending in scale, when switching between the bare hand and the sword."
The answer, as is so often the case in political philosophy, is really a critique of the question: "No matter how many hundreds of students you have in the martial arts, no matter how carefully you may track the outcomes of their education, you will never be able to measure out a definite conclusion on the matter, as to whether you should begin at the end or end at the beginning. Whether it is better to begin with a long spear or a short blade depends entirely on the interest of the student (most likely, in our history, a teenage boy, although now these things include all others, in gender and age). If the student is, at the beginning of the process, fascinated by fighting with spears, his enthusiasm for beginning at that end of the spectrum will be more important than any asymmetry in how easy it may seem to extend the skill of the bare hand outward (to the spear and the sword) as opposed to inward (from the long pike to the palm and fingertip)."
"In politics and in war, every allegory is a false allegory: we do not learn by extending one skill to another --but we think we do. Most often, the student and the teacher both presume that they are applying what they learned with one thing to another, but, in fact, they are starting again with each weapon in learning an entirely new art: what we imagine to be a difference in scale entails a difference in style, in skill, in substance, with the profundity of that difference being obscured by sharing the same category. We fool ourselves into thinking the same skill is shared by the butterknife and the sword, and we have fooled ourselves for centuries into thinking we understand democracy because we understand politics. Politics is a long polearm."
Now this next part I wouldn't bother explaining to these birds, as they learn by observation, neither working with teachers nor working as teachers themselves, but I say to you, as one ape to another, that this delusion exists for a good reason. We are not extending the student's skill, in moving from one sense of scale to the next, but we are extending his or her interest: the teacher must know how to stretch the student's interest without moving beyond its limits into disaffection, demoralization and boredom.
If someone is fascinated by what they can do with a pencil, an educator might motivate them to take up the tedious process of working with a chisel and a block of stone, although the enjoyment of one provides no valid template for the other: it is the interest in learning that is extended from one skill to the next, not the skill itself. There are some teenagers who are fascinated by the abstractions of human rights; they are motivated to study politics by their first awareness of "crimes against humanity" on an enormous scale (becoming engrossed in the drama of televised tribunals, for example). The educator's role, then, is to extend their interest, step by step, down to the smallest scale of the local prisons, orphanages, hospitals and schools, where the abstract discourse about "human rights" simultaneously becomes both more and less absurd. If a student only cares about the tangible difference they can make in the real world, they will need to learn how this is related to abstract questions of philosophy and remote examples from ancient history, whereas the student who approaches politics primarily through philosophical reasoning and the study of history will need to learn how this becomes meaningful through the struggle they can engage in with their own hands. Whether it is better to first understand the work of your own hands or the far end of the spear is irrelevant.
Meanwhile, some other teenager might be motivated to study politics by a particular example of police brutality that impacted his own life, or by the simple recognition that the prisons, hospitals and schools he has seen for himself (in his own neighborhood) are not awful by mere happenstance, but as a consequence of definite political decisions that could be studied and become known. In this case, the teacher should work to extend the student's interest outward, although the skill needed to understand politics at each successive scale (at each "order of magnitude") cannot really be applied to the next.
Something that seems inspirational at a distance could become a tedious chore when it is so immediate as to require the work of your own hands; but, for another sort of character, taking pride in his or her own handiwork seems natural, whereas abstractions on the horizon are inscrutable rather than inspiring, offering only an unwanted distraction from the task at hand. It is the teacher's art to extend the student's motivation from one skill to the next, even if that student's motivation is no more altruistic than fear, yearning for revenge, or the desire for money, fame, power, respect and sex.
We should never forget that politics concerns survival, and not only in the narrowest sense of food and shelter: how we are to have meaningful lives is a category of questions that must be asked and answered politically. Without politics, these words mean nothing at all. Without politics, we neither contribute to a civilization nor subtract from it. Without any connection to a polity, we live and die like spiders, each one tending its own web: whatever brings us joy or sorrow is merely self-indulgence, with no significance beyond the limits of the tiny, woven trap where we find ourselves perpetually at the center. A meaningful life begins and ends as a political position; a meaningful death is a political statement, whether in peace or war; you do not choose your face or your fate, but what we decide, politically, is who we truly are. And I say this with real sympathy for all the teenagers who tried to study political philosophy, with or without a teacher, and who ended up with only the most meaningless preparatory courses (and pep talks) on how to be a social worker, a journalist, or a legal secretary. It was the meaning of life itself they were reaching out for --even if their only motivations had been fear, revenge, money, fame, power, respect and sex.
So I ask my court of impatient judges: "Can you really tell me that it would be unreasonable for the people of New Orleans to tear down the justice system they've got, and to experiment with creating some other system, however slapdash, in those conditions?" […]
[This is not the end of chapter five: the narrative now returns to New Orleans, with a tale of police brutality and political incompetence that makes these questions of local democracy and reform of education seem much more urgent and much less abstract.]
