The Personal Politics of Emotional One-upmanship

On feelings and the narrowing of horizons

By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realise the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whither we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.

-Leo Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient and Modern

The 1960s radicals who popularised the slogan ‘the personal is political’ thought that they were expanding horizons: opening up the private sphere to the liberating force of politics. In fact they were doing the opposite: narrowing the horizon of politics to sheer personal interest. Two news stories from the past week or so, trivial at first glance, bring this home quite starkly. And in doing so they remind us that we have not yet even really begun to grapple with the central issue of our time: the nature of secular modernity itself.

First - the UK Parliament’s House of Commons last week had a debate on an Order that was recently made by Kemi Badenoch, the Minister for Women and Equalities,¹ on the subject of Gender Recognition. Essentially, this Order stipulates the requirements for somebody who has had their gender changed in a foreign jurisdiction to have that change recognised within UK law; its main practical consequence is that if somebody has changed their gender through self-identification alone in an overseas country this will not be sufficient for the UK to recognise that change. The subtext here is almost a supertext: the UK government does not want to permit people to change their gender as a result of self-identification alone, and this means it wants to prevent UK citizens from circumventing restrictions on self-ID here by doing it in other jurisdictions where the requirements are more lax.

An interesting, and highly illustrative, snippet of the debate in the Commons, featuring the Labour MP Sir Chris Bryant, can be viewed here. But to offer a transcript of the preface to his question:

I will say this as gently as I can. As a gay man, I feel less safe today than I did three years or five years ago. Why? Sometimes it is because of the rhetoric used in the public debate, including by the Minister….I am just making the point that many of us feel less safe today, and when people over there on the Government Benches cheer, as they just did [in response to a statement by Miriam Cates MP about the protection of women and girls], it chills me to the bone—it genuinely does.

Now, I am not entirely dismissive of the substance of these comments (although it is probably worth saying that Sir Chris Bryant is ultimately a very frivolous and mediocre figure). While the language of ‘safety’ and being ‘chill[ed] to the bone’ is a bit silly and obviously being deployed for effect, I understand the point that he was trying to make - and which gay friends have made to me before - which is that there remains an abiding concern, despite the astonishing rapidity with which society has changed, that there could one day be a return to the ‘bad old days’ of repression and illegality when it comes to homosexuality. No matter how unlikely that may seem, and no matter that the issue being debated (gender self-ID) has nothing really to do with gay rights as such, it is important to recognise that some gay people have that lingering fear, and that they are as a result hypersensitive to anything that looks even remotely like a backlash against gay rights. One can empathise with this even if one ultimately agrees with Kemi Badenoch on the issue at hand.

Setting to one side the substantive issue, though, it is worth considering exactly what is going on here: the deployment of personal feelings to attempt to win political debate. A claim is made - gender self-identification will, empirically, make women and girls less safe, because it will result in men changing their legal gender for nefarious purposes - and this is purportedly refuted not by a competing empirical claim or an empirical challenge but by a plea to emotion: ‘I, as a gay Parliamentarian, feel less safe, and my feeling of unsafety is stronger.’

Never mind whether or not there is any justification for this ‘feeling unsafe’; what is significant about it is the way in which it transforms politics into a game of who can appeal to personal emotional response more strongly. Who feels the unsafest? Sir Chris Bryant or, say, a woman in a public toilet or gym changing room confronted with the presence of a biological man? And in so doing, it takes the question of the national interest - not to mention justice, fairness, or even empirical reality itself - entirely off the table. Politics is thus reduced to a mere confrontation between personal feelings; the result is a narrowing of political horizons to the least important and interesting sphere of all (except for the unreconstructed narcissist) - our navels, and what our navels have to say about the role of government.

The second story is that of the comments made by a BBC radio presenter, Nihal Arthanayake, at a recent journalism conference, to the effect that, well, there were too many white people working at the Beeb and this constituted a threat to his mental health. To quote:

It's really affecting me that I walk in and all I see is white people…The hardest thing is to walk into a room, look around and nobody looks like you.

Now, when it comes to racists, I think empathy ought to be a lower priority, so I will tell it like it is here: I don’t believe Mr Arthanayake for a moment. The reason why I don’t believe him for a moment is that I have worked in workplaces in which I have been literally the only white person in a room full of dozens of people of another ethnicity. And so I know that the consequences for one’s mental health that stem from being the only person of a particular race in a room are, basically, nonexistent. After about ten seconds one doesn’t even notice a difference anymore, and one simply absorbs the truth that (saying this makes one a radical nowadays), we are all human beings and when it comes to personal interactions racial distinctions between individuals don’t actually matter.

But, again, something much bigger is at stake here, which is the deployment of personal feelings as the tool of a competitive game. Mr Arthanayake’s comments were made at a conference about equality, diversity and inclusion in journalism, and were therefore transparently an example of somebody playing to an audience. I think I am safe therefore in going out on a limb in saying that his statement was not really about the mental health struggles associated with his own racist sentiments towards white people (although I think it is evident that those racist sentiments are real enough); it was about drawing attention to a particular issue (diversity at the BBC) in a ostentatious and self-aggrandizing way, in the interests of his career. To the extent that it has made Mr Arthanayake more well-known (I certainly had never heard of him before) it has definitely worked, and no doubt it got him plenty of back-slaps at the event itself and invitations to speaking engagements at future conferences. No doubt many more Twitter followers too.

We see all around us, in other words, the consequences of the personal becoming political, and it is not very pretty - indeed, it is all very sordid: the entire exercise of politics reduced to a mere spectacle of emotional one-upmanship. Whether it is a senior Parliamentarian seeking to trump an opponent in a debate through appeal to how her policy makes him feel, or a BBC journalist weaponising mental health in a political way in the interests of career advancement, everybody in public life seems to be seeking at all times to assert the personal as the be-all and end-all of politics, and feelings as the decisive factor in determining policy. The result is that our public life is becoming ever more petty and shrill; when the personal is all that matters and feelings are the only recognised currency, one can appeal to nothing but the force of one’s feelings in seeking to win political debate. In the end, this reduces us to little more than shrieking children, and the emotional tenor of our politics thus takes on the aspect of a primary school playground.

But all of this was long ago foreseen. Leo Strauss, writing in the early 1960s on the subject of Machiavelli, staked out the issue for us in very clear terms. Modernity, for Strauss - since it rejected the spiritual and theological and recognised only the rational and temporal as sources of value - had narrowed mankind’s horizons, even while it had ostensibly resulted in a great expansion in personal freedom. This was because, when politics becomes concerned merely with the physical and the temporal, the relationship between the ruler and ruled inevitably becomes transactional; the only way that the ruler can present his rule as legitimate is by purporting to ‘govern’ in the sense of improving the lives of the population.

This of course incentivises government to endlessly present itself as necessary to the population by relentlessly identifying new problems which only it can solve on their behalf; and it also incentives the population to concern itself only with ‘hedonic’ matters - the avoidance of discomfort and the obtaining of material satisfaction - and how government can provide help in this regard. The consequence is the two parties, government and governed, becoming locked in a vicious cycle, with the government constantly trying to find new ways to do ever more for the governed, and the governed becoming ever more demanding accordingly.

How this manifests itself will of course vary in accordance with the dominant ideological frame. Under Nazism, the promise was that government would cleanse the body politic of polluting elements and bring about union between State and people; under Communism, the promise was that government was ushering in a new phase of History in which resources would become endlessly abundant; under liberalism, the promise is that government is necessary to free each and every individual from all wants and fears. But at root the basic dynamic is the same: since there is no reason for government to exist other than that it does things for people, the entire project is, as it were, on rails: it can only go in one direction, towards the provision of ever more Good Things (however that might be interpreted) to the populace.

The reason why Machiavelli was important to Strauss was in other words precisely because he was the first to make the personal political: he was concerned not with transcendent value but purely with the person of the ruler and how he or she could take, and keep, charge, essentially through buying the loyalty of the populace. We live in Machiavelli’s world, and what has become clear in the centuries since is that what is true for the ruler eventually becomes true for the population at large. In a secular society, which definitionally does not recognise transcendent value, or indeed any value except for contentless ‘rationality’ or ‘science’, all that is left is personal jostling for whatever one can get - a perpetual struggle for status, power, wealth. Virtue is stripped away, to leave only personal motives behind; ‘every man for himself and God against all’, as the famous modernist line goes.

The end result, to use Strauss’s own terms, is that our gaze is perpetually lowered to the subhuman, rather than the superhuman. All that matters to us, increasingly, is the material, and the status games from which increased material goods flow. And it should be no surprise therefore firstly that our feelings should become increasingly weaponised in the manner in which we are seeing, and secondly that we should search ever more for emotional comfort as a necessary extension of the underlying dynamic, in which ever more demands are placed upon the State - extending beyond the physical and into the sphere of mental well-being.

These are, bluntly put, the consequences of secularism when it has stamped the spiritual and the transcendent out from public life. We do not wish to recognise those consequences, because we like to cling to the notion that the interests of humanity itself (the ‘brotherhood of man’) can be of sufficient weight as a concept to provide a sense of agnostic value that will motivate society instead. It is becoming increasingly evident, though, how inadequate this notion really is. And through this process it is also becoming revealed to us ever more strongly how gruesome the consequences of the personalisation of the political will ultimately be: subhuman, in the Straussian sense, with only hedonism on the horizon, and only our own personal status to inspire us. Those who do not wish to relinquish secularism’s gains need therefore to think long and hard about its negative effects, and what in the end those effects show about the long-term viability of the entire project. Put very simply, they need to find a way to imagine how a vision of the superhuman can exist without a concept of the divine. The fate of secular society indeed I think rests on this.

1. I am anxious not to get sidetracked, but I do wish to note how much this title pains me purely from a grammatical perspective; it is astonishing to see such contempt for graceful English usage so openly on display within government itself.