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Politics needs some deep stirring emotion

In politics, the struggle between our reason and desire is a fair fight.
A young woman in a blue suit stands at a wooden box in a parliamentary debating chamber looking upward while speaking.
British Youth Council parliamentary debate.
British Youth Council.

“The government you elect is the government you deserve.” So goes the famous quote, variously attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Joseph de Maistre and George Bernard Shaw. Of all these thinkers, Maistre is perhaps the most interesting, describing the business of government as a kind of religion, a political “faith” – one complete with dogmas, mysteries and even ministers.  

Maistre was, somewhat surprisingly amid the turmoil of eighteenth-century France, a staunch monarchist. His argument was that, if the authority of a political leader was only a product of social convention, then that authority would always lack a sufficient degree of legitimacy, leaving the door wide open for violence and strife. His solution was to defend the divine right of kings. This was a controversial position, as much then as it is now.  

Aside from his famous quote about elections, Maistre’s political philosophy is oft-criticised as polemical, hearkening back to a golden era of European monarchy that never really existed. Nevertheless, within his writings, Maistre laid bare a reality that we often prefer to keep veiled: that our political will is as much about what we find to be emotionally compelling as it is about what we find to be rationally convincing, indeed, the latter is very much dependent on the former. The more social scientists are able to demonstrate the reality of subtle phenomena such as confirmation bias, unconscious bias, and racial prejudice, the more we see that we are often being governed by pre-cognitive or non-cognitive instincts, even those of us who like to think that we are better than that. In the end, we have to concede that when it comes to politics, as with so much else, the struggle between our faculty of reason and the desire of our heart is a fair fight.  

  

“They have few standards by which to judge between falsehood and truth in revolutionary movements.”  

Amy Buller

In 1930’s Europe, there was certainly a lot of emotionally compelling politics around. Fascinated by the language and culture of the German people, thinker and educator Amy Buller made repeated visits to Germany from the 1920’s onwards, often accompanied by reading parties of British academics, church leaders and university students. In those decades, as the political landscape of Germany began to shift, her purpose became less about countryside walks and studying, and more about the facilitation of urgent, open and honest dialogue between Buller, her fellow travellers, and their German counterparts in the churches and universities wherever she had contacts. As Hitler rose to power, and even before the full horrors of Nazism became widely known, Amy was compelled to find out why so many people, especially young people, were being attracted by what she saw as a “brutish” ideology.  

In 1943, amid the violence and destruction of World War II, Buller published a book, Darkness Over Germany, which gives a first-hand account of the many people that she and her travelling parties had met, and the conversations that had taken place. Like Maistre, Buller proposed that without God, politics was a dangerous kind of faith in something, one that tended towards violence. In the introduction to her book she writes of “…the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth, who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.”  

It’s common these days to hear complaints about the political apathy of the young, with polls commonly reporting that only about 50 per cent of British 18 to 24-year-olds are intending to vote in the next General Election. However, there are those who raise the caution that this may not be a symptom of apathy, so much as a symptom of the cultural and structural injustices that put barriers in the way of young people engaging with our nation’s political life. Young people are not likely to “believe in” a political system from which they feel excluded. As Buller’s writing notes – when this happens, young people are likely to put their “faith” in something else.   

Maistre’s solution was perhaps too extreme for modern sensibilities: asking the politically minded populace to believe that their leaders were imbued with the authority of God, by God. In the twentieth-century, Buller took a more moderate view. As the Nazis began to view her with suspicion, trips to Germany became increasingly difficult to arrange, so she travelled elsewhere to places such as Hungary and Bulgaria. Wherever Buller went, she found more and more young people who wanted to talk to her about their political hopes and ideals. Summarising the whole, Buller suggested that Europe’s political landscape was eschewing “shallow rationalism” and instead being shaken by a “deep stirring” of emotion, particularly among young people. She recorded the observation: 

“They all want change, and they all want a chance to play a part in that change, but so few have any religious faith, which means that they have few standards by which to judge between falsehood and truth in revolutionary movements.” 

In a recent report, published by the Jo Cox Foundation, increasing the public’s “political literacy” was highlighted as a key response to prevent the outbreaks of abuse, intimidation and violence towards elected officials. As any educator will tell you, literacy is a two-way street – it includes not only the “shallow rationalism” of knowing information, or knowing where to access information, but also the ability to communicate that information effectively to others. Such communication comes from a much deeper, embodied kind of knowing, one which requires one to have assimilated knowledge and worked with it, feeling its malleability, and testing its apparent truth-claims against an internal standard of what is true and false, or right and wrong.  

For Buller, this internal standard was inextricably linked to faith. To the end of her life, she remained open minded as to what form this faith might take, albeit her own religious practice was firmly Christian. Cumberland Lodge, the educational charity she set up to promote her aims, was from the start open to those of all faiths and none, and she warmly welcomed dialogue between those of different faith groups, including atheism. But in 1943, as Amy Buller looked with hope towards the prospect of a post-war Europe, she summed up the political landscape as follows:  

We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations, including our own, I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction.  

Given Amy Buller’s open-mindedness, one can read the word “God” in this statement its broadest possible sense, as referring to whatever moral compass one takes as an internal standard of what is true and false, or right and wrong. But the point remains that the political will is therefore not a matter of rational thought, or not only of that, but is an expression of feelings and instincts that run far, far deeper.  

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Reading Don Quixote is making me a better person

Learning from Cervantes’ mistakes
Statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza point toward a windmill
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza statues, Tandil, Argentina.
Alena Grebneva, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I love reading, but I’m not very well read. As is often the case, a curmudgeonly teacher quashed any interest I had in literature in my last few years of school; the increasing creep of technology and social media into my life means my diminishing attention span often makes reading seem a herculean task. It’s a long time to sit still and not doomscroll.  

It’s only in recent years that I’ve rediscovered a love of reading. As part of this, I’m trying to right some literary wrongs.  

Okay, confession time: I’ve never read anything by Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, George Elliot, Tolstoy, or Proust. I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings or Moby Dick nor To The Lighthouse or Heart of Darkness. I know. Bad, isn’t it? I could go on, too … 

I love reading, but I’m not very well read.  

And so I’m making an effort to read some of the Great Books of the canon. At the moment, I’m reading Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Crucially, I’m reading Edith Grossman’s 2003 translation of the novel. It is an absolute joy.  

I had heard that it was deeply funny, and a work of genius; neither aspect of the text has been a surprise to me. But there’s something about Grossman’s translation in particular that has caught me off guard: the mistakes.   

Not any mistakes by Grossman. I know nothing whatsoever about Spanish, let alone 17th Century Spanish (another dream crushed by another teacher), but the English text is a marvel. Eminently readable and funny without compromising the occasional complexity of Cervantes’ prose.  

No: I mean the mistakes by Cervantes himself. Early on, a footnote from Grossman points out that Sancho Panza (Don Quixote’s long-suffering squire) refers to his wife using several different names throughout the text. Without Grossman’s footnotes, I’m sure I would have overthought this. What is the author trying to say about Sancho Panza? Is it a comment on his intelligence? Or the character’s view of women, perhaps? Am I just too dense to understand what’s going on here? 

Grossman’s assessment? It’s just “an oversight”. A mistake. And quite a basic one, at that. Later on, Cervantes divides up his chapters, using those brief sentences summarising their contents that are common in this period (“Chapter III, In which …”). But they’re all wrong. Things are said to happen in Chapter X that don’t actually happen until Chapter XV; the chapter summaries are a mess, frankly.  

One of the things that made me reluctant to read Great Books for so long is that they’re intimidating. They are certified Works of Genius and therefore probably a bit much for my little brain to digest. Many of the archetypical Great Books compound this by being incredibly long, too: think Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, or even more recent candidates like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. Don Quixote itself runs to nearly 1,000 pages long; it carries a literal and literary heft to it. 

But there it is. Full of mistakes. 

It turns out to have been quite an opportune moment for me to read Don Quixote. I’m in the final stages of preparing for my second book to come out. (It’s an academic Christian theology book, so will probably sell slightly less than Don Quixote but will certainly cost much more to buy). This means it’s been quite a stressful season for me, as I try to catch any lingering mistakes that might have somehow slipped through the myriad rounds of copyediting, or find myself wondering if the book isn’t just so bad that I’m going to be forced to return my PhD, leave academia forever, and by sued by my publisher for besmirching their good name by association.  

This has also been a time of being deeply frustrated with my own humanity. Why aren’t I a better writer? Why can’t I spell properly? Why aren’t I more creative? Why aren’t I better at this? Why am I so … limited

As an academic, imposter syndrome never really goes away. You just learn to cope with it. And reading Don Quixote and seeing these mistakes in the text has helped me reframe who I am, and my own limitations. Here is a text that is human; completely and utterly human. And so, naturally, here is a text with mistakes; text that is imperfect and flawed. And therein lies its part of its charm. It is rough and coarse, and I love it for that. The mistakes in Don Quixote haven’t detracted from my enjoyment of the text, they’ve enhanced it. They’ve underscored the beautiful humanity that is so evident in Cervantes’ work.  

The Christian Bible is at pains to tell me that I am “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as the Psalmist puts it. I can be so quick to forget this when I focus all my attention on my limitations, and flaws, and missteps. This is why I’m so grateful for Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Above all else, I’m grateful for its mistakes. Like me, it is utterly human. Like me, this means it is utterly flawed. Like me, that makes it a work of utter beauty. 

Don Quixote is helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of my limitations as a creature. In doing so, it’s helping me to recognise the inherent beauty of the One who created me. It’s helping me to fall more in love with the God who sent His Son to Earth to become human like me, to revel in and live alongside me in my humanity. Warts and all. 

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