Ideas
Truly, madly, politically
Published 19 June 2008
David Davis's snap resignation struck a chord with people because it was spontaneous and unscripted. But why did so many commentators struggle with the idea it was a reasoned decision, ponders Demos director Catherine Fieschi. And why do we have a problem with emotion in politics?
We all know a week is a long time in politics - but a weekend? Long enough, it seems, for a man to go from nuts to visionary. The David Davis saga brings to the surface the myriad underlying assumptions, relational synapses, summary judgements and convenient shortcuts that underpin political life. If politics were a good book, it would more often look as it did over the past few days - full of surprise, spontaneity, revolt, disbelief, judgement, repentance, suspicion, self-sacrifice, posturing and even conversion.
Questions abound - will Davis's stance help the cause for which he is fighting? How split are the Tories? More fun, how furious are they? Above all, does his grandstanding damage David Cameron? These are all good questions but they miss what is really interesting: namely, what happens when spontaneity and its handmaidens re-enter our field of political vision. Ironed out of the news scripts by spin masters such as Alastair Campbell, spontaneity leaves politicians flipping frantically through their lines. Cueless and clueless - witness the headlines that followed his resignation announcement - Davis was pronounced "crazy". Anyone so committed to a position that they decide to resign their seat in the Commons and their post as shadow home secretary had to, well, have a screw loose.
It had to be cynicism or manipulation - a thinly veiled ploy to make a play for the leadership of the Conservative Party. But within two or three days of his resignation, the tide was turning. A "principled streak" emerged from the stories. "Vainglorious and mad but rather terrific", as one columnist put it. The certainty that Davis was nuts (or nuts and evil) was replaced by a surge of support - "Principled and brave, yes. But Davis still looks an oddball", read one headline in the Guardian. It took hundreds of column inches to arrive at the startling conclusion that Davis might have made a reasoned stance. Why such reluctance to believe that, principled or not, useful or not, misguided or not, riddled with ulterior motives or not, this was a decision born, as decisions usually are, of a combination of emotional reasoning and strategic rationality?
One of the obvious aspects of the Davis affair is that the public's support for his stance is partly explained by the excitement of knowing it was not scripted. It was not managed by the party. The Tories were forced to react. The public and the commentariat were forced to react. And in this early summer of political discontent the important contrast is not between the two (or three) parties, between the two (or three) leaders), between old and new, ill at ease and at ease with a vengeance, but between spontaneity and script, managerialism and politics.
All this was made abundantly clear at a Demos event at the Hay Festival a few weeks ago, when we hosted a debate on politics and emotions. Over the course of an hour I had an ill-formed hunch confirmed - namely, that at a time when our political script is punctuated by self-hatred, irritation, disappointment and anxiety, we have to have the guts to ask what kind of relationship we want to politics. If the David Davis episode illustrates anything, it illustrates that.
This could turn out to be the richest of political moments: the moment at which we finally turn the corner and square our political operating system with the lives we lead and the things we feel. Let's not blow it because we don't "do" emotions.
Frustration
My own frustration is that, in my "native" social science discipline of politics, and in the policy arena, and even in the acute world of informed commentariat, emotions never figure in ways that are less than patronising and mocking. I spent ten years studying the far right across the world and only rarely did anyone care to mention that emotions might, conceivably, be part of a phenomenon whose most obvious manifestations were fear, authoritarianism and mass ritual. Could emotions have something to do with this? A few brave souls have explored the possibility, some brilliantly (see Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies for an extraordinary - though not as titillating as the title might suggest - analysis of fetishism and fascism). But establishing categories of deviant personality types has been the main aim of political psychology.
From the writings of Gustave Le Bon to the controversial "authoritarian personality" experiments in 1950s Berkeley, emotion and research on emotions is looked upon with suspicion. More than half a century later, the public and analysts alike seem unable to move on from this fascination with personality and profiling. From politicians to terrorists, parents to youth, this approach still holds inordinate sway. Not only does this perpetuate one of the Enlightenment's less useful myths (that emotions only serve to "overwhelm reason"), the obsession with personality prompts us to focus on the unusual rather than what we share. This accounts for much of the Punch and Judy political reporting and commentary, but it also triggers a drag-and-drop attitude towards politicians as "types", and a wilful ignoring of shared emotion. It is not emotions that lead us astray, but our need for reassuring categories into which we fling people (cue the David Davis delirium headlines).
Working with labels is an easy way to avoid confronting states intrinsic to the world of politics because they are intrinsic to humanity. Our political categories, stunted as they are, are not good at accommodating emotions such as desire, envy, jealousy, anger, irritation and despair.
Relief
Thankfully, another emotion is in sight: relief. In the social sciences, but also in neuroscience and physiology, we seem to be making progress. Many are working to break the hold of the simplistic tenets of classical economics; others question the nonsensical allegiance to what Steven Pinker labelled the "blank slate syndrome" - ie, the belief that we are completely culturally and contextually determined and that our bodies, our physiology, is irrelevant.
Such studies have themselves given rise to an emotionally charged ideological debate and accusations of a kind of biological determinism that the left cannot square easily with its commitment to change and self-determination. In a desperate attempt to avoid looking more closely at biology and neurology, the left has refused to engage properly with a set of tools that can help to rehabilitate emotions as a reliable guide to choice, to behaviour and commitment.
Drew Westen's The Political Brain or George E Marcus's The Sentimental Citizen demonstrate that reason is in part the physiological product of emotional systems. The two writers shed light on how and why people choose leaders, why they experience satisfaction, well-being, pleasure, betrayal. Ditch the heart and mind distinction and, all of a sudden, you not only move beyond biological determinism, you access a form of biological wisdom.
Frustration (again)
And yet frustration returns in the face of the policy world's remarkable imperviousness to this research agenda and its implications for policy. This matters. Reason is intrinsically bound up with any emotional reaction. We should recognise its validity beyond the poll or the focus group. Fear and enthusiasm are highly discerning mechanisms and are conductors of political preference and choice. They are also highly receptive to changes in the environment and can yield counter-intuitive results. These emotions are guides to action. When we talk of "trust", we should remember that "trusting" someone is about choosing to weather a measure of vulnerability; that solidarity is about empathy; that alienation is about loneliness; that extremism is not just about despair, but also about excitement and enthusiasm. These are all potential clues to be harnessed in policymaking.
They are also clues as to who the public are. It is remarkable that the advertising industry cottoned on to this (possibly for the wrong reasons) decades ago, while policymakers, particularly left-wing policymakers, behave like rabbits caught in the ideological headlights the minute the prospect of emotional engagement is raised. In all areas of politics - from radicalisation, to public behaviour, from citizenship issues to matters of security - acknowledging the real, emotionally driven, relationship that people have to these matters is still seen as either sentimental claptrap, manipulation or an opportunity to manipulate. Or all of the above.
On the left, we are too often compelled to acknowledge material issues to the detriment of any other explanatory factor. Deprivation also plays a major role - if not a straightforward one - but here, too, we need to acknowledge that its impact is mediated by emotional choices.
For the policy world, taking these issues on board is also about embedding a measure of emotional literacy into policymaking - from the inception of a policy to its delivery. From prisons to social-care policies, it is the incapacity to hold on to that emotionally literate thread that accounts for many of our failures.
We start off with an NHS that commits to "dignity and compassion" in its documents - and does so in good faith - but these principles are wrung out, expelled, diluted, reified in so much of the planning that intervenes between the intentions and the delivery. The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme is a case in point. A policy designed to deal with vulnerability, depression and anxiety is being rolled out with little regard for the necessary hesitation and messiness that come with such emotionally charged territory. Sustained, emotionally fulfilling and empowering engagement is the only way to manage the long-term, chronic care that will be the hallmark of our epoch. Yet the policy talk remains centred on targets, on OECD rankings, on benchmarking. All of these are important contextual factors, but they are not persuasive or sustaining ones.
Do we - both as analysts and policymakers - really want to perpetuate policymaking that reduces emotions to a nuisance or a sideshow?
Academics and policymakers have reason to tread carefully. However, there is one group for whom I am inclined to show less forgiveness and that is (though not all of them, I hasten to add) the commentariat.
Disbelief
The panel at Hay was a case in point - and this is why it has been haunting me. It was a good panel and an entertaining one. But it was also a panel that seemed unable and unwilling to engage with the complexity and emotional tenets of the topic. One participant summed up his position by saying that politicians were not only "bastards but also bonkers"; the other harked back nostalgically to a time when politicians didn't show emotions. Both kept firmly to issues of personality. They may make for better stories, but they offer up yet another caricature of politics and, more to the point, a caricature of what emotional literacy might look like. The reference point was, comfortably for everyone on the panel, Tony Blair's emotionalism.
No one seemed willing to entertain the possibility of a middle point between Clement Attlee (who was reputed to fire people by way of advanced grunting and dismissive one-liners) and Blair's tearful, steely-jawed, dewy-eyed appeals. No one on the panel wanted to move past notions of emotionalism and "blubbing". The fact that there might be a difference between emotionalism and a minimum of emotional literacy was, handily, glossed over.
Hope
At this point the audience played the part of the Greek chorus and issued what amounted to a stark warning about ignoring "the signs". One after the other they put up their hands and asked fabulous questions: they recognised their own confusion, pointed to cultural differences, wondered what it was about "our system" that tended to turn politicians into caricatures of themselves (to make them bonkers or at least appear bonkers, even if some of them start out as bastards) and fully accepted that they were unsure about how they felt about politics and the kind of emotional relationship they wanted with it. They voiced their anxiety about living in a system and an era that didn't ever allow them to feel quite "grown up". In other words, they didn't let anyone get in the way of talking about what we had come to talk about, and they largely eschewed the personality issue. It served as a poignant illustration both of the importance of these issues for the public, but also as a sign (that's what choruses do) that this is a moment to seize, to try to ask these questions and bring our emotional wisdom and plain old courage to the debate. Who knows, we could reinvent something. And the public is ready to give it a try.
Given the permanent state of reinvention into which we are maintained by 21st-century politics and the pace of change around us, this "not feeling quite grown-up", this anxiety about never being allowed to settle into ourselves, is the one thing that is here to stay - and one of the major political challenges ahead. Learning how one manages the enthusiasm and the inevitable bouts of exhaustion (that will come from the regular spells of retraining, the myriad professional reinventions, the countless house or country moves, the need to integrate as new citizens and old citizens, and the pressure to keep going), how we create a set of political relationships that will help to build the necessary emotional resilience in citizens, is the key political challenge we face. To do this we need to recognise that emotions can be educated, that they are also reliable guides, that they are a means to communicate, that they are the tools with which we reason. And that, when you least expect it, they can make things pretty damn exciting again.
Catherine Fieschi is director of Demos
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