notes.reversedelay.net

There is this urge to distill my thoughts around politics, democracy, and governance into a kind of manifesto, so that, one, it is easier for me to communicate my most important beliefs, values, and principles regarding these topics to other people, to facilitate our recognition of what we agree on, and of what we could still discuss or enlighten each other about; and two, as a reminder to myself, because this modern world is increasingly making us more forgetful.

I could try to hunker down and pore over readings and then meditate and reflect to produce the said manifesto, but that means I’ll likely never get around to doing it, so in this space I will just be writing tentatively about them one by one, as the ideas come to me. Today, I’m thinking about the value of focusing on issues over personalities.

In using this formula of “x over y,” I’m thinking of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, where the authors take care to explain that y is also valuable, it is just that x is more important. Indeed, it’s easy to say that when it comes to issues of governance and other important topics, one focuses on the issues rather than on the personalities, but we’re humans, not Vulcans, we’re social beings not immune to the workings of charisma and other features of interpersonal action. It would be lovely to see political chatter everywhere shift focus to debates on the complications and nuances of data-driven policy-making, but that is hard, and serious and boring; it is easier to talk about people.

Besides, issues and policies do not exist in a vacuum. These ultimately relate to people, and the ones who are most able to do something about them are the personalities of inevitable interest: politicians. And, oh boy, aren’t some of these politicians irresistible, their every word and deed scrutinized on the Internet and glorified or demonized (depending on which side of the political arena one is sitting on). Some of these personalities who have dominated national and global discourse so thoroughly in the past decade are perhaps to blame for the current political climate of nonstop anger and anxiety. But there are personalities who are walking beacons of hope too. This election season, for example, there is this young mayor from a city east of Manila who is worshipped in my online hangout spaces, who seems too good to be true, who is so decent that he makes his current electoral opponent look like the perfect caricature of traditional, backwards, third-world politics.

But I’m getting carried away. See? It’s a good thing that this same mayor makes sure to emphasize in his deliberately non-festive campaign sorties that the focus should not be on personalities, but on systems and institutions. As to whether he is succeeding in perpetuating this new, modern politics in his city remains to be seen. The pioneering sociologist Max Weber teaches that charismatic authority (of which this mayor has plenty) either eventually gives way to modern rational-legal authority, as this mayor would like to happen, or falls back to traditional authority, bringing back with it all its detrimental effects on social progress.

For the love of this country, I hope he succeeds, and that his success would spread and catch fire, ushering in our nation’s much-delayed transition into modernity.

Taking place in the coming days are two elections of great relevance to the Philippine nation: Filipinos will be voting for local and national government leaders, and cardinals will be voting for the next pope. The proximity is an accident, of course: Pope Francis was a beloved leader, and, inevitable as it was, no faithful wanted to see him leave this world and set a conclave in motion.

In their nature and conduct, the two elections have intriguing contrasts. One has millions of voters trooping to precincts across the archipelago, they who have witnessed the nationwide carnival that is the Philippine election campaign season; the other has a mere 133 cardinals holding a secret gathering, with much praying and whispering in secluded chambers.

Yet, both, at their essence, are processes of persons getting to know other persons, and deciding on who is most fit to serve particular roles in society. The cardinals in the past days have not been remiss in reminding their flock that the conclave is the work of the Holy Spirit, that it is much different from the electoral affairs of our temporal institutions, and yet, even the would-be Pope Benedict XVI once admitted that it is an imperfect process with human agency. (As relayed by Rappler’s religion reporter Paterno Esmaquel II, in ‘The Holy Spirit in the conclave and its politics’.) In other words, even this most sacred of elections is also a human activity, not immune to politics, even if the kind of politics I expect cardinals to conduct is among the most benevolent possible from men, charitably speaking.

The election of the pope, according to the recent conclave chatter, is said to be an unpredictable process, where the lists of papabile are just as likely to be spot-on as they can be utterly misguiding in the end for those trying to predict who would be the next pope. The Vatican watchers say that most of the cardinals do not know each other well, and that the trajectory of the voting only starts to take shape when they meet in the short time leading to the conclave proper.

I cannot help but wonder then how these cardinals’ information-gathering and decision-making thought processes look like during these days. As the princes of the church meet their peers, do they approach them with an analytical, purpose-driven mind, or do they first see in the other, simply, a human being, as they are supposed to do, according to what they preach? When, deep in the privacy of their thoughts, they weigh their options for their conclave vote, how much of the realpolitik needs of the 21^st-century church do they consider, and how much is left to Holy Spirit-inspired vibe checks?

The Jesuit scholastic Kevin Stephon Centeno writes in a reflection on the late pope (‘Pope Francis: Returning to the tradition of Jesus Christ’):

At times, labels can help us understand a person and his characteristics. Categorizing someone as this or that is very human since we are always in need of words that define and that can serve as a reference point in encountering someone different from us.

However, we need to be cautious with absolutizing labels.

Labels can dehumanize and erase the complexity of the person. While we cannot totally do away with labels, we should still, citing Timothy Radcliffe, OP in one of his synod meditations, “be formed for deeply personal encounters with each other, in which we transcend easy labels.” Deep personal encounters allow us to lovingly meet the person who goes beyond simplistic labels.

Here is a beautiful reminder that people are not just datasets to be processed and reduced for feeding into decision-making engines. Not always, at least.

I have been reconsidering my own process of deciding on who to vote for in government elections, since my thinking about governance and democracy and politics have also been shifting. (Towards refinement, rather than degradation, I hope.) A question that keeps coming up is how to be more rational in the face of both an abundance of irrelevant information (a.k.a. noise, of most political chatter) and the lack or inaccessibility of enough relevant data on candidates (a.k.a. signals, especially at the local level). How can I reasonably get to know so many candidates with only so much time? I usually fall far short of the data-driven, rational ideal, and end up voting for some (or many?) candidates whom I have chosen based on mental shortcuts.

Maybe it is no fault of my own. The writer and cultural critic L.M. Sacasas writes:

The deluge of information through which we all slog everyday is not hospitable to the ideals of objectivity and impartiality, which to some degree were artifacts of print and mass media ecosystems. The present condition of information super-abundance and troves of easily searchable memory databases makes it trivially easy to either expose actual instances of bias, self-interest, inconsistency, and outright hypocrisy or to generate (unwittingly for yourself or intentionally for others) the appearance of such. In the age of the Database, no one controls the Narrative. And while narratives proliferate and consolidate along a predictable array of partisan and factional lines, the notion that the competing claims could be adjudicated objectively or impartially is defeated by exhaustion.

And, confronted by exhaustion, we fall back to shortcuts.

Perhaps that is fine. We exercise reason until we reach its limit, at which point we leave the rest to faith—faith in a higher being who, despite the shortcomings of humanity, guides all nations towards a majestic destiny.

‘Democracy’ is one of those concepts that we take for granted, and a word we use in capital-‘i’ Important conversations, but there is a crucial aspect of it that is often missed in the common usage. What we often think of when we think about democracy is the electoral aspect, and how decisions are made based on whichever option gets the most votes. This winning alternative reigns, no matter how bitter or resentful it leaves the losing factions.

This is what the deliberative conception of democracy addresses. Democracy is not, or should not be, just about the procedure of voting; it is also as much about the formative process of reaching a decision tolerable to the many, not just to the one winning camp. The goal—not always achievable—is a consensus. The winner might not be everyone’s first choice, but at least, through the deliberative democratic process, everyone gets a chance to air their reservations and disagreements, try to persuade the other teams, and potentially uncover a final alternative better than what was available at the start of the process.

It is easy to see how different this is from how democracy is actually practiced now. The elections of government officials are not carried out in a charitable and rational procedure, where the alternatives are carefully scrutinized in orderly debates where all sides are truly open to being persuaded. This latter point is critical: in the deliberative ideal version of democracy, there are no fanatics, there are no permanent factions or political parties. Everyone would be genuinely open to changing their votes. People would not go campaigning for a candidate while holding them sacred and infallible; there are no tribes, no cheering for one’s side while booing the others like sports fans in an arena.

Obviously, this ideal state of democracy remains that, an ideal. First among many reasons is that it is expensive. Deliberation and reasoning takes time, and time is a scarce resource. (To make things worse, time is disproportionately more scarce for the masses of people whom democratic governance is supposed to benefit, than to the elites who often end up dominating the flawed democracies.) Deliberation also assumes the strong presence of a shared reality, a common information environment: debates work only if the participants can point to the same, agreed-upon ecosystem of facts and experiences to support their claims. Unfortunately, the Internet did not democratize information, as its early proponents claimed. Instead, it created an anarchy.

Still, it is imperative to work towards a more deliberative democratic society, because there is no choice but to improve this form of society that we have good reason to believe is the best there is. As the famous Winston Churchill quote goes: “Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried.”

In his recent essay ‘The Waters of Lethe Flow From Our Digital Streams,’ L.M. Sacasas compares our digital environment, our online reality, to the river Lethe in Greek mythology, the underworld river which induces forgetfulness in everyone who drinks from it. Sacasas arrived at this metaphor from pondering that all-too-common experience of picking up our phone (or whichever digital device), seeking and intending only a few minutes’ worth of distraction, only to end up quickly forgetting what we set out to do, getting lost in the infinite stream of content.

It is, essentially, about one of the many effects of information overload, and is not a particularly novel observation about our experiences with the Internet. But the reframing in terms of Greek mythology makes it more appealing and lends it gravitas. The Greeks certainly knew how to ponder important questions and afflictions, and they had remedies to offer and prescribe.

I have been in a very unfocused state for a while now, my mind battered by winds of inattention too strong for my feeble mental foundations. I could use some ancient Greek prescription for this ailment. In his essay, Sacasas identifies one such remedy: “a practice of anamnesis”. Wikipedia tells me this means something particular in Platonic philosophy, and I usually would have taken this as a cue to dive down a rabbit hole of Web pages to build a scholarly understanding of this alluring Greek term. But that, I recognize now, is to indulge again in drinking from the waters of Lethe.

So I will just take an irrational leap of faith and—gasp—assume that the idea of anamnesis is something in the same spirit as that currently fashionable idea of returning to “first principles”. One medicine for distraction and digital forgetfulness, according to this ethos, is a deliberate, mindful focus on one’s core values, and this mindfulness would help illuminate the path of true priorities, bringing clarity to an otherwise chaotic existence. (And there are practices that aid mindfulness, such as writing, like this.)

It sounds serious and Greek-like enough. I hope it helps.