The beginning of the year is traditionally a time to look beyond the messiness of the past year, to imagine a larger and more generous life, and to make good resolutions. It is also a time for reflecting on the character of public life and to ask whether we find there any large vision of a better world. And, indeed, to ask whether we should look for one.
Certainly, the business of political life is generally limited to managerial goals, such as cutting the deficit, lowering taxes, cutting welfare and educational budgets, and strengthening the security apparatus. Its rhetoric is small, often mean, appealing to fear and anxiety and promising maintenance of past entitlements rather than a sketch of a better world. The language is abstract, managerial and the metaphors stale and domestic.
If we compare political life of a century ago with that of today, we shall recognise the same narrowness, self-interest and meanness in its everyday conduct. But political issues were set, often fraudulently to be sure, in a larger rhetoric of national vision for which rich images and words came naturally. The contrast between then and now provokes question why this appeal to a larger vision has been lost, and indeed whether it matters.
The loss is partly due to the erosion of the culture which supported high vision and its rhetoric. These drew on the Jewish and Christian prophetic tradition whose words and images were handed on through widespread church allegiance and rudimentary religious education. Belief in an after-life was conventional, and the biblical imagery and rhetoric of hope in a transformed world readily available.
Such images of the future as the proud being put down from their thrones and the poor raised, the city of God descending like a bride adorned for her husband, a green and fertile land, the desert flowering and the lion lying down with the lamb were familiar and flowed easily into the political imagination.
In a culturally diverse society where religious faith has less purchase, and the biblical images of the future are not part of the popular imagination, that tradition is no longer shared. Hope is now generally imagined in technological and material terms or in personal and interpersonal relationships. The language and imagery of politics are correspondingly managerial, technological and domestic.
The loss of a larger shared hope and of the rhetoric to inspire it is a mixed blessing. In the last century secularised versions of a larger vision caused untold suffering. The Marxist vision of a material paradise to be built by eradicating what existed before brought massive suffering in the prison camps of Siberia, and the paddy fields of China and Cambodia. The earlier Taiping civil war in China, rooted in a sick man's reading prophetic texts from Isaiah, cost 20 or 30 million lives. Hitler's vision of a racially homogenous master race sparked war and destruction through Europe. Such movements understandably led many people to turn their backs on large visions and to focus on the pragmatic.
"Large visions of a better society provide a goal against which policies and their results can be measured. They make us ask at each point what matters, and whether the policies and aspirations that governments propose will lead to it."
These versions of a large hope, however, were distortions of the religious tradition. They treated the vision of a transformed world as something that could be achieved by effort, struggle and conflict, rather than as an unattainable horizon bounding the pragmatic business, both cooperative and conflictual, of public life. In the religious tradition the realisation of the vision was always a gift to be longed for, not a project to be fully realised.
Understood in that way, large visions of a better society are important in public life. They provide a goal against which policies and their results can be measured. They make us ask at each point what matters in society, and whether the policies and aspirations that governments propose will lead to it. Will cutting the budget and the steps taken to do so contribute to a more just and sustainable society? What effects will stopping the boats have on those who implement the policy and on its direct victims, and will it be conducive to a more harmonious and open society? Will the creation of jobs respect the humanity of the workers who are employed?
A rhetoric that does justice to large hopes, too, invites people to test the human qualities of the political process against the affective charge of the rhetoric. Noble words can shame mean words and deeds.
All in all, there is something to be said for political parties and representatives of government to dream largely in the New Year and to resolve to share their dreams.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.